Last weekend I asked Ellie Jackson, Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library, for a copy of an article she published last year, and she kindly sent me a PDF:
Eleanor Jackson, ‘Pursuing the Percys: The Original Owners of the Percy Psalter-Hours’, Journal of Medieval History, 48.4 (2022), 524–45
It concerns a late 13th-century Psalter-Hours that I examined nearly 25 years ago when it was in a private collection; it was acquired by the BL in 2019. By coincidence, one of the things it addresses is so relevant to the blog I wrote a few weeks ago about the heraldic arms in the so-called "de Roucy" Hours, that I thought it would be worth writing this brief addendum to that post. (If you have not already read it, I suggest you do so before continuing here).
The previously unresolved puzzle about the patronage of the Percy Psalter-Hours depends on the identification of heraldic shields that appear in the lower margin of the page on which the text of the psalms begins:
BL, Add. MS. 70000 [Source] |
[Detail of lower margin] |
The colour of the rampant lion in the middle shield has always been uncertain. As Janet Backhouse, former Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library wrote in 1990 (emphasis added),
"In the centre is a shield of gules also bearing the shape of a lion rampant, but this is now so seriously damaged that it is impossible to be certain, even with the aid of a microscope, whether it was originally coloured gold or silver."
And, as Jackson explains, whether the lion was originally silver ("argent") or gold ("or"), is crucial for identifying the original patron:
This is precisely the same problem I addressed in my previous blog about the Roucy/Elmhirst-Courtanvaux Hours, in which it is hard to determine whether the background of a heraldic shield is either (i) gold, or (ii) a pigment/metal representing silver. In my previous post about the "de Roucy" Hours, I suggested that the answer can be found by an examination of physical evidence, because the pigments/metals used for gold and silver have different chemical properties. The 13th-century Percy Psalter-Hours provides a precisely comparable situation.
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