Anne Stanton’s book provides a detailed and insightful examination of the Queen Mary Psalter (London, BLMS Royal 2 B.vii), a luxury devotional text that is densely illustrated with Old and New Testament subjects and marginal illuminations. The author focuses on the manuscript as a material artifact, its relationship to devotional manuscripts in England and France, and the connection between its contents and its proposed royal audience. On one level, Stanton’s study, which is based on her doctoral thesis, expands the work of the Warner facsimile (George Warner, Queen Mary’s Psalter [London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1912]) and therefore includes transcriptions of texts that were omitted from that publication (appendix A). On another level, the book offers a novel interpretation of the ways in which late medieval audiences, particularly noble women, used the Psalter, with its mixture of Old and New Testament illustrations, for devotional and didactic purposes.

In her introduction, Stanton argues that “an accumulation of substantial contextual evidence points toward a particular kind of audience for the Psalter” (5). That audience, she believes, should be understood as both female and royal. Stanton approaches the Psalter’s diverse miniatures as a unified program. The preference for narrative clarity in the book’s imagery serves as “one of the primary links between varied sections of the Psalter” (57) and “strongly supports the thematic linkages” (58) that the author highlights in subsequent chapters.

Stanton’s approach to the manuscript sensitively combines the quantitative observations of the codicologist with the integrated approaches to artistic monuments recently adopted by historians of gothic art. For Stanton, the archaeology of the manuscript lays the foundation for understanding how the book’s physical structure shaped its audience’s understanding of its contents. Stanton consequently devotes the first chapter of her study to analyzing the book as a physical object and its relationship to the pictorial cycles that accompanied private devotional manuscripts in the same period. Her examination of the book’s connection to Psalters and books of hours reveals that the Queen Mary Psalter “reflected English tradition, by the very selection of the Psalter preface, while at the same time incorporating French ideas about the ‘look’ of a devotional book” (80). This combination of elements placed the manuscript at a functional juncture between books used by families in education and those used by individual worshippers in their daily devotional exercises. This latter point lays the groundwork for Stanton’s subsequent arguments about the patron, as the English court is presented as a cultural sphere that was particularly receptive to French artistic influences.

Having established the physical and typological contexts for the manuscript, Stanton uses her second chapter to explore three interrelated themes: 1) the importance of women and children in the pictorial narratives included in the Psalter; 2) the concentrated focus on issues of genealogical concern, such as succession, and on heroes and kings as children; and 3) the importance of good counsel in responsible kingship and moral decision-making. In this section of her study, the author approaches the images as a visual narrative capable of revealing thematic patterns that existed outside the scope of the Psalter as a strictly devotional text: “it is the act of reading images, of making connections between one scene and another, that remains constant throughout the manuscript” (82). Critical to this portion of the book is the author’s conviction that biblical women provided many of the most powerful behavioral models in the pictorial program, and that these examples articulate matriarchal themes that were especially relevant for a female reader charged with the moral education of her children.

In chapter 3, Stanton makes a plausible case that the Psalter was ideally suited to one specific reader: Queen Isabelle, daughter of Phillip IV of France and the wife of King Edward II of England (r. 1327–30). By arguing that the Psalter’s closest parallels can be found in the encyclopedic programs supported by the Capetian family in the thirteenth century, Stanton makes the case that the French orientation of the pictorial cycles and their repeated emphasis on women as dynastic vessels are best understood as evidence of the manuscript’s royal patron. Equally important in this context is the author’s conviction that Psalters served as a tool in the education of young princes. Given the didactic function of medieval Psalters as primers, the intergenerational orientation of Stanton’s argument is well placed. For Stanton, the didactic utility of the pictorial cycle also had a concrete impact on its compositions, in which simplified casts of characters appear in scenes that “seem calculated to appeal to a young audience” (215).

Stanton’s case for the patron is fundamentally one of emphasis. Whereas Warner and Kathryn Smith have proposed that the manuscript’s patron might have been Edward II, Stanton argues that the Psalter was neither produced for Edward II nor presented by him as a gift to his new queen, but rather was commissioned specifically for the queen, who ruled for four years in her son’s name (220). In her historic analysis of the queen’s position, Stanton notes that Isabelle was “well placed to commission expensive, complex, and important books, such as the Queen Mary Psalter … [and] had financial means to support such a venture, particularly between 1318 and 1320” (236). The iconography of the program is interpreted as “specifically tailored for her use in instructing her family, now containing two children and expected to grow” (240). Thus, the author sees the manuscript’s relationship to the Isabelle Psalter, which the queen received in 1308, as especially significant. For Stanton, the Queen Mary Psalter’s program is dependent, at least in part, on the program of the Isabelle Psalter, and on the Capetian cycles and Parisian books of hours with which she was familiar. Here, however, one could logically ask whether such a lavishly illuminated book served exclusively devotional and didactic functions, or whether, given the queen’s taste for luxury manuscripts, the Psalter should also be understood as an expression of princely magnificence.

Some of the most remarkable features of the Queen Mary Psalter are the extended vernacular prefatory texts that accompany its Old Testament images. As Stanton points out, these texts not only made specific reference to the stories depicted in the attending pictorial program, but they also conditioned the audience’s reading of the images. While noting that vernacular texts were not written to facilitate vocal reading (30), she also highlights how the informal, conversational tone of the preface text might have lent itself to more imaginative, performative reading (31). However, the extent to which the images support this kind of interpretation is ultimately unclear, as Stanton later remarks that the small script and delicate drawings require “a physical closeness to the manuscript in order to read both the images and text of the preface” (81). In her consideration of the prefatory cycle, Stanton could have explored the role played by women in stimulating the production of French accounts of the Old Testament. In an age when vernacular renditions of sacred history were increasingly cast as epic tales of human action, the martial character of some of the scenes featured in the Queen Mary Psalter may have appealed directly to the female audience that Stanton posits. In his Vie de Saint Louis, for instance, Jean Sire de Joinville reflects on how the struggles of the crusader army on the fields before Damietta would later be recounted in ladies’ chambers.

Stanton’s focus on the relationship between the physical structure of the book and its illuminations calls attention to the role played by specific images in uniting the book’s two sections: the vernacular picture book devoted to the Old Testament, and the devotional texts, New Testament images, and marginalia that compose the body of the Psalter. At this juncture, the manuscript features illuminations of the Tree of Jesse and the Holy Kinship. Stanton’s emphasis on the genealogical themes of these illuminations offers critical insights into the manuscript’s overall program: “By presenting Christ’s grandmother, mother, and aunts in a parallel orientation with its more distant male relatives in the Tree of Jesse, the Queen Mary Psalter Holy Kinship underlines the importance of genealogy, and of female ancestors as well as male” (152). The fact that these two illuminations appear as pendants in the manuscript and create a diptych (152–53) that is crucial to understanding the overall program highlights the special challenges that manuscripts pose to contemporary publishers. By not presenting these illustrations on facing pages, the publisher of The Queen Mary Psalter: A Study of Affect and Audience missed a valuable opportunity to connect the form of the modern book to the structure of the book that is the subject of Stanton’s investigation.

Much more than a monographic study of the Queen Mary Psalter, Stanton’s book contributes to the increasing body of secondary literature devoted to the artistic patronage and cultural concerns of late medieval women. Because it is increasingly clear that women were particularly active as owners, readers, and consumers of books, much of this literature has focused on manuscripts. Stanton observes that the narrative character of the Queen Mary Psalter is one marker of its connection to the newly emerging genre of the book of hours; this has far-reaching implications for understanding the role played by images in shaping late medieval preferences for devotional manuscripts of a certain type. Indeed, she suggests that “it was the narrative affective quality of the images typical of books of hours that helped make them more popular than Psalters” (69). As noble women often operated at the intersection between the two spheres of family education and private devotion, Stanton’s study of the role that these women played in developing and perpetuating novel forms of religious expression is a welcome addition the growing body of art-historical research on female patronage and its impact on the visual culture of the late medieval period.