This book is a beautifully written and illustrated introduction to the Psalters in the libraries of Trinity College and the Chester Beatty Collection in Dublin. Essays by Helen Conrad O’Briain on text and use and by Laura Cleaver on illustration, patronage, and provenance precede the catalogue. Thirteen manuscripts are then presented in chronological order, with one or two illustrations for each. For Trinity manuscripts, Marvin Colker’s detailed catalogue is cited. The earliest manuscript, dated ca. 1079 on the basis of its computistical tables on fol. 26 (noted by Colker), was written and illuminated for Ricemarch, bishop of St. David’s, by his brothers John and Ithael, as stated in the colophon. Five manuscripts are English, beginning with the well-known Winchcombe Psalter (ca. 1130–40), Trinity MS 50, with its lovely double B initials corresponding to the Gallican and Hebraicum texts. The D initials, one unfinished, are reproduced in the introductory essay. Trinity MS 600 is a small glossed Psalter in verse of the thirteenth century; MS 92 is a late fourteenth-century Psalter-hours of London manufacture with tiny historiated initials and foliate borders with grotesque terminals. A contemporary manuscript is the unillustrated Psalter in Latin and English also containing the Apocalypse (Trinity MS 69); Bülbring, cited by Colker, claims it is the “earliest version in English prose of any entire book of Scripture.”

The final English manuscript is Trinity MS 93, a Psalter-hymnal whose patrons, John Wingfield and Elizabeth Fitz-Lewis (married in 1461), are identified by the heraldic shield on the opening page beneath scenes of David and the Trinity, the latter sadly mutilated. A panel painting of this family in the Buccleuch Collection is reproduced as figure 15. The text opening of Trinity MS 93 depicts King David holding harp and scepter in the B initial, and a delicate foliage border surrounds the entire page. German manuscripts are Chester Beatty W. 40, a mid-thirteenth-century Gallican Psalter for Augsburg, in which Psalm 38 depicts Saint Francis revealing the stigmata, the page marked by a leather tag and protected by a silk curtain. The book preserves its original stamped binding (fig. 3). A second German manuscript, of the fourteenth century — Trinity MS 11042 — is written in a bâtarde hand and decorated with simple capitals in red and blue. From Liège (politically part of the Holy Roman Empire though French speaking) comes the Psalter-hours Trinity MS 90, part of a group of manuscripts clustered around the Psalter of Lambert le Bègue, London BL Add. 21114, whose frameless labors of the months and zodiac signs in medallions (reproduced in comparison) are close to those in Trinity MS 90. Chester Beatty MS W. 61 is a well-known Psalter from Flanders (French and Flemish speaking, a fief of France). A lacuna in the references is Kerstin Carlvant’s Manuscript Painting in Thirteenth-Century Flander: Bruges, Ghent and the Circle of the Counts (2012). Carlvant argues for a provenance in Bruges and considers CB W. 61 particularly close to Oxford, Bodl. Auct. D. 4. 2 and to New York, Pierpont Morgan Lib. MS M.72.

Two little-known manuscripts are French. Trinity MS 91 has an interesting layout with pen-flourished versal initials and line endings on the versos and champie initials in gold on pink-and-blue backgrounds and painted grotesques and shields on the rectos. The heraldic shields on fol. 15 are untraced but the use of shields in line endings, the types of dragon terminals, and the lion in the border (this one with an ape’s head) resemble John Rylands University Library MS lat. 117 (see Richard A. Leson, “Heraldry and Identity in the Psalter-Hours of Jeanne of Flanders (Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS Lat. 117,” Studies in Iconography 32 [2011]: 155–98; Alison Stones, Manuscripts Illuminated in France, Gothic Manuscripts 1260–1320 [2013], part 1, vol. 2, cat. nos. III–107–111). Trinity MS 10956 is a small ferial Psalter with lovely pen-flourished initials in red, blue, and mauve — the latter color typical of Southern France from the late thirteenth century. Finally, there is one Italian manuscript, Trinity MS 106, a Psalter and hymnal with a portrait of King David in the beatus initial, shown playing a psaltery. In the calendar, Ambrose in red (7 December) is probably more significant than Bibiana in brown ink, suggesting Milan rather than Rome as the place this was made to be used. The calendar is ungraded, suggesting a lay owner, whose shield in the bottom border beneath David may one day be identified. At the end is a glossary and a bibliography, mostly in English, to which could be added the fundamental German studies Die Psalterillustration by G. Haseoff (1938) and the more recent edited volume by F. O. Büttner, The Illuminated Psalter: Studies in the Content, Purpose and Placement of its Images (2004).