The Lichtenthal Psalter is the latest, but not the last, of Lucy Freeman Sandler's publications on manuscripts made for the Bohun family. The Psalter was recognized as a Bohun manuscript only in 1987, when Felix Heinzer identified it as such in the library of the Cistercian convent of Lichtenthal. Sandler's book comprises the first full description and analysis of the psalter's contents, style, and iconography, all placed within the context of other Bohun manuscripts and the circumstances of their production at Pleshey Castle, the Bohun family seat.
The Bohuns became one of the most prominent families in England over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries through astute political maneouvers and careful marriages. While the male Bohun line ended with the death of Humphrey de Bohun in 1373, his son-in-law Henry of Bolingbroke, the husband of Humphrey's daughter Mary, claimed the throne as Henry IV in 1399. Their eldest son inherited the throne as Henry V (15). The family today, however, is better remembered for its patronage of illuminated manuscripts. The books commissioned by the Bohuns represent the largest surviving group of English illuminated manuscripts from this period. Not only were they made for the same family, but many of them were produced by a "closely knit group of scribes and illuminators" who worked together at Pleshey Castle for over a quarter of a century, as recorded by Bohun documents (11-15). The survival of documentary evidence along with manuscripts and other objects allows scholars "to reconstruct the material culture of a noble family of fourteenth-century England, unique because for no other contemporary individual or family is the written record supported by so many of the artifacts themselves" (28).
Sandler sets out this material in the introduction to The Lichtenthal Psalter (7-28). The remainder of the text is divided into two sections. In Part One, the longest section of the book, Sandler describes the manuscript and comments on the iconography of its pictorial decoration (29-116). This section begins with a straightforward, traditional description of the book; one suspects this is the catalogue entry that Sandler would have included in her volume of the Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles, Gothic Manuscripts 1285- 1385 (1986), had she known of the Lichtenthal Psalter. She then describes every folio that carries pictorial decoration. This page-by-page approach begins with the calendar (35-55), which was decorated in a typical fashion with tiny roundels of the Labors of the Months and the Zodiac signs, and continues with the incipit pages at the major textual divisions. These folios received pictorial decoration to varying degrees, primarily in the form of historiated initials and narrative vignettes in the bas-de-page that present episodes from the Old Testament. Psalm 1, as the most important incipit, received in addition what Sandler terms haut-de-page imagery in the top margin and heraldic emblems and other figures woven into the vertical borders.
Sandler follows the Old-Testament narrative scene by scene and discusses sources, comparanda, and the designer's editing strategy as she goes along. Since the Lichtenthal Psalter is one of a group of manuscripts illustrated by the same cohort of artists, using a similar decorative and narrative vocabulary, comparison with other manuscripts in this group reveals a great deal about the editorial strategies followed here. This analysis reveals, among other things, a certain sanitizing tendency in the choice of episodes in the Lichtenthal Psalter; for example, characters who would not be good role models, like Potiphar's wife, might be completely omitted from the narrative (79).
The step-by-step approach Sandler follows in this section allows her to draw the reader of The Lichtenthal Psalter into in a simulacrum of moving through the manuscript itself, aided by a deft interweaving of description and analysis. She sticks closely to the Bohun group for her comparanda, venturing out occasionally for specific iconography. This is for the most part the right approach, since it emphasizes the context out of which the Lichtenthal Psalter came, although a wider view is often useful as well since, as Sandler's introduction makes clear, the Bohuns were very well-connected and obtained other well-known manuscripts in addition to the ones they commissioned.
This section is exceptionally well-illustrated, presenting every illuminated folio in the manuscript in color plates. The plates are reproduced to the scale of the original manuscript, and are bookended, appropriately enough, by plates of its front and back covers (Plates 1 and 34). The designers of The Lichtenthal Psalter succeeded at the difficult task of setting out the plates to echo the Psalter's recto and verso placements, even ensuring that facing folios appear on facing pages in the publication (as with folios 163v and 164, which are reproduced in the facing plates 31 and 32). The plentiful black-and-white figures present all of the comparative material, and also provide enlarged details of folios reproduced in whole in the color plates. At times these details are not enlarged enough to make the extra illustration useful (as with the duplication of the upper half of folio 8, reproduced in color in plate 14, and again as an only slightly enlarged figure 20). On the whole however this extensive, and no doubt expensive, strategy is very helpful, particularly since so much of Sandler's discussion hinges on tiny historiated initials and marginal paintings.
The first section thus provides the reader with basic information about the manuscript and analysis of its separate images; the second, shorter section provides the synthesis. Here, Sandler sets the newly-discovered psalter as a whole within the context of the ten other Bohun manuscripts produced in the later part of the fourteenth century, which are listed in Appendix I (163-65). Her discussion of their paleography, calendrical and textual idiosyncracies, artistic style and pictorial rhetoric is informed by decades of research on the Bohun manuscripts. One of the most intriguing passages occurs where Sandler builds on the "data" presented in Part One to discuss the pictorial program of the Lichtenthal Psalter, in comparison to that of the other prayerbooks in the group with analogous image cycles (130-44). She concludes that editorial control, exercised by the main artist John de Teye, would have been shaped by the aristocratic point of view or mentalite of his patrons. "Probably without realizing it, 'reading' the images of the Lichtenthal Psalter was as much a part of their education as reading and reciting the words of the sacred text." (142).
She then moves on to her conclusions about who specifically commissioned the manuscript, for whom, and when (145-46). She argues that Joan Fitzalan, the widow of the last Earl Humphrey and mother of Mary de Bohun, is most likely to have been the commissioner of the Lichtenthal Psalter and other prayerbooks intended for Mary and her husband. Sandler concludes with a discussion of the "post-history" of the Psalter, providing a hypothetical but highly persuasive itinerary from the hands of Mary de Bohun in England to those of the Cistercian nuns at Lichtenthal.
The production values of The Lichtenthal Psalter are high. As noted above Part One is exceptionally well- illustrated, and while there are no color plates in Part Two, the publishers included all necessary black-and-white illustrations and reproduced them clearly. In other words, the visual support for the textual arguments is available to the reader, a rare treat in these days of increasing costs of photography, permissions, and printing for both authors and publishers. And Sandler's writing carries an authority that few art historians of our time can muster, because of the connoisseurship skills and breadth of first-hand knowledge of manuscripts she earned while working on Gothic Manuscripts 1285-1385. One might quibble with minor points or choices for comparison, but her sentences are at times lively and unforgettable. For example, she describes the characteristic "Bohun style" on p. 128 in this fashion, accompanied by an enlarged detail of a marginal scene from the Lichtenthal Psalter: "Figures, though tiny and crowded together, are large- headed, wasp-waisted, spindly-limbed and unstable; faces have ovoid contours, half-lowered eyes over large, dark pupils, and puffy lips."
The Lichtenthal Psalter, despite its relatively small size, is an important book--in much the same way that the Lichtenthal Psalter itself, even smaller in scale, is an important manuscript. In the very first sentence of her book Sandler notes that "discoveries of previously unknown medieval manuscripts of great beauty or historic importance have become rare events" (7). We are fortunate indeed that this manuscript was recognized for what it is, and that it can be added to an already well-established context. With this important addition to the ouevre of John de Teye and his cohort, we can now wait eagerly for the next installment in the story of the Bohun family manuscripts.