St John's College MS 27

Decoration

No headings although guides are left. No chapter divisions or running titles.

Verse divisions in alternate red and blue 2-line arabesque capitals.

Chapter divisions added later (s. xv?) in the margins.

There are two illuminated initials, in the hand also responsible for our MS 26:

Fol. 1^ra: an 11-line gold E with two birds on red, on a violet ground;

Fol. 3^vb: a 12-line gold E with blue and orange vine and flower on gold, on a midnight blue ground.

Walter Cahn, ‘St Albans and the Channel Style in England’, in The Year 1200: A Symposium (New York, 1975), 187–230 identified our MSS 26–27, companion volumes, with a painter who illuminated St Albans books during the tenure of abbot Simon (1167–83); he listed them as no. 7 in his enumeration of the relevant books (211).

Cahn suggests (194) that our MSS might be associated with a multi-volume glossed Bible commissioned by Simon. (Other portions, although not in the format shared by our books, might be the Luke and John in Lambeth Palace MS 102 and the Pauline epistles, with Peter Lombard’s gloss, in Cambridge, Trinity College MS O.5.8.)

There is further discussion in Patricia D. Stirnemann, ‘The Copenhagen Psalter’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1976), which we have not seen.

But Thomson demurs (see 1:54–62 passim); he lists our MSS among fifteen books attributed to ‘the Simon master’ perhaps from the abbey (nos. 97–8 [1:127]), but he suggests that the atelier was probably commercial, not monastic, not located at the abbey, and filling orders from a variety of customers.

See AT no. 65 (10), with attribution to the ‘Simon painter’.