Polish-Dutch research into Old English Psalter fragments receives funding from the British Academy
Thijs Porck (Universiteit Leiden) and Monika Opalińska (University of Warsaw) have received a small grant from the Neil Ker Memorial Fund (British Academy) for their research into the fragments of an 11th-century manuscript that were found scattered across European libraries, in The Netherlands, Poland, Germany and England.
Collaborative detective work
A couple of years ago, Porck was involved in the find of twenty-one fragments of an Old English glossed psalter in the Regional Archive of Alkmaar; around the same time, Opalińska and colleagues had chanced upon fragments of the same manuscript in a library in Elbląg, Poland. In both cases, the parchment fragments had been reused by bookbinders around the year 1600 to strengthen their books. Since their respective discoveries, Opalińska and Porck have collaborated on finding out more about how fragments of the same manuscript ended up in The Netherlands and Poland, connecting the fragments to earlier finds in Germany and England. Their archival detective work involved tracing the origin of the bookbinder to Leiden, while the owner of the manuscript may have been Princess Gunhild, an English princess who fled to the continent after the Norman Conquest of 1066, taking her psalter with Old English glosses with her. Recently, Porck shared the story behind this remarkable manuscript in the Dutch podcast De Middeleeuwen, which you can find on Spotify.
Digitally reconstructing the Psalter
With their small grant from The British Academy, Opalińska and Porck will continue their collaborative effort to reconstruct and better understand the 11th-century psalter with its Old English glosses. Working together with scholars from Poland, the Netherlands, Germany, USA, Canada, Ireland, and Italy, they are preparing a book that will present the first complete critical edition of all surviving fragments of the Psalter. The book will include digital reconstructions of the manuscript pages, visualizing the original layout and demonstrate the proportions of preserved and missing text. By combining philological scholarship with digital and material analysis, the book may help scholars discover additional hidden fragments still waiting to be found.
The object of this fund, established by the family and friends of Neil R Ker FBA, is to promote the study of Western medieval manuscripts, in particular those of British interest; that is enabling investigation of their production (including decoration), readership and use in particular.