Illuminators and Patrons in Fourteenth-Century England: The Psalter & Hours of Humphrey de Bohun and the Manuscripts of the Bohun Family by Lucy Freeman Sandler (review)

During the fourteenth century, Pleshey Castle in Essex was the locus of a remarkable confluence of patrons, artists, and scribes. The patrons were members of the wealthy and prominent Bohun family, and two of the artists, John de Teye and Henry Hood, were Augustinian friars attached to their household. During the second half of the century, the illuminators and scribes at Pleshey produced a number of profusely-decorated manuscripts, of which twelve complete or fragmentary examples remain as witnesses to a large and coherent group. In Illuminators and Patrons, Lucy Freeman Sandler places a prayerbook made for the last male Bohun in the context of this important group.

The first part of Illuminators and Patrons addresses the historical background of the Bohuns and their artists, and surveys the surviving manuscripts (pp. 1–36; see also the appendix pp. 346–49). Sandler then turns to the titular manuscript, a psalter and hours now in the British Library (MS Egerton 3277), which here receives its first full scholarly description and analysis. She argues that the unusual organization and subject matter of this prayerbook was informed by the synergy of patron and illuminator at Pleshey. Here, as in other Bohun manuscripts, each verse begins with a historiated initial that contains a tiny painted scene. These initials provide the engaged reader with visual narratives drawn primarily from the Bible, which proceed along their own course in a way that sometimes dovetails with but is never captioned by the devotional texts. While Sandler’s overview of the illumination program explores the structure and the context of these paintings (pp. 37–91), her analyses of each of the illuminations in the next chapter are the heart of this part of the book. Here, Sandler explores the interplay between the texts, the biblical initials, and the other figural imagery that was painted in marginal complexes outside the “primary” material (pp. 92–158). The complex and literate relationships between these different elements are suggestive of the relationships between the original readers and some of the artists, particularly John de Teye.

Illuminators and Patrons is the culmination of three decades of work by Lucy Freeman Sandler, the doyenne of fourteenth-century English manuscript studies, who since 1985 has published several shorter articles on various aspects of the Bohun manuscripts as well as a monograph on one of the psalters. Several of these are republished in the second part of this book, updated and furnished with more color reproductions. This is a valuable compilation of both easily-available journal articles and essays that can be harder to track down. Presented here in a thematic organization, these studies present additional overviews of the group and its historiography, and either address themes, like political imagery, across several manuscripts (pp. 179-202), or individual members of the Bohun group, like the psalter in Vienna (ÖNB cod. 1826*; pp. 290–306).

Illuminators and Patrons, like the manuscripts it discusses, is a copiously illustrated book, but it also includes a CD that provides images of every folio from Egerton 3277 in files large enough to allow close inspection of the texts and images. The manuscript is, at this writing, fully digitized at the British Library website (http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Egerton_MS_3277), but the disk is a more convenient adjunct to the analyses in the book. This volume, in conjunction with Sandler’s study of The Lichtenthal Psalter and the Manuscript Patronage of the Bohun Family (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2004) provide by themselves an essential library on this unusual group of illuminated manuscripts, and will no doubt provide an important foundation for further studies.