The Fitzwilliam Museum - University of Cambridge

The Macclesfield Psalter
East Anglia, c.1330
Illuminated manuscript on
vellum
170 x 108 mm, 252 folios
Purchased with grants from the
National Heritage Memorial
Fund, The Art Fund, the Friends
of the Fitzwilliam Museum, the
Friends of the National Libraries,
the Cadbury Trust, and with
contributions from a public
appeal launched by The Art Fund.
MS 1-2005, fols. 235v-236r
The Macclesfield Psalter is the most
important and exciting recent addition to
the corpus of English medieval art. It
exemplifies the vigorous exchange
between local traditions, metropolitan
trends, and continental fashions in
fourteenth-century England. It clarifies the
relationship between the most celebrated
manuscripts of c.1320–1340 and reveals
their links with monumental painting in
East Anglia, notably the Thornham Parva
Retable made in the 1330s, probably in
Norwich. The manuscripts most closely
associated with the Macclesfield Psalter
point to Norwich or Cambridge. The
homogeneous style found in a wide range
of texts suggests a major centre which
catered for the devotional, pastoral, and
academic needs of lay and religious
patrons. Reflecting the economic, political
and social landscape of England in the
1330s, the marginal imagery has a distinct
urban flavour. It also exemplifies the
‘Italianate’ tendencies in fourteenthcentury
East Anglian painting. They
flourished in places of international
exchange, such as Norwich, the second
largest city in fourteenth-century England
and the economic centre of East Anglia,
and Cambridge, an expanding University
town in which Italian scholars represented
the largest foreign component in the
1330s and 1340s. The Macclesfield
imagery reveals subtle knowledge of
classical texts and realia. The two English
centres of ancient learning in the second
quarter of the fourteenth century, Oxford
and Cambridge, saw the friars at the head
of their classicizing movement. The
Macclesfield Psalter preserves the portrait
of a Dominican, presumably the owner’s
confessor. At the heart of the University,
the Cambridge Blackfriars headed the
East Anglian visitation of the Dominican
order in England. The association of East
Anglian illumination with specific centres
is notoriously problematic. The
Macclesfield Psalter may clarify it by
inviting the study of illuminated
manuscripts as products of wide networks
of patronage and artistic exchange -
exceedingly mobile, transcending media
and geographic boundaries.
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