Illuminated manuscripts constitute some of the finest works of art to have survived from the Middle Ages, and Psalters and Books of Hours are among the most richly decorated. Glittering with burnished gold and painted in exquisite pigments, their pages offer an unparalleled insight into a largely vanished visual culture. From the sixth to the sixteenth century these two texts constituted the standard forms of personal prayerbook for laity and clergy. Psalters and Books of Hours were owned by kings and commoners, priests, monks, and aristocrats, and attracted the attention of some of the greatest artists of the late Middle Ages. Their illustration ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous, from visions of saintliness to scatology and grotesquerie, from the Virgin and Saints to an upside-down world populated by monkeys and monsters. Often delightful, comic and startling in equal measure, these rich repositories of medieval painting were designed to stimulate and intrigue the medieval viewer as they do us. 
 
This extensively illustrated lecture course will introduce students to the production, decoration and use of these key medieval religious texts. 
 
No prior knowledge needed. 

Freddie Law Turner is an independent scholar, who has taught and published widely on medieval illuminated manuscripts both in the UK and the US. She is currently co-curator of an exhibition on the history of the psalms at the Morgan Museum and Library in New York, ‘Sing a New Song – the Psalms in Medieval Art and Life’ and contributed the chapter on illuminated psalters to the accompanying publication. She holds a PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art.