Online Seminar 9 June 2020: 'The Patrons of the Percy Psalter-Hours' by Dr Eleanor Jackson (British Library)

Hosted by the University of York’s Centre for Medieval Studies and the Department of History of Art’s Medieval Art and Medievalisms Research School, Dr Eleanor Jackson (British Library) will be giving an online research seminar on Tuesday 9 June at 5.30 p.m.: ‘The Patrons of the Percy Psalter-Hours’.  All are welcome: see below for how to join the event.

Dr Eleanor Jackson is Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library. She completed her PhD at the History of Art Department at the University of York in 2017.

About the seminar

In March 2019, the British Library acquired a late 13th-century book of hours of the Use of York known as the Percy Hours. This would be exciting enough on its own, but the British Library also holds its long-separated other half, the Percy Psalter, with which it originally formed a single-volume psalter-hours. This acquisition allowed the Library to reunite the two manuscript halves in the same institution for the first time in around 200 years.

The Percy Psalter-Hours is one of a relatively small number of devotional books for the laity surviving from 13th-century England, and probably the only example from York. It provides rare insight into a period of great change in book culture, when devotional books for the laity were growing in popularity and regional workshops for commercial book production were emerging around the country.

Despite its significance, the question of the manuscript's patronage has never been satisfactorily answered. Scholars have long recognised that the original owners should be identifiable based on the portrait of a knight and lady with coats of arms on the Beatus page. While scholarly opinion has generally settled on Henry de Percy (d. 1314) and his wife Eleanor FitzAlan (d. 1328) as an approximate fit for the heraldry, there are serious problems with this identification.

This paper, still a work in progress, presents a new identification of the patrons for your opinions and feedback.

Joining the Meeting

The meeting will be held by Zoom. To join the meeting please sign up on this Google Form. Registration closes at 10.00 a.m. on the day itself. Participants will receive an email containing a link to the meeting once registration has closed. If you have any queries, please email hanna.vorholt@york.ac.uk.

 

Image: A page detail from the Percy Psalter, London, British Library, Add MS 70000, fol. 16r; © British Library Board