Gender, Genre, and the Afterlives of Medieval Devotion: The Lussher Psalter and Its Readers

Indiana University, Lilly Library, MS Ricketts 28, also known as the Lussher Psalter for one of its owners, dates to the period between 1420 and 1450. It presents the Psalms from the Vulgate Bible and other devotional materials, all in Latin. This manuscript provides a remarkable manifestation of later medieval lay devotion and its afterlives. It bears witness to the religious and political commitments of its original owner; it also reveals the ways in which, as Gail McMurray Gibson says in her study of the manuscript of the N-Town plays, early modern owners of medieval manuscripts "inscribed new cultural uses and histories on the pages."¹ Such inscriptions raise significant questions concerning the porous boundaries demarcating the medieval and early modern periods, and give us reasons to consider "these manuscripts as ongoing contests about past and present religious devotion and orthodoxy."²

In this essay, I consider what the material elements of MS Ricketts 28, which was owned and used in various ways by multiple generations of a set of intermarried families, might tell us about lay devotion as manifested in textual practices. I examine the ways in which, in various senses, later medieval devotion remained, through interactions with this manuscript, something culturally valuable and viable long after the time of the manuscript's original creation. The value and viability of medieval devotion are, I argue, perhaps especially relevant to the women who interacted with this manuscript, which at least three times in its history was inherited by or given to a daughter. Given that in the Middle Ages the psalter, a mainstay of the devotional canon, had strong associations with women's reading, a feminine line of transmission for this manuscript, and for the forms of medieval devotion and medieval textual practices it embodies, seems quite fitting. MS Ricketts 28 provides insights into the ways in which the interactions of gender, genre, and the canon play significant roles in expressions of personal and familial identity as well as of religiopolitical allegiances, not only at the time of the manuscript's creation but also through the early modern period well into the eighteenth century, the time to which the latest inscriptions in the manuscript date.

MS Ricketts 28 is a beautiful manuscript; written on vellum and containing 138 leaves, it measures 11 × 7 ¼ in and is bound in blue velvet over pasteboard. Henry Yates Thompson purchased the manuscript from the rare-book seller Bernard Quaritch Ltd. in March 1895, and it came into the collection at the Lilly Library in the early 1920s. The kalendar occupies folios 1–6v, followed by the psalter (7r–114v), the Canticles (115r–125v), the Litany (126r–131r), and the Office of the Dead (131v–138). The name "Lussher Psalter" comes from an inscription reading "Sum liber Johannis Hunt ex dono Mariae Lussher, 1585" (fol. 1r). Though not lavishly illuminated in comparison with some medieval devotional texts such as books of hours, the manuscript was fairly costly to produce; Montague Rhodes James describes its decorative work as "of the most admirable XVth century kind."³ One illumination is particularly notable. On folio 7r the initial "B" for Psalm 1, "Beatus vir," includes a picture of King David with a harp. A man dressed in red kneels before him and touches the harp. The first page of the psalter also includes an elaborate border that incorporates gold leaf. Seven additional Psalms begin with large initials of gold and foliage as well as partial borders ("Dominus illuminatio," "Dixit custodiam," "Dixit insipiens," "Saluum," "Exultate," "Laudate," "Dixit Dominus"), while additional Psalms begin with smaller initials with shaded colors of orange, blue, and green.

Although we do not know who had this manuscript made, or who owned it in the fifteenth century, as Rosemarie McGerr has noted, the presence of gold and the beautiful decorations reflect both the wealth of the original owner and the extent to which that owner honored the religious texts the manuscript contains.⁴ Indeed, as a physical object, this manuscript not only facilitates the reader's devotional...