Carrow Psalter

Carrow Psalter

When opening this precious devotional book, the eye is first greeted by the gilded splendor of three impressive picture cycles. The first pages of the manuscript are taken up by ten full-page depictions of saints, each of which is juxtaposed with a corresponding suffrage. Most of the saints stand in pairs and frontally under pointed arch arcades and are easy to identify thanks to their attributes and the golden headlines. Only King Edmund, Thomas Becket and St. Agatha appear individually and during their gruesome martyrdom. A lost leaf probably also showed Mary Magdalene, whose suffrage can still be found in this first part of the Carrow Psalter.

Biblical Scenes on Golden Backgrounds

The following picture cycles do without any text at all. The first eleven of these full-page miniatures, some of which are divided into two to four registers, present a condensed but no less splendid overview of the Christian salvific history from the creation of man to the Last Judgement. The third cycle takes up five events from the life of Christ and presents them in wonderful full-page images. Here, the focus is on stories from Jesus' early days. Thus, the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Adoration by the Three Magi and the Presentation in the Temple are depicted, followed by the Carrying of the Cross.

Clues to the Patron

After this opulent opening and a calendar, the actual Psalter begins, consisting of the biblical psalms and canticles of the Old and New Testaments. It is decorated with countless gold and blue pen-flourished initials and wonderful large historiated initials, the first of which at the beginning of the Book of Psalms gives us a clue to the unknown patron. In six gold-grounded roundels, the more than half-page sized initial 'B' shows scenes from the Vita of St. Olaf, who, as King of Norway, Christianized his kingdom after he himself was missionized, and whose distinctive feature is the axe. This prominent depiction testifies to a particular veneration of the saint, who may have been the namesake of the patron saint.

Precious Psalter-Hours

The psalms and canticles are followed by several prayer texts that are rather unusual in this context, such as the Office of the Dead and the Hours of the Virgin (lat. Officium Beatae Mariae Virginis), which is why it is also referred to as a psalter-hours. When the manuscript was located in the eponymous Carrow Abbey, a Benedictine nunnery near Norwich, in the 15th century, the coats of arms of English aristocrats were added to eleven initials of the Marian prayer, including those of the Earl of Winchester, the Earl of Oxford and the Baron of Stafford. Moreover, the coat of arms of St. George appears on fol. 288v.

Lively History of Ownership

In the 18th century, the codex came into the possession of the 3rd Lord Caryll, John Baptist (1716–1780), who had it rebound. The precious gem then passed through the hands of various renowned collectors, including Bertram Ashburnham (1797–1878), the 4th Earl of Ashburnham, and Henry Yates Thompson (1838–1928), before Henry Walters (1848–1931), founder of the Walters Art Gallery, now Walters Art Museum, where it is kept today, was able to purchase the psalter-hours.