The psalter of Isabelle, Queen of England 1308–1330: Isabelle as the audience

Abstract

Isabelle of France has long been vilified for her role in the deposition of her husband Edward II in 1327. Recent studies, however, have reevaluated her activities and are more likely to present her as a canny diplomat than as the ‘She-wolf of France’.1 Interest in her role as an art patron and collector is based largely on the survival of an inventory drawn up after her death in August 1358, which lists some thirty-six books in addition to jewels, relics, tapestries, and panel paintings.2 One of the few extant codexes associated with this inventory is the Isabelle Psalter (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, cod. gall. 16), in which the psalms are presented in both Latin and French and are decorated with a complex tapestry of biblical stories, bestiary scenes, and heraldic imagery. The identification of the Munich psalter with the salterium coopertum cum uno panno de serico of the queen's inventory is necessarily tentative, but our placement of the book in Isabelle's hands 50 years earlier is fairly certain: not only are the heraldic arms of England and France prominent in the psalter, but one historiated initial depicts a queen kneeling between these arms (figure 1). The stylistic evidence adduced by D. D. Egbert in the 1930s pointed to an early fourteenth-century date for the psalter which, in conjunction with the heraldry and the image of the queen, led him to suggest that the manuscript was produced as a gift for Isabelle between her betrothal in 1303 and her marriage in 1308.3 The goal of the current study is to examine the psalter as a gift given to Isabelle, a 12-year-old princess-bride, and to explore some of the ways in which this very young woman might have understood the complex imagery between its covers. The bilingual texts and discrete but complementary visual narratives in the Psalter provide visual metaphors for the official, maternal roles Isabelle assumed at the very time she received her gift, so that the manuscript becomes a matrix of ideas suitable to the use of a young woman who was destined to become a ‘matrix of future kings’.4

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