Sing a New Song: the companion volume

I would love to have seen this special exhibit at the Morgan Library in New York City, but I was able to experience the next best thing in the companion volume, which my unfailingly thoughtful wife gave me for Christmas. This is an utterly beautiful book, a feast for the eyes and for the spirit. It is edited by Roger S. Wieck, with the assistance and contributions of several other people, and a foreword by Colin B. Bailey, director of the Morgan Library and Museum. Chapters are devoted to David as Psalmist, Translating the Psalms, Teaching the Psalms, Illuminating the Psalms, Performing the Psalms, and Using the Psalms.

Appropriately, there is some discussion in several places of the ancient pattern known as the Divine Office, the cycle of daily prayers spaced at approximately three-hour intervals throughout the day.

The psalms were recited in blocks, principally at Matins and Vespers. This program was followed with some variation by both monks and secular clergy, that is, priests and other clerics serving cathedral, collegiate, and parish churches. The ordained were meant to know the psalms by heart (96).

Although the clergy were expected to pray the Divine Office, members of the nobility and princely families had sufficient resources to afford illuminated psalters or books of hours, the making of which was a laborious and time-consuming process prior to the invention of the printing press. Many of these handwritten manuscripts have survived centuries of usage.

One of the peculiarities of this volume is that the numbering of the psalms referenced in the text is generally off by one from that familiar to Protestants and observant Jews. Many readers will find this confusing, but because the illuminated manuscript is a peculiarly western European art form, the text follows the numbering of the Psalms from the Latin Vulgate and the Greek Septuagint.

While the chapters in this book include much information on the use of the psalms in the devotional life of mediaeval Europeans, most of the text simply takes us through individual psalters and books of hours, meticulously describing the illuminations and their relationship to the psalms, accompanied by photographs of the illuminated psalms themselves. Because the first Psalm starts with Beatus vir qui non abiit in consilio impiorum ("Blessed is the man who walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly"), the initial B was usually the first to be historiated (a word I had to look up), often with King David playing his harp and sometimes with the addition of Jesus Christ, David's descendant, enthroned above and conferring a blessing.

One of the less familiar (to me at least) forms of prayer was the Office of the Dead, "the last of the three main texts of a Book of Hours containing psalms" (202). These texts were often illuminated with macabre figures such as skeletons and animated corpses, with the departed soul, represented by a naked child, being contested by angels and demons.

The collection ends with the prayer book of Sir Thomas More, a printed volume with his own annotations in the margins, written as he awaited execution in the Tower of London in 1534-5.

I indicated above that this volume is the next best thing to being at the Morgan Library for this special exhibit, which closed on 4 January. But for me it may have been better than an actual visit, because the volume allowed me to spend more time with each of the featured psalters than I would have been able to during a single-day's visit.