Honeyed Words

Honeyed Words Comparative commentary by Frederica Law Turner Bible Passage The grand historiated initials which open Psalm 80 (81 in modern versions) superbly illustrate the inventiveness of medieval artists, and the variations in iconography and hence meaning for different audiences. Unlike the historical books of the Bible, the Psalms are poetry and thus notoriously hard to illustrate. Various solutions to this problem evolved over the Middle Ages, and so psalters often contain (i) images of King David, understood in the Middle Ages as the psalms’ author, emphasizing the psalms’ historical context; (ii) ‘literal’ scenes responding to the opening words of the text; or (iii) images of Christ, reminding the viewer of the christological understanding of the psalms. Psalm 80 was the first psalm sung at Matins on a Wednesday in the medieval cycle of Church services known as the Divine Office. It is also one of the most musical of the psalms: Sing aloud to God our strength; shout for joy to the God of Jacob! Raise a song, sound the timbrel, the sweet lyre with the harp. Blow the trumpet at the new moon, at the full moon, on our feast day. (vv. 1–3) All three of these Psalm 80 initials show King David, but with a subtly different emphasis in each. The Windmill Psalter contains what appears initially to be a straightforward response to the opening words of the text, but David plays a cymbala—a classical rather than a medieval instrument and an attribute of Music, one of the Seven Liberal Arts. David here symbolizes the sacred music of the Bible—he is an ideal musician playing an ideal instrument, as well as an historical king. In the lavish Sainte Chapelle Breviary—probably made for a queen of France as a pair to her husband’s book—David is an ideal ruler, whom the monarch should aspire to imitate. The psalter initials either emphasize his privileged position—he is saved personally by God from a capsizing boat at Psalm 68 (69 in modern versions)—or set up his conduct as a righteous example, as here where his sacred music in praise of God is contrasted with the cacophony made by the idolatrous worshippers of the Golden Calf. Whoever designed the iconographic programme in the decidedly academic Tickhill Psalter—made for and perhaps partly by an Augustinian Prior—had little interest in straightforward literal or historical illustrations of the text. The book opens with the preface to Peter Lombard’s commentary on the Psalms, and each psalm is introduced by extracts from that commentary written in red, which explains the psalms in terms of Christ and the Church. An extensive visual programme runs alongside this textual exegesis, with over 460 episodes of biblical history drawn from the Old Testament books of Kings and Peter Comestor’s Historia scholastica in the initials and lower borders of each page. So while the added texts emphasize the Christian significance of the psalms, the imagery reminds the viewer of their historical context, a duality well suited to the manuscript’s scholarly patron. Overall, the richness of these illuminations seems especially appropriate to a psalm that celebrates God’s abundance. As Jerome urged: Be sure you penetrate the mystery in the scriptural words: ‘With the finest of wheat’ [v.16]. … The prophet wanted to show the abundance and richness of spiritual grace …. ‘And with honey from the rock he would fill them’. [God] is the wheat; he also is the rock who quenches the thirst of the Israelites in the desert. He satisfied their thirst spiritually with honey, and not with water, so that they who believe and receive the food taste honey in their mouth. ‘How sweet to my palate are your promises, sweeter than honey to my mouth!’. (Jerome, Homilies on the Psalms 13)