The Fitzwilliam Museum - University of Cambridge

38 Keepers, Jonathan Alexander, Professor at the
Institute of Fine Arts, New York, and James Marrow,
Professor Emeritus of Princeton University.
Research
The discovery in 2004 of the so-called Macclesfield
Psalter equals in significance that of the Thornham
Parva retable nearly eighty years ago. It came to light
when Sotheby’s catalogued for sale the library
belonging to the Earl of Macclesfield at Shirburn
Castle in Oxfordshire. Its earlier provenance remains
a mystery; it may have been in the library which
Thomas Parker, the first Earl, acquired with the
Castle in 1716. On the other hand we know from his
inscription that in the late sixteenth century it
belonged to Anthony Watson, sometime student and
then Fellow of Christ’s College Cambridge who was
appointed Bishop of Chichester by Elizabeth I in
1596. By the time the psalter appeared in Sotheby’s
catalogue it had already been associated with two
other illuminated manuscripts, the Gorleston Psalter
in the British Library and the Douai Psalter, so
named because its remnants are in the library there.
All three display sufficiently similar characteristics to
suggest a common source, scriptorium or workshop,
and all three have links with the parish of Gorleston
on the east coast (the county boundaries have been
redrawn to divide the honours between Suffolk and
Norfolk). What are unmistakable are the East Anglian
connections; St Edmund and St Etheldreda, St Alban,
St Botolph, and St Osyth consort with less regional
Christian saints, along with an extraordinary cast of
imaginary characters revealing that one of the
illuminators had an extremely fertile mind. Rabbits
and monkeys are concealed within its leaves along
with grotesque figures reminiscent of the most
indecent miserichords, to give a vivid impression of
the earthy humour and unbridled fantasy which are
as much a part of the Middle Ages as its
unquestioning piety. Fortunately for the Fitzwilliam
Museum, the importance of the Macclesfield Psalter
was acknowledged by everyone, including the
National Heritage Memorial Fund which offered a
grant of £860,000 representing half the cost, after
the National Art Collections Fund gave £500,000
and mounted a national campaign to ‘save the
psalter’. At the Museum, the public response was
overwhelming as people recognised the manuscript
as both a national and a regional treasure, moreover
one which increases by a significant amount the sum
total of our knowledge of painting in fourteenthcentury
East Anglia.
For the Museum, of course, the task has only just
begun. Dr Panayotova has already been to Douai to
draw her own conclusions about the precise nature of
the relationship between the two manuscripts before
writing the entry for ours in time to include it in
Cambridge Illuminations. In the meantime, after an
initial showing when it arrived in Cambridge, the
Macclesfield Psalter is undergoing conservation.
Because its eighteenth-century binding is split, there
is a perfect opportunity to photograph it leaf by leaf
and to display it in its unbound state before putting
this most private of all devotional books back together
again. Unknown until a year ago, this gem of East
Anglian painting is about to become one of the bestknown
of all English medieval manuscripts. It also
demonstrates, in the words of a former director, M R
James, written just over a century ago, that ‘the
Fitzwilliam Museum is a place where manuscripts
(are) choicely valued, religiously preserved, and
minutely investigated.’
The Cambridge Illuminations will be on display
at The Fitzwilliam Museum and the University
Library, 26 July – 11 December 2005.
The Museum’s research activities are undertaken
across the breadth of the collections. A list of
publications is available on request.
1Christopher Norton, David Park and Paul Binski, Dominican Painting in East Anglia: the Thornham Parva
Retable and the Musée de Cluny Frontal, Woodbridge, 1987