A French 13th-Century Psalter at Smith College

Smith College, Northampton, MA, MS. 291, p.13
[All images from Digital Scriptorium]

Smith College, Massachusetts, is the most recent institution to join the Digital Scriptorium consortium. It has digitized 10 medieval manuscripts in their entirety and added them to the site.

I visited Smith for the first time last November, and wrote one post as a result, but have always intended to do more. Here I return to my notes on MS 291, a mid 13th-century Psalter.

A Thérouanne Book of Hours at Occidental

Occidental College has a very interesting and unusual Book of Hours, one of whose features is a unique(?) image of its patron saying the rosary.

 I provide a fairly detailed textual and iconographic descriptions below, but first the known details of its provenance.

Office of the Dead: Reims

One of the few things missing from Erik Drigsdahl's excellent www.chd.dk website is a table for identifying Offices of the Dead of different Uses, comparable to his tables of Hours of the Virgin (he does, however, provide a list of the responsories).  I have collected many over the years, especially non-Sarum English ones, but never had time to put them on the web. So, until I get organised to make a useful table, maybe I'll put some Uses up here individually, starting with Reims, from the Houston Hours.

A Reims Book of Hours written by Raulinus de Sorcy

A full set of digital images have recently been made available of a Book of Hours of the Use of Reims, now in Houston. It was alluded to at the end of a list of Reims Horae by Jean-Luc Deuffic in 2007, on his Pecia blog, and has recently been blogged about at Houston.

Following the gospel extracts (fol.15r) is the scribal colophon:

"Raulinus de Sorcy scrip-
toris hunc librum scripsit. et
in omnibus complevit. Misereatur sibi deus."