The Office of the Dead and the Iken Psalter

The Office of the Dead is a text whose overall format is pretty consistent, but whose details vary significantly, according to different liturgical "Uses". The Office can be found in several types of liturgical and devotional manuscripts, often appearing at or near the end of a Psalter, for example, and it is a standard feature of Books of Hours. It can be particularly helpful in establishing where a book was made (or at least where it was intended to be used) when the Hours of the Virgin are missing, incomplete, or correspond to a very widespread Use such as the Use of Paris or Rome. One might find, for example, a Book of Hours illuminated by Parisian artists, with a Parisian Use for the Hours of the Virgin, but an Office of the Dead for the Use of Troyes: a sure clue to the area where the patron lived.

The Office of the Dead is introduced in accessible terms in Roger Wieck's Time Sanctified: The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life (New York, 1988) and his Painted Prayers: The Book of Hours in Medieval and Renaissance Art (New York, 1997). For the present purposes, it is enough to know that the central portion (matins) of a full Office of the Dead comprises three main sections (nocturns), each with three lessons (or "lections", i.e. biblical readings, typically from the Book of Job), and each lesson  is followed by a responsory and versicle (short concluding phrases, often derived from the Psalms). By recording the incipits of these 27 pieces of text (9 lessons, each with a responsory and versicle), you can usually identify the Use. Knud Ottosen, who compiled a huge database of the Office of the Dead (first available in 1993 as a printed book, and now available online here) presents his material as if you only needs the 9 responsories to identify a Use. He perhaps derived this idea from Victor Leroquais, who in turn depended heavily on the work of G.-M. Beyssac. Here is an excerpt from Leroquais's introduction to his volumes on Books of Hours, showing how the responsories of different liturgical Uses can vary widely:

In fact the nine responsories on their own are often not enough to distinguish one liturgical Use from another. It is clear from Ottosen's printed tables that some very different Uses have the same responsories; to distinguish them you also need to consider the versicles, and to a lesser extent the lessons.

In personal note-taking, many incipits can be represented by a single word, while in other cases more than the first word is need to distinguish different incipits (e.g. to distinguish "Qui Lazarum resuscitasti" from "Qui venturus es iudicare"). There are also some incipits that seem effectively to have been interchangeable, for example, sometimes the fourth lesson begins "Quantas habeo iniqutates ..." and sometimes this quotation from Job begins two words earlier "Responde mihi: quantas habeo iniquitates ..." (Job 13:22-23).

The lessons, versicles and responses of the normal Use of Sarum (which by the 14th century was pretty standard across most of England other than the dioceses of York, Hereford, and London), are:

1. Parce; Credo; Quem
2. Tedet; Qui Lazarum; Qui venturus
3. Manus; Domine quando; Commissa
4. Quantas; Heu mihi; Anima
5. Homo; Ne recorderis; Dirige
6. Quis; Domine secundum; Amplius
7. Spiritus; Peccantem; Deus
8. Pelli; Requiem; Qui lazarum
9. Quare; Libera ... morte; Dies

All of the above may seem rather technical and esoteric; now it is time to give an example of how this information can be used in a practical situation.

In the forthcoming auction of the collection of Marvin Colker mentioned in last weeks's blog is a leaf from the Office of the Dead of the Iken Psalter, so-called because it seems to have belonged at an early date to St Botulph's church at Iken, in Suffolk, or someone in that parish:

The text on the Colker leaf comprises most of the third to fifth lessons, responsories and versicles, as follows:

The relevant incipits (encircled in red above) are:

3. Manus; Heu; Anima
4. Responde; Ne recorderis; Amplius
5. Homo; Domine quando; Comiss[sa] 

which differ considerably from the incipits of the Use of Sarum that we might have expected:

3. Manus; Domine quando; Commissa
4. Quantas; Heu mihi; Anima
5. Homo; Ne recorderis; Dirige

In the early 1990s I actively collected the incipits of lots of different Offices of the Dead, and thanks to these very old notes I was able to find some matches for the Colker-Iken leaf. In particular they match a 15th-century Psalter at Trinity College, Cambridge (MS. B.11.6), whose calendar is rather 'vanilla' Sarum, and whose only historiated initial is, I suspect, London work:

[Source]

The script and decoration of the Litany and Office of the Dead that follow the Psalms are slightly different from the rest of the book, however, and I imagine they were commissioned by the original owner to tailor the volume to his/her personal devotional needs. 

The litany points very strongly to the Benedictine abbey of Ely. St Benedict and St Alban (whose relics Ely claimed to have) are each given a double invocation:

[Source]

Other male saints include Botulph (whose head was at Ely), Neot (the town of St Neots is about 30 south-west of Ely), and Edmund (the town of Bury St Edmunds is about 25 miles south-east of Ely). The first five virgins are Etheldreda (foundress and abbess of Ely), Wythburga (sister of Etheldreda, whose relics were at Ely), Sexburga (sister of Etheldreda, and her successor as abbess of Ely), Ethelburga (another sister of Etheldreda), and Ermenilda (another abbess of Ely, and daughter of Sexburga):

[Source]

and the last two are Erkengota (another daughter of Sexburga), and Werburga (traditionally a daughter of Ermenila, nun and perhaps abbess of Ely):

[Source]

It seems inescapable that the litany is in some sense of Ely "Use". The medieval diocese of Ely was small, and did not include Iken, some 65 miles or 105km to the east, but it is not hard to imagine the book travelling this distance in the 15th century, especially if the first owner was the sort of person who travelled to London to acquire it in the first place:

As discussed in the catalogue entry for the Christie's sale, the same Office of the Dead readings can be found in a few other manuscripts from Peterborough, another Benedictine abbey in East Anglia, which suggests that the text was not limited to Ely:

All that remains is to show that the Office of the Dead of the Psalter at Trinity College, Cambridge, corresponds to that of the leaf from the Iken Psalter: the next two images show that the third to fifth lessons, responsories, and versicles are the same:

 

It is very likely that more leaves of the Iken Psalter's Office of the Dead will come to light (the volume was broken-up as recently as c.1980) and it will be possible to see if it is in complete agreement with manuscripts from Ely, Peterborough, or elsewhere in East Anglia.