Virtually unknown before 2004, the Macclesfield Psalter has since emerged as a key work for the study of East Anglian book painting of the first half of the fourteenth century. Named for the Earls of Macclesfield in whose library at Shirburn Castle, Oxfordshire, it had been housed, the manuscript was auctioned as lot 587 at Sotheby’s on June 22 of that year and was initially purchased for the department of manuscripts at the Getty Museum. It was subsequently prevented from exportation by the Minister of Culture and was purchased by the Fitzwilliam Museum in February of 2005, where it is now housed as MS 1–2005. The manuscript itself is comprised of a calendar, the text of the Psalms, various prayers, canticles and hymns, a litany, and an Office of the Dead.

The publication under review includes a commentary on the Psalter by Stella Panayotova, who also published a much shorter study of the manuscript in 2005. Since then important articles have also been written by Lucy Freeman Sandler and M. A. Michael (both published in The Cambridge Illuminations: The Conference Papers, ed., Stella Panayotova, London: Harvey Miller, 2007). The current book and its commentary text build on that earlier scholarship, extend it, and have the added advantage of reproducing every folio of the manuscript to scale. The illustrations are floated on the larger pages of the book, making the publication something of a pseudo-facsimile. Following the commentary and the reproductions are a series of useful appendices describing and analyzing various aspects of the manuscript. Especially welcome are discussions of the book’s pigments (by Spike Bucklow) and conservation (by Robert Proctor).

Panayotova’s opening commentary deftly balances those technical issues that all scholars of manuscript illumination must consider (dating, location, paleography, iconographic sources) with larger issues that treat the broader contextual aspects of the book. Thus, carefully reasoned discussion is given over to the manuscript’s relations with key works of East Anglian illumination, specifically the Gorleston, Douai, St.-Omer, and Ormesby Psalters, as well as the Stowe Breviary. Panayotova argues that of these manuscripts the Macclesfield Psalter is perhaps closest to the Douai Psalter in terms of iconography and style. Yet it is also possible that Macclesfield was copied by the same scribe as the Stowe Breviary. In terms of painting, Macclesfield was seemingly painted by two artists. The chief painter, whom Panayotova dubs the “Macclesfield Master,” has been known previously as the Douai Assistant, after his work on the ruined Psalter now housed in that city. This artist also seemingly worked on a Bede manuscript (now in Trinity College, Cambridge) and on a John of Freiburg manuscript (now in the British Library). Based on its relations with these various manuscripts, Panayotova concludes that the Macclesfield Psalter was most likely produced in Norwich, in the mid- to late 1330s.

In considering the book’s patronage, Panayotova is judicious in her weighing of internal evidence. It is likely that the book’s intended recipient was a young man. He would seem to be represented in the form of a marginal figure seen at the bottom of folio 246r beneath the manuscript’s prayer of confession. He is also probably depicted on folio 166v at Psalm 114, which begins, “I have loved, because the Lord will hear the voice of my prayer.” The start of Psalm 101 might have shown the young man as well (the folio is now missing). Panayotova also notes that the texts in the manuscript are often learned, can be heavily abbreviated, and occasionally deal with clerical issues. This leads her to the tentative conclusion that the book’s intended recipient may have been in training for a career in the church and/or that he might have been in minor orders.

He was also likely a member of one of the leading aristocratic families in East Anglia. His coat of arms would seem to survive on folio 37v, and there are perhaps two other places in the manuscript (folios 9r and 58r) where heraldry might have been featured; unfortunately, parts of each page have been removed. From this one surviving coat of arms no specific individual can be adduced as the book’s owner, but Panayotova presents several possibilities based on surviving knowledge of aristocratic families in East Anglia at this time.

The aforementioned figural and heraldic images pointing to the book’s intended recipient belong to its substantial body of marginal illustration. Panayotova approaches this rich body of imagery from multiple angles. Scholars will be able to build on her work considering the relationship of the marginalia to other manuscripts from East Anglia and beyond. The rabbit imagery in Macclesfield, for example, recalls that of the Gorleston Psalter. The two books appear to be unique in their depiction of a rabbit funeral with priest and bell ringer. In general it is the Gorleston Psalter’s rich body of marginalia that is closest to Macclesfield. Yet another vignette seems to be a reworking of the so-called Bawdy Betrothal bas-de-page of the Ormesby Psalter (a descriptive title first used by Sandler [“A Bawdy Betrothal in the Ormesby Psalter,” in William Clark et al., eds., Tribute to Lotte Brand Philip: Art Historian and Detective, New York: Abaris, 1985, 154–59). Also notable is the extensive series of nude figures haunting the margins of Macclesfield. Several of them “moon” the reader or other figures in the margins. Perhaps even more provocative is a series of figures that would seem to be less hybrids than masked humans. Here there may be an affinity with some of the figures in the Luttrell Psalter (on this topic, see especially chapter 5 of Michael Camille’s Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

The discussion of all of the above issues is skillfully handled by Panayotova in her commentary. This is a text that will be read usefully by both scholars and students. Perhaps most notable is her holistic approach to the ways in which the manuscript would likely have been experienced by fourteenth-century viewers. Along these lines Panayotova offers a sketch of the possible cognitive experience of reading a richly illuminated prayer book in the late Middle Ages. In her elegant formulation, “seeing, reading, comprehension, and reflection were all parts of the same seamless mental process” (70). To take just one example, her discussion of the opening pages and their depictions of St. Edmund of Bury and St. Andrew offers a provocative way of thinking about stylistic modes of depiction with late medieval devotion. Here and throughout her commentary Panayotova has opened up rich areas of thought that will hopefully stimulate further study of this provocative manuscript.