Music and Themes of the Carmina Burana

The Carmina Burana, also known as the Codex Buranus, is a 13th-century collection containing 228 medieval poems and songs, written in Latin, German, and French, that can be categorized into four basic themes. Fifty-five of these texts are satirical poems and songs about morals and mockery, 131 of them are lyrics of courtly love and springtime, 40 of them are songs about drinking and gaming, and 2 of them are long, spiritual theater pieces. This collection shows that music flourished even outside the church. The poems and songs in this manuscript were written by numerous different authors, many of which are unidentifiable. The only authors that scholars seem to have identified for certain who made contributions to this collection are the fifteen poets that either had their name cited in the text or were identified through comparisons with other manuscripts. Even still, it is wise to assume possible mistakes could have easily been made when identifying authors by using only stylistic comparisons. The obvious reason to consider this possibility is that authors may have lyrical styles similar to those of other authors either by coincidence, stylistic trends, or by having been influenced by another lyricist.

The majority of the scripture of the Carmina Burana is attributed to two primary, unknown scribes. Three additional scribes also contributed to the manuscript at different points throughout the thirteenth (and possibly early fourteenth) century. This is inferred because the script seems to be written in a gothic minuscule (or possibly in continental protogothic book script) which was the most popular type of script of the thirteenth century. Some scholars believe that the poems were written by traveling poets called goliards.

Additional proof that the script was from this time period, and one of the features that I personally find most interesting, is also demonstrated in the early musical notation that accompanies some of the songs in the manuscript. For instance, if you take a look at folio 4 verso, you can see that the musical notation is written in the Gothic style of notation. It starts with a few simple virga above about the first four syllables and then adds the use of multiple-note neumes such as the climacus above the word that looks like "floruit" and the clivis above "licuit." Although the notation does not provide the location of the starting pitch, it does provide some detail about the melodic direction as well as about the relationships between the pitches. For instance, the climacus represents a group of pitches that descends in a step-by-step fashion. In other words, if the first note of the climacus is sung on the musical note E, then the next two notes in the text would be sung on a D and a C. This style of medieval notation provides little to no information about the song's rhythmic patterns, however, rhythmic patterns can be seen in later versions of the songs.

When thinking about these songs in terms of performance, it is important to remember that around the the high middle ages, troubadours had become very popular. Common troubadour themes included songs of courtly love as well as vulgar satires, which together make up well over half of the songs in the Carmina Burana. From this, we can obviously infer that these songs might have been inspired by troubadours and definitely sung by them. Troubadours may have even written many of the lyrics and notations in the collection.

An interesting fact about this manuscript is that it seems to have been hidden or received little attention up until the 20th century, when a German composer by the name of Carl Orf expanded upon and develop the written notation and composed an opus that he also named the Carmina Burana. In his opus, the composer used twenty-four of the original poems and songs in the original 13th-century Carmina Burana. He connected all of them together with a repeating motif. This made the Carmina Burana very popular. One of the songs that Orf adopted is titled “O Fortuna” or “Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi” and contains lyrics which compare fortune to the moon, saying it is “statu variablis” which translates to “always changing.” A miniature exists in the original manuscript that parallels a part of the song which compares fortune to a whirling wheel that causes poverty and power. The miniature depicts a king at four instances on the wheel: climbing up the spokes of the wheel, sitting atop of it having conquered it, falling down the other side, and finally being crushed underneath and held down by the wheel. Other depictions include one of courtly love which illustrates two lovers lying side by side, cheerful springtime scenes, scenes of gamblers, and two scenes from Virgil’s Aeneid.

As you can see, the Carmina Burana covers a wide range of topics using many songs and poems. It shows that they held courtly love important and enjoyed mockery and gambling and it provides general insight into the lives and the views outside of the church of those who lived in the thirteenth century.

The Carmina Burana

Considering the belief that it had originally been intended for an influential court, the Carmina Burana contains an interesting array of lyrical poetry. Dating back to about AD 1230, the colored miniatures contained within are decorative and complex, showcasing both pagan scenes and more fanciful, romantic springtime scenes. The poetry inside varies similarly from romantic songs that focus on love and spring to a vast number of satirical, goliardic verses. The 320 poem collection features a great number of different poets, those that are identifiable hailing from a myriad of different backgrounds and writing styles.

The pages themselves – disregarding the eight colored miniatures - are mostly undecorated aside from the ornate initials spread throughout the text. The distinctive, careful writing style was written and edited by a collection of many different scribes, two of which are believed to have contributed the most work. One of the two may even be credited with the painting of the miniatures, as there appear to be stylistic similarities between some of the initials and the illustrations themselves. Of course, there seem to have been a period of years after these two scribes and the completion of the book wherein there were several corrections made. It is believed that there were a total of five different scribes who put work into the codex before it was finally left alone. However, his wasn’t until around the year 1300, when the last, yet most extensive, editing took place.

The sections of the book that do include illustrations appear to have intricate and well painted scenes, most notably the first miniature. Showcasing a scene where in a sovereign is being drawn around the Wheel of Fortune – an ornately dressed Fortuna seated in the center – the color and detail put into the miniature accurately supports the manuscript as a more high class document. Bright colors - including vibrant hues of blue, red and yellow - were used in these miniatures and seem as though they may have been just as expensive to commission as they appear to be.

The poets included within the texts are not outshined in comparison and are not lacking in variety. They come from all sorts of backgrounds, whether Latin, German or French, their educations and roles within society ranging from clerics and theologians to politicians and writers. Some of them had influential patrons standing behind them, while others wrote through their school days, their credits (if they had the,) ranging from their proper titles to pen names. Such a varying collection of poets is not surprising, as the content within the book seems to be rather varied itself.

What’s most interesting is that many of the poets seem to have rather fascinating progressions between the time they wrote their additions to the book and their eventual contributions to the world. One of these writers in particular was Peter of Blois (1135-1204), a tutor to King William II of Sicily, servant of Henry II and Latin secretary to Eleanor of Aquitaine in his later years. His contributions to the book are comprised of a collection of ten Goliardic sequences written in his student days, a common practice among students at the time but no less entertaining to remember in light of his later life. Another man, Walter of Chatillon – a learned French writer and theologian – also wrote a number of Goliardic poems that were included in the text, all the while going on to be a writer of epics.

Other writers, such as Godfrey of Winchester, seem to have poems that lie on the opposite spectrum of their usual work, such as the satirical writers who had their love poems published within the manuscript. However, there are still more poets found within that simply contributed to all of the different categories identified inside, such as Philip the Chencellor. Contributing much to the poetic world, eventually being deemed one of the more influential poets of the 13^th century, Philip had eight of his poems input into the codex, including anything from satirical or moral songs to those that were more romantic.

Interestingly, the collection’s current popularity is credited to the composer Carl Orff, whose famous compositions are based off of the poems inside the manuscript. Orff himself draws inspiration from everything that the manuscript seems to encompass, from the verses speaking of meadows and spring time, to those dealing with the court of love or the tavern. The predominantly orchestral and dramatic nature of the opus, however, seems strange at times, especially in consideration of the more ridiculous sounding goliardic verses they were occasionally inspired by. The song named “Cignus ustus canat,” (The Roast Swan) fits this description quite well, as someone not familiar with the lyrics would find the song more dramatic or lamentful than silly, as many find it to be. In many performances, after all, those in audience who understand the lyrics seem to be suppressing giggles throughout the heavily emotional choral segments.

In general, though, this opus has remained massively popular and widespread, his compositions invading even today’s popular culture. One such composition is his Carmina Burina: O Fortuna, which is commonly known as one of the go-to dramatic songs in TV and film, becoming more ironically dramatic in today’s terms than in the 1970-80’s. You’ve probably heard it a hundred times before - used in a multitude of comedy shows in popular media as joking transitions into melodramatic scenes – without the knowledge that it was based off of this manuscript.

Canticum canticorum, with Glossia Ordinaria

Canticum Canticorum, with Glossa Ordinaria

The Canticum canticorum, as held by the prestigious Yale University, is a medieval copy of the Song of Songs from the Old Testament of the Bible. The Song of Songs, which is also known as the Song of Solomon, is a unique pieces of verse from the Bible in that it does not make reference to the Talmudic law nor does it contain references to the supernatural. Instead, the song is about the erotic love between a man and a woman, though Jewish and Christian clergy tend to hold the view that the song is instead an allegory for the love that God holds for those who are faithful to him. As the years went on, the Song of Solomon, so named because it is believed to have been written by the biblical king, was viewed as an allegory for the love of Christ for the Church and even having to do with the Virgin Mary, with the exegesis tied to the book growing ever more complex with each new theory put forward by the clergy.

As for the manuscript itself, the book is 178x127mm, with the writing itself being 102x86mm. The text is written in a large round late Caroline minuscule, with commentaries written in a smaller, though stylistically similar, script. The book’s text is easily legible, and the exegesis is off to the sides so that the main body of text can be read more easily. Dating back to the last quarter of the 12th century, the Canticum canticorum with Glossia Ordinaria has seen quite a bit of wear, with several of the pages damaged by what look like strong impacts to the bottom and several that have been discolored by their advanced age.

When the Canticum canticorum was first accepted into Jewish canon in the 2nd century AD, it was the subject of considerable controversy, owing to it overtly sexual nature. The Song of Songs was permitted because it was believed to have been written by King Solomon and, when read allegorically, it was possible to view it as an allegory for God’s love for the people of Israel. Though admittedly, it can be hard to consider a passage such as this as allegory:

Song of Solomon 3:1
By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth:
I sought him, but I found him not.

Song of Solomon 3:4
It was but a little that I passed from them, but I found him whom my soul loveth:
I held him, and would not let him go, until I had brought him into my mother’s house,
And into the chamber of her that conceived me.

Song of Solomon 4:5
Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.

Song of Solomon 5:4
My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him.

Song of Solomon 5:15
His legs are as pillars of marble, set upon sockets of fine gold:
His countenance is as Lebanon, excellent as the cedars.

These are just a few choice verses from the Song of Songs that display its overtly sexual nature, but the belief that these are the words of Solomon himself kept the Canticum canticorum from being lost to the Apocrypha, where all of the books of the Bible that are not considered canon are banished to.

As one would expect for a book whose literal interpretation would be squarely at odds with the doctrine of the medieval church, the Song of Songs would always be read with an extensive exegesis that would explain to the common people how comparisons of breasts to game animals and bowels moving were in fact allegories for God’s love for them, rather than ancient pornography. As one could expect for a book that would require some very creative interpretation to reach the conclusion that the verse was meant to be read in a way that is very different from what is actually on the page, the exegesis commentaries are far longer than the actual Song.

Who actually wrote the Song of Songs is not known, as it has proffered neither an author nor a date of origin within its text, though its similarity to classical Egyptian love poems has led to speculation that it was composed between the 10th and 2nd centuries BC. Indeed, it is not even certain of the Song is the product of only one author, but this has not stopped it from being used by Christians and Jews alike for centuries.

The Song of Solomon is important because it shows that even after centuries religions that adhere to sacred texts, such as the Torah for Judaism, can still adapt should a new chapter for their holy book be discovered and considered authentic. It also demonstrates how religious officials will try to incorporate new finding that are declared canon into the preexisting doctrine through careful study of the document in question and the writing of commentaries to explain to their successors what conclusions they have draw from the text and how they arrived at said conclusions. The Song of Solomon also shows that even powerful clerics aren't above getting a little cheeky when it comes to the religious canon, so long as they are able to justify the inclusion of the new findings with a tie to a well known figure in the religion’s history.

The Carmina Burana: 

The University and the Advent of Popular Satire

The rise of the cathedral school and university in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries presented the papacy with a troubling new paradox. With the population of Latinate Europe ever swelling, its cities and towns bursting out beyond their former walls, a radical increase in the number of clergy was necessary to reach an increasingly sophisticated laity whose spiritual rectitude could not be left in their own hands. Moreover, the sacred and secular authorities who managed these new masses required a steady stream of educated and literate bureaucrats to oversee the ever compounding difficulties of regulating and taxing the nascent commerce and industry that was rapidly replacing agricultural land-holding as the source of wealth. The methods of former monastic traditions, slow, irregular, and parochial, were insufficient to meet these demands.

The answers were the cathedral schools and the prestigious universities that would develop from them. With regular curriculums, sophisticated methods of book production, and libraries that brought together the collected volumes of the classical and christian traditions in greater numbers than ever previously seen, the universities would churn out hundreds of students over the period and a new culture of lay literacy unrivaled in Western Europe since the fall of Rome. If the problem was a lack of clergy, it was a problem abundantly solved.

But these new schools, while protected and promoted by papal authority, provided a new problem for the church. Intended to promote and protect orthodoxy against the possibility of lay heresy, these new institutions with their sophisticated professors steeped in classics and philosophical knowledge of a kind sacral and unwholesome seemed to certain eyes suspiciously worldly. In fact, in a new and perhaps more insidious way, heretical.

Much of the debate concerning the merits of pagan writings and, arguably, secular knowledge would take place between papal legates and teachers like Peter Abelard. Abelard, Thomas Augustus and their like would claim that christian moral lessons could be read in allegory from classic works, and that the skeptical logic of Aristotle would only lead them to greater faith. Detractors from these scholars argued that to put scripture to question at all was prideful heresy, and that if God had so valued philosophy, Christ would have surrounded himself with philosophers rather than simple fishermen.

While such debates raged on, a simpler and perhaps more informal form of dissent was already taking place. The Carmina Burana is a witness to this second mode. Likely begun in the early 1220’s and finished around 1230, the Carmina Burana is a beautiful if not richly ornate manuscript. It has eight full illustrations and a number of large capitals inked in black and red, with smaller red capitals being used to designate the beginning of lines and sentences within the various verse. Two scribes made the document, but a number of edits have been made over the years, largely by writing corrections between the lines over the offending script. The poems within are an anthology of well known poets of the time, likely to be presented before court. The poems themselves are a collection of verse of popular poets, several of whom wrote in the vernacular. The verses include biting anti-clerical satire, and examples of the Goliardic tradition, a poetic pseudo-movement composed of wandering students and itinerant monks who concern themselves largely with themes of drink, women, and humor in a distinctly un-sacral manner.

One of the immediate features of the manuscript that sticks out is its familiarity with classical myth and reference. If these poems were to be read at court, I think it not an unreasonable assumption to see the use of such reference as implying familiarity with the material not only in the case of the author, but the audience. If true, this speaks to the rapid dispersal of classical material in the thirteenth century. Even the opening illustration to the Carmina Burana features the Roman goddess of destiny, and the love poems within make heavy reference of Venus and Cupid. That this sort of education, once the exclusive property of monks whose cloistered existence allowed for the solemn meditation on such relics of the Roman past could now be bandied about by a wandering poet, speaks volumes about the changing social atmosphere of Europe.

Another telling feature: the poetry is unapologetically intended for amusement. This is both based on the actual assertions of the poets and the clearly humorous material they chose as a subject. Further, the writing of some of the verse in vernacular implies that the intended amusement was meant to be accessible, not just to the latin literate, but to the lay people (albeit, likely not the serfs in the field, but those only semi-literate in Latin). Take this excerpt (found at www.poetryintranslation.com):

1.To each one Nature gives                     3.Never does the spirit
Their unique endowment:                       Of poetry visit me
when I’m making verses I                       If there aren’t enough
Drink for my enjoyment,                         Rations in my belly
With the very innkeeper                          When in my arching brain
Who the purest cask blest                       Bacchus controls me,
Such wine creates the best                      Phoebus erupts again
Written entertainment.                            Uttering marvelously.

2.Such is the verse I write,
Such the wine I drink
Not a word can I indite
Unless I eat and think;
Nothing has inner power
When I fast above the ink
The nearer Ovid in my verse
The more the wine I sink.

If there is an edifying moral message to this verse, it has eluded me. The material is irreverent and self-laudatory, and that is its act of dissent. It shows the desires of a sophisticated and literate culture whose aesthetic tastes are developing to indulge more than saint’s-lives and similarly moralizing tales. That this has an anti-clerical, or at least anti-orthodox, slant is made more obvious by the anti-clerical verses such as the one featuring the Abbot of Cockaigne who merrily drinks and gambles at the local tavern.

These features of the manuscript display the evidence of the shifting social attitudes of Europe, and the demands of a newly sophisticated upper class for a different type of culture than the neat parables and biblical glosses that the thirteenth century papacy was comfortable seeing in the university curriculum.

The Winchester Bible

The process of illumination is a difficult and precarious task, one that depends on the

utmost skill and delicacy of the illuminator. It may take years to illuminate an entire manuscript, weeks to finish a single illumination if the initial is extravagant enough, or the miniature intricate enough. In The Winchester Bible, the largest known bible of its time, is also famous not only as a text, but as a piece of art.

Recently showcased in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the manuscript displayed the

height of monastic scribal and illuminative skill. The immense codex is filled with bright colors, including lapis lazuli, a semiprecious stone that can only be found in the Middle East. In the time of this manuscript, the name of this pigment would have been Ultramarinum or “beyond the sea”. It would have only ever been able to be used with the most ornate of manuscripts or paintings due to its pure, strong, and loud blue marine color. Its hue is so specific and profound, that the synthetic coloring for it today cannot match its effect when used in pieces of art. Even with the synthetic on the market, it is one of the most expensive materials that can be purchased to illuminate a manuscript, and usually, even in the modern day, more expensive than gold used for gold leaf or even other parts of art.

The Winchester Bible has extensive use of this pigment, in most of its initials and full

paged miniatures:

The process of turning the stone into ink is strenuous, and unless done properly, will only 

end in a pale grayish blue. First, the stone must be of a high level with very little impurities so as to get enough of a rich blue. Next, the stone must be ground by hand and mixed with melted wax, resins, and oils, until all the impurities are absorbed by those materials, leaving a fine powder of pure lapis lazuli. Finally, the scribe can mix it with a base and use the ink to write or decorate the manuscript. Because of this process and cost of importation, this pigment is seen as the most luxurious item that can be used. For the Winchester Bible to use this pigment as background and text demonstrates the absolute wealth of its patron, Henry de Blois, a bishop and abbot of where this manuscript was made, at the Winchester Monastery in England.

Just imagine how much money and effort went into this still unfinished Bible. It is a true

depiction of why monastic England was so influential and grandiose at this time.

—Donni Aldrich

Book Manufacturing in a World After the Carolingians

     The collapse of the Carolingian dynasty in Western Europe had a profound impact similar to that of the collapse of the Roman Empire. Asides from the basic return to regional rulers having total authority over their wards, there was also the return to regionalized culture across Christendom. Monasteries returned to maintaining their own version of the Benedictine charter, book production and copying returned to previous methods with little organization between distant monasteries, unlike what was seen during the time of the Carolingians. This return to localization, not just within the governments and organization of monastic life, but with scripts, is a very visible reflection of the collapse of one of the greatest land empires Europe had seen since the Romans.Within the Rievaulx Orosius are several of the prime markers of the re-localisation of book manufacturing, as the previously accepted methods of Caroline script and hierarchy within books is ignored. Instead of Anglo-Caroline minuscule, we see a return to more traditionally Anglo text styles in the form of Anglo square capitals and even the beginnings of Anglo Protogothic script. Note the sharpness of the corners on the words and the distinctive flatness of the sides. This contrasts sharply with the relatively fluid movements required by the previously dominant scripts on the British Isles, Insular and Anglo-Caroline. Though perhaps not the best term to use, but this form of script contains a tremendous amount of "minim-ization," as nearly every letter is made up of minims in one way or another.

Note the preference of pattern
similar to peacock
feathers over Celtic knots or
 religious iconography
within the stem of the P.

This A in particular strikes me
as very typical of Capetian design,
 look at thelong trailing flourish and how
fluid it seems to melt across the page.
Looking withinyou can clearly see
several flower buds
and surrounding leaves.

More examples of proto-gothic
script and strange styling in
initials for the English
monks to be writing with.

     There is also the question of illustrations and images within the manuscript, more specifically the elaborately detailed initials present in the text. They bear dozens of patterns that are fairly atypical to Insular manuscripts and those of the continent. Up into the 10th century Celtic knots were still quite common within initials and were used in a variety of genres of text. So why was there a shift away from traditional iconography? More likely than anything else, it was perhaps mostly just due to changes in tastes as time went on. Knots went out of style and the rise of the Capetians in Francia (ah, those French, always the trend setters) led to increasing usage of blues as well as designs and symbols we typically associate as being very "French," such as the fleur de lis, peacock featherings, and the twisting, vine-like, detailing typical of French engraving and architecture. It's also important to note that there is significantly more rubrication in the main body of the script than in in many of the other manuscripts we've looked at this semester. It seems that rubrication has overtaken marginal notes in popularity to make certain points more noticeable than others.

Interesting to note: the
rubrication appears to be similar
to the main body of text, perhaps
the same scribe did them both?

     Then of course there is the return to writing about local affairs rather than the copying of universally applicable philosophical and religious texts. The  Rievaulx Orosius is a narrative and a chronicle, the only one of its kind it seems, that covers English history in depth from the 2nd century all the way though to the 12th. However, this is only one book within the manuscript, prior to that is an account of the Trojan War by by a priest of Troy known as Dare, however this is probably fictionalized as the writer appears to be late Roman. Neither of these two things would be considered useful to any monastery outside of England. In the centuries prior to the writing of this piece, this would have been exceedingly rare and written in shorthand and with very little care to legibility or illustrations (such as the Moore Bede with it's line after line of historical regurgitation). This piece is less interested in the retelling of events, but rather it is interested in the spread and dispersion of a specific form of knowledge. The Rievaulx Orosius is a local history book used for spreading knowledge between neighboring monasteries. This makes it unique to those that came before it. Before manuscripts traveled entire continents to be copied and shared so that everyone could have the same basic knowledge, but this manuscript is meant to be shared locally, and locally alone.

Legacy of the Utrecht Psalter: the Eadwine Psalter & its brethren

The Eadwine Psalter is the second of the three copies of the Utrecht Psalter that were copied from it during its long travels before it reached Utrecht at one monastery--Christ Church in Canterbury, England. All three of these books were produced from the same monastery but with very different results, all of them are of very high quality in preparation, scribal work, and painting/illumination. It is interesting the increasing level of detail from psalter to psalter in these four books.

Utrecht Psalter

The Utrecht Psalter (France, ca. 820-830) was decorated solely by ink drawings done with the same brown walnut gall ink as the writing.

Harley Psalter

Then the Harley Psalter (Canterbury, ca.1110-30 w/additions in ca.1140 in London) which keeps with the same illustrations as its predecessor but adds in colored inks as well.

Eadwine Psalter

The Eadwine Psalter (Canterbury,  ca.1120-60 w/additions in 1160-70) a trilingual (Latin, Old English, and Anglo-French) psalter with several different glosses. The drawings are in a different style than before and there is even more coloring, with the addition of colored washes as well, although the color palette is the same as the Harley, with its use of the light sepia, and high contrast green, blue, and red (with illuminated initials).

Anglo-Catalan w/painter 2

Anglo-Catalan w/painter 1

Finally the last of the copies is the Anglo-Catalan Psalter (Canterbury, ca.1180-1200 and the illustration was completed in Spain ca. 1340-50). There is a liberal amount of gold leaf here, the figures standing starkly against the background of solid gold leaf. However the illustrations were completed by someone with a completely different style (although not with any less gold leaf) almost a century after its beginning.

The gradual shift in decoration is very interesting with these books, and is a reflection of personal influences, as well as the changes in monastic book production. Different miniatores and illuminators that were probably a part of the monastery gave the drawings different interpretations, and then once we get to the last book it is done around a time when the practice of free-lance artists to paint and illustrate books became prevalent we see a whole change in style in the images (and once in that same book) than we had seen until then.

Focusing now on the Eadwine Psalter, let us take a closer look at the inclusion of all three versions of the psalms: the Gallicanum, the Romanum (with Old English glosses), and the Hebraicum (with Anglo-Norman/French glosses). The page layout for most of the codex is much more complex than the previous copy or the Utrecht Psalter, with a system of three columns, one column is the width of the other two combined and is written in a different size than the others (the Gall one having around 18 lines per page while the others have about 36 per page); this is the one that is the Gallicanum version and the abbreviation Gall is on the bottom of the page (although sometimes it was on the top. The other two versions have similar abbreviations at the bottom to mark which one is written where. There are interlinear glosses for each of the three columns as well as space left above or below for additional glosses and plenty of margin space around the large column.

The rubrics for all three columns is in red (or sometimes gold) and just because the other two are smaller does not necessarily mean that their illuminated initials are any less ornate or detailed, they differ more in size than anything else. While there may be a large amount of different texts being used on the same page it does not seem cluttered or chaotic at all, in fact throughout the codex (with the exceptions of the two instances f.1-4 and f.275-82 where a different person did the layout) there is a great sense of uniformity and clarity. It also probably helps that the vellum used is of very high quality, premium calf vellum that was cut with a lot of waste so that only the flattest, smoothest parts were used. The amount of pages is very impressive considering the size of the manuscript, 455mm x 326mm (roughly 18in x 13in).

The script itself is a hybrid English Vernacular Miniscule with elements from Carolingian scripts and insular ones, and is beautifully done throughout the book. The main text’s script is thick and formal while the smaller writing of the various glosses is thinner and smaller in size. The scribes were chosen so that there would be little deviation in handwriting in order to make the text seem more uniform throughout the entire codex. The ink is sometimes a dark walnut gall ink or sometimes a carbon black for the main text, however the glosses seem to be in a medium brown gall ink.

(from the left) Gallic version w/interlinear Latin gloss; column Latin of gloss; Roman version w/Old English interlinear gloss; Hebrew version w/Anglo-French interlinear gloss.

While there is a definite shift in style in the drawings of the Eadwine Psalter from the whimsical wispy drawings of the Utrecht Psalter it still shows the influence of those drawings in the composition of the new drawings. This may in part be from the use of washes and colored inks leading to more solid figures and also undoubtedly because of the different painters involved in painting it. We do see a similarity between the two drawing styles in the landscapes which are still very cloud-like. And while the drawings in the Eadwine do not seem to be replicas of those in the Utrecht they do seem to be using the Utrecht drawings for a basis of the content of the drawings (as well as the actual psalms themselves). Take a look at the first page of psalms of each of these:

Utrecht

Eadwine

In the left we see angels on top of clouds throwing spears down at the soldiers below them; also in the clouds we have a figure of God holding out his right hand pointing his index and middle fingers. In the middle we have a hill with groups of soldiers on either sides holding spears with another haloed figure on top of the hill holding a long rod or branch or some kind in his right hand, the rod pointing downwards. And in the upper right corner we have the hand of God coming out of the heavens. Even the placement of trees are the same in these two images.