The Murthly Hours: Devotion, Literacy and Luxury in Paris, England and the Gaelic West

Citation

James, S. (2002), "The Murthly Hours: Devotion, Literacy and Luxury in Paris, England and the Gaelic West", Library Review, Vol. 51 No. 9, pp. 480-481. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.2002.51.9.480.5

We can barely imagine what a mediaeval calligrapher or artist would have made of CD‐ROMs and Web sites, but it is easy enough to see what wonders electronic media can make of mediaeval illuminated manuscripts. Previously the Lindisfarne Gospels, and now the Sherborne Missal gets the British Library’s unique Turning the Pages CD‐ROM treatment. At £12.95 this has to be some kind of bargain (the original set the BL back a pretty penny even allowing for off‐sets against inheritance tax for the £15 million estimated value of the book); if anything, this latest CD‐ROM programme is even better than its predecessor (and I speak from a position of great personal prejudice in favour of the Lindisfarne Gospels). More pages can be opened as the cursor scrolls across the scene and through the volume, and the images may be magnified by zooming on any part of the page, together with a text or audio presentation for each folio revealed, much as in the previous programme. There is an account of the missal, by Michelle P. Brown, both in illustrated text over several screens and as an audio presentation.

Some features are extracted from the missal for special treatment. Images of birds may be selected from a menu to be shown magnified from the original illuminations with their Anglo‐Saxon names and atmospherically with an audio presentation of the bird’s song. Saints, scribes and festivals are all featured in enlarged illuminations with explanatory notes, and another audio programme presents monks singing plain chant against an appropriate image.

Produced at the start of the fifteenth century for the Benedictine Abbey of Sherborne in Dorset, this is the largest and most lavishly illustrated service book to have survived from the Middle Ages. As noted above, it is also the most expensive item ever acquired by the British Library. In its manner of presentation in this unique programme it becomes even more of a treasure, accessible anywhere to anybody at any time, taking the user directly if virtually into another world of long ago.

The Murthly Hours is easily comparable with the Sherborne Missal: also sumptuously decorated it dates from the late thirteenth century, made by Parisian artists initially for a wealthy laywoman in England. By the early fifteenth century it was in Scotland, where it remained, and now rests in the National Library of Scotland following its rediscovery in 1980 at Mount Stewart on the Isle of Bute. The principal vehicle here is a detailed, scholarly, well illustrated book examining the history, writing and decoration of the Murthly Hours, its relation to illumination in France and England, the nature and use of books of hours as demonstrated by it, discussion of the miniatures and of devotional and illuminated manuscripts in mediaeval Scotland. The author is a senior lecturer in the Department of Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh. Appendices cover details of the manuscript’s contents, including editions of the texts of Gaelic charms and other fragments. Altogether this scholarly book makes a significant contribution not just to the understanding of this major manuscript but more widely to Scottish and European mediaeval culture.

Supplementing the book is a CD‐ROM with a digital facsimile of the manuscript. Each folio is reproduced, with the facility to zoom on details and accompanied by a brief commentary on each folio. Not as ambitious as the British Library’s series, it yet serves a notable and similar purpose whether as an accompaniment to a specialist book or, more widely, on its own. A book and two CD‐ROMs all in their own ways make further treasures more readily accessible through different kinds of virtual media (and not forgetting that the original manuscripts were in their own day virtual media of another kind), whether for scholarship or general interest. All are warmly welcomed and long may the trend continue. This is a joint review with The Sherborne Missal.