A Middle Dutch Psalter

A small oddity found in the rare book room at Miller Library has left us with a little mystery; It is a small book measuring only five inches by three and a half inches but with over four hundred hand-written pages.

While the binding is in poor condition it is the original. Strong cords bind the pages together and the bookworm (yes bookworms are real) eaten boards show under the hand-tooled leather. Inside is the result of hours and hours of a scribe’s work as they copied religious calendars, offices, and psalms. Sadly, some of their most important works, illuminated illustrations of religious scenes have been cut out and are now permanently separated from the psalter. Even if we came across the missing pages in an auction or a museum, we would not know that they belonged to ours since there is no record of the scenes or what the complete and intact psalter looked like.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Through a little research and asking a lot of experts, we have been able to solve some of its mysteries. At first, we assumed that the text was in Latin, then German. The modern German language looks very different from what was written in the Middle Ages. Our first round of experts told us that the psalter is actually written in Middle Dutch, this also helps us date it to around the 1500s. We now had a region and a time frame, so we contacted the second round of experts who specialized in this area and were able to narrow it down even more to the Utrecht area of the Netherlands. Through this process, we received a crash course in Medieval Manuscripts including how the calendars and lists of Saints can tell you the location. There is still a great deal we could learn about this small psalter, and we hope that we can pique the interest of Medieval scholars from around the world to help us.

 

You can learn more about this book here: https://washcoll.whirlihost.com/Gallery/13/show_intro/1

or look through the whole book on our Digital Archive.