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Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis. Jaargang 22 (2015)

Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis. Jaargang 22

(2015)– [tijdschrift] Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

Bart Jaski
Reproductions of the Utrecht Psalter: handwritten, printed and digital

It is a rare occurrence when a medieval manuscript evokes debates which lead to petitions and large protesting crowds outside the buildings of parliament, so that the national museum requests its government for the loan of the manuscript from abroad, resulting in the foundation of a new society for the purpose of reproducing the manuscript in a recently invented scientific process. Yet this is what happened in London in the year 1873. Rarely had a single medieval manuscript generated such public attention.

The Athanasian Creed

The direct cause of all the commotion was the rediscovery of an old psalter in the library of Utrecht University, which contained the socalled Athanasian Creed, a text also known as the Quicumque vult (‘Whosoever wishes’), from its first words. The Athanasian Creed is a confession of faith about the equality of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost in the Trinity. In the 1870s it was hotly debated whether this creed should be retained in the Anglican Church or not, and in this discussion the date of the creed was of central importance. Many thought that the old psalter in Utrecht proved that it belonged to the early Christian Church. It certainly looked like a Late Roman manuscript, with all the text written in capitalis rustica: the Latin Vulgate text of the 150 psalms and sixteen cantica. These cantica actually consist of twelve biblical liturgical songs, a prayer, two creeds (including the Quicumque vult) and the apocryphal psalm 151, Pusillus eram.1 Even the illustrations which accompany all the psalms and cantica looked like they had been made in the Late Roman Empire.

Yet in the 1870s it was the text of the Quicumque vult that mattered, and it was known that two and a half centuries earlier it had been kept in the library of the famous collector Robert Cotton (1570-1631). The theologian James Ussher (1581-1656) borrowed it in 1625, together with a number of other psalters.2 Ussher investigated the date of the Athanasian Creed, but it was only in 1647 that he published his findings. He concluded that

this text was not written by the Greek Church Father Athanasius in the fourth century, but much later. The earliest manuscript Ussher knew to contain the Quicumque vult was the illustrated psalter he had borrowed from Robert Cotton, which he dated not later than the time of Gregory the Great (Pope 590-604).3

However, in 1647 that illustrated psalter was no longer present in the Cottonian library. It was known that Cotton's friend Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, had borrowed it in 1630, but an investigation in 1646 by Robert's son Thomas Cotton had yielded no further information as to its whereabouts.4 The investigation was complicated because Arundel had fled to the Netherlands in 1642, taking an important part of his extensive collection of art with him. After his death in Pavia in 1646, his widow Alatheia remained in the Netherlands, and apparently sold the manuscript. It was donated to the University Library of Utrecht by Willem de Ridder in 1716, but remained unconsulted in the collection for more than a century.5 Its rediscovery in the nineteenth century would set a whole train of events in motion, and with it an almost constant need for reproductions of the manuscript. It would be these reproductions and their distribution which opened up, for the first time, an international debate about a manuscript's dating and provenance which also caught the public eye. Indeed, there is no other medieval manuscript of which its history, influence and study are so much tied up to its own generation of reproductions, whether handwritten, printed or digital, than the Utrecht Psalter.

The Utrecht Psalter rediscovered

In his aim to describe the libraries of western Europe and their catalogues, the German scholar Gustav Friedrich Hänel visited Utrecht, and noted a small number of old manuscripts which he briefly described in his catalogue, published in 1830. Among them was an illustrated psalter which he dated to the sixth century.6 Although his description was flawed, it marked the start of a rapid increase of attention this psalter would receive. The first to seriously investigate the manuscript was Willem Hendrik Jacob (Baron) van Westreenen van Tiellandt (1783-1848). Like Robert Cotton he was an aristocratie book collector, and became the founder of the Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum in The Hague, the oldest museum of the book in the world. Van Westreenen noted several features which prevented him from dating the manuscript to the time of Valentinian (iii), the second quarter of the fifth century, as was noted in the manuscript itself in the time it was still in the possession of Robert Cotton.7 However, he could agree with the sixth century as suggested by Hänel. He also noted that its old shelfmark was Claudius A. vii (it actually reads Claudius C. 7), and found out that the manuscript with this shelfmark was declared missing in the catalogue of the library of Robert Cotton from 1696.8 Van Westreenen's article contains a lithographic facsimile of a part of the letters of the first psalm on fol. 2r and a few other samples of letters.9 It is the first mechanical reprint of a part of the Utrecht Psalter.

In the first half of the 1830s, and probably because of Van Westreenen's publication, the Utrecht Psalter came to the attention of Caspar Jacob Christiaan Reuvens (1793-1835), the world's first professor of archeology, in Leyden. He asked his draughtsman Tiemen Hooiberg to make a copy of those drawings which could be relevant to his interest in classical archeology. Hooiberg skillfully produced 101 bistre ink drawings, using tracing paper, which were pasted on ordinary paper. Reuvens added about 30 lines of notes. He never got around to do more, for he died unexpectedly during a trip in England in 1835. On 8 October 1838 the drawings were auctioned as part of Reuven's collection, and bought by the Utrecht bookseller Frederik Altheer. He asked an unknown draughtsman to complete the set of 166 drawings, which was done in black ink. After Altheer's death the whole set at an auction in 1843, and after his death it was sold at an auction in 1864. The British buyers, a couple named Boone, sold it the next year to the British Museum, where it was classified ms. Add. 26, 104.10 This is the only complete and fairly accurate manual reproduction of the illustrations of the manuscript we now know of. Yet by this time new techniques were developing which could reproduce manuscripts quicker and more accurately, and distribute them to a wider audience. These would have important repercussions on the study of manuscripts worldwide.

British interest

For all the interest in the old psalter displayed by Hänel, Van Westreenen, Reuvens and Altheer, its rediscovery did not cause much of a stir. This changed when in 1856 the Scottish antiquarian David Laing wrote a letter to Frederic Madden, keeper of manuscripts at the British Museum, in which he gave a description of an old psalter with the Cottonian shelfmark Claudius C. vii, recommending that the British Museum acquire it from the University Library of Utrecht.11 Yet the Utrecht Universtity Board refused, as they did not believe it was stolen from Cotton's library.12 In that same year, 1857, Yman Dirk Christiaan Suermondt, art collector and for-

mer royal mint master at Utrecht, made a couple of tracings from the Utrecht Psalter which he sent to Edward Augustus Bond, assistant keeper of manuscripts at the British Museum, noting the similarities of the drawings in the Harley Psalter (see below); he also included a copy of Van Westreenen's article.13

In 1859 the Oxford zoologist and librarian John Obadiah Westwood visited Utrecht to view the Utrecht Psalter, as he calls it (he thought it ‘ought to be preserved in the British Museum’),14 and noted the similarities with the Harley Psalter, the Eadwine Psalter and the Paris (Anglo-Catalan) Psalter, made in Canterbury in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.15 Westwood concluded that all three had been copied from the Utrecht Psalter. He included seven small drawings (which he calls ‘woodcuts’) from the Utrecht Psalter in his article, and one of the script, and argued that on account of the Saxon interlaced capital b of psalm 1 on fol. 2r, the manuscript was produced in a scriptorium established by the followers of the missionary Augustine of Canterbury (died 604). This was sufficient reason to give the Utrecht Psalter a place in his Fac-similes of the miniatures and ornaments of Anglo-Saxon and Irish manuscripts, published in 1868.16 The illustrations were drawn on stone and chromolithographed. Westwood refers to the recent purchase of the Hooiberg drawings by the British Museum and those made by ‘Herr Guermondt’.

Westwood's publications finally brought the Utrecht Psalter to the attention of a wider audience, including those interested in the rapidly evolving debate about the place of the Athanasian Creed in the Anglican liturgy. The Quicumque vult was for long incorporated in the Book of Common Prayer and frequently recited in the service. The more liberal members of the Anglican Church had issues with clauses which damned those who did evil, and with the final part which warned that those who did not believe this Catholic faith could not be saved.

Obtaining reproductions

The matter became acute when Edmund Ffoulkes of Jesus College, Oxford, published his view that the Athanasian Creed was a Carolingian forgery, and thus had no proper place in the Anglican liturgy.17 The heated debate that followed evoked a renewed search for the psalter which Ussher had dated to the sixth century. Charles Anthony Swainson, professor of divinity at Cambridge, who was highly involved in the matter, was appraised of West-



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Figure 1. Utrecht, University Library, ms. 32, fol. 90v, illustrating the Athanasian Creed (Quicumque vult)


wood's publications by Henry Bradshaw, librarian of the University of Cambridge. Swainson sought reproductions of the text of the Athanasian Creed, and together with Charles John Ellicott, the bishop of Gloucester and Bristol, he enlisted the help of father James Jones of St. Beuno's College in St. Asaph in North Wales. Jones wrote to a Dutch priest, who on his turn contacted father Jaques Arnzt, teacher at the seminary Kuilenburg of the archbishopric of Utrecht. Arntz had a number of chromolithographic copies made by the Utrecht printer P.W. van de Weyer, both of the leaves with the Quicumque vult as specimen of a few remarkable letters. In May 1872 four copies of these prints were sent to father Jones, soon followed by another hundred so that more people could study them.18 This shows the possibilities the new reproduction techniques offered - possibilities which also had their drawbacks. This became quickly apparent at a convocation at Canterbury in July that year, where Ellicott triumphantly produced his copy of the Quicumque vult facsimile, announcing that here he had a photograph (rather than a chromolithographic print) of Ussher's long-lost manuscript which supported the creed's early date. This manuscript in Utrecht, he stated, had in the past been stolen from the British Museum (rather than from Cotton's library). These blunders show that a reproduction without its proper metadata can lead people astray.

Perhaps Ellicott made this mistake because he had explored another avenue to obtain the coveted reproductions. Thomas Duffy Hardy, deputy keeper of Public Records, had sent him a photograph from a Greek text of the Athanasian Creed at St Mark's Library in Venice. The bishop asked John Romilly, the Master of the Rolls, to secure a photograph of the creed in the Utrecht Psalter. On his turn, Romilly requested Earl Granville, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, to contact Utrecht, and also commissioned Hardy to write a report on the date of the Utrecht Psalter. Late in May, just after Arntz had sent his chromolithographic reproductions to Wales, the Utrecht photographer Gustav Albert Lüssow was set to work. However, he kept delaying and finally damaged his negatives in an attempt to enhance the quality of the pictures. It was at this point in time that the newspaper reports from the Canterbury convocation of July and Ellicott's pronouncements reached Utrecht. The University Board suspected that Lüssow had made photographs behind their backs and had passed them on to the British. So, when Swainson arrived in Utrecht in July 1872, he was not allowed to see the Utrecht Psalter, for Ellicott's words had made people suspicious of an attempt of the British to steal the manuscript from the library.

Fortunately, the matter was resolved, and in August Swainson was allowed to spend an afternoon with the Utrecht Psalter before he went back to Cambridge. In the same month the photographs were sent to Britain, together with the expert opinion about the date of the manuscript, which the British had also asked for. The librarian of the Utrecht University Library, Pieter J. Vermeulen, threw the cat among the pigeons when he stated that the Utrecht Psalter could not be earlier than the ninth century, since there are two depictions of an organ in the manuscript, at psalm



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Figure 2. Utrecht, University Library, ms. 32, fol. 2r, illustrating psalm 2. The text of psalm 1, Beatus vir, begins with an ornamenteel b in the Franco-Saxon style. The main part of the psalm is written in capitalis rustica


150 on fol. 83r, and at the additional psalm 151 on fol. 91v. Such organs, the specialists concurred, were first built in the age of Charlemagne. Such a late date would of course make the Utrecht Psalter useless to prove an early date of the Athanasian Creed.19

Vermeulen's memoir, both the Dutch text and an English translation, and including drawings of the two organs, was incorporated in the report Hardy wrote on the whole matter. This report was published in December 1872. The memoir appears at the end of a printed version of a summary of the whole Utrecht Psalter dossier to date, from Hänel onwards. Hardy's own investigation led him to believe that the psalter dated from the sixth century. He relied heavily on the opinions of others, as well as on the reproductions which had been made hitherto. He included not only those of the Athanasian Creed, but also the four preceding cantica (fol. 89v-91r) and the first part of the first psalm (with the Franco-Saxon capital b) as printed in Van Westreenen's article.20 Those in favour of retaining the Quicumque vult in the Anglian liturgy feit their case strengthened. Discussions, a great meeting organised by the Athanasian Defence Committee,21 petitions and articles in various newspapers show that the matter was closely followed by the public at large, also outside Britain. The Utrecht Psalter had become both famous and controversial. The fact that Hardy was associated with the Master of Rolls Lord Romilly (to whom the report was dedicated) and bishop Ellicott, did not sit well with the authorities at the British Museum. They also thought that Hardy had relied too much on only a selection of reproductions; he had not seen the manuscript itself.22 It was time for the scholars to strike back.

New techniques

In February 1873 the Trustees of the British Museum sent a request to Utrecht, asking the Utrecht Psalter in loan for two months to be examined in their institution. Although librarian Vermeulen was not keen to oblige, the Utrecht University Board was willing to honour it, provided that the English government would officially make the request, so that it covered the full responsibility for the loan. From 11 June to 10 August that year the Utrecht Psalter was in London, and the Trustees invited eight specialists (mainly librarians, but also including Swainson) to examine it. They gave their opinions about its date and provenance in a report published in 1874. Apart from one abstention, all concluded that the Utrecht Psalter belonged to the eighth or ninth century.23

The report of the British Museum includes three printed photographs, which were made by the firm Spencer, Sawyer and Bird as part of their photography of the complete Utrecht Psalter. This took place at the British Museum, after having obtained permission from the Utrecht University to do so. The costs were covered by the Palaeographical Society, which had just been founded for this occasion by

Bond, by now keeper of manuscripts at the British Museum, and his assistant Edward Maude Thompson in November 1873. To obtain one of the 200 copies made of the edition one had to become a member of the Palaeographical Society.24 This even applied to the Utrecht librarian Vermeulen, as he had not asked for a free copy. On behalf of a couple of members a copy was later sent to the university library as a gift. In effect, the Palaeographical Society controlled the copyright of the reproduction - and the University Library of Utrecht had leamed a valuable lesson.25

In the late 1850s and 1860s only a few books had been reproduced by photographs, and mostly this concerned just a number of manuscript pages. The facsimile edition of the Utrecht Psalter was something new:

The full reproduction in 1875 of the ninth-century Utrecht Psalter was a further milestone that heralded a new approach to the study of manuscripts not simply according to a small selection of images, but in their entirety. (...) [T]he tonal range of its writing and illustration made it unsuitable for the cheaper reproduction processes. Photography, on the other hand, provided good detailed pictures, and it promised a long-lived image. In its range of tonal qualities it was also vastly superior to the facsimiles of printed books that were available at the time. It marked a departure that leads directly to modern times.26

Indeed, even nowadays the 1875 facsimile edition gives a surprisingly good impression of the Utrecht Psalter, even if the images are in black/grey with a brownish sepia teint. Its production was an auspicious start for the Palaeographical Society, which was the first of its kind in the world. It would continue to publish a whole range of photographic facsimile editions of ancient manuscripts, especially of those containing classical Roman or Greek texts.27 Hence it can be said that through the facsimile edition and the foundation of the Palaeographical Society, the discussions surrounding the Utrecht Psalter had an important impact on the use of reproductions in the field of manuscript studies. Yet, on the other hand, even photographic facsimiles remained surrogates, and the Trustees of the British Museum were correct in insisting that only a detailed examination of the complete manuscript itself could lead to trustworthy conclusions.

Such conclusions were naturally dependent of the state of knowledge at that time, and although the specialists were almost unanimous in dating the Utrecht Psalter much later than the sixth century, there remained room for discussion. In a new report, Hardy attacked the opinions of the specialists, and firmly

stuck to his earlier dating.28 This finally won the day, and the Athanasian Creed was retained in the Anglican liturgy, albeit less prominent than before. Bond chose not to continue the debate: ‘The general conviction as to the character and age of the Psalter will eventually be effected by means of a preponderance of responsible opinions obtained from other countries as well as our own’.29 He was to be vindicated in all respects. Yet it was surely no coincidence that the next great study of the Utrecht Psalter, published in 1876, in which the history of the debate until then was revisited in some detail, was by the senior assistant of the manuscripts department of the British Museum, Walter De Gray Birch, who dated it to the early eighth century at the earliest.30 One special feature of his work was the description of several dozens of psalm illustrations. A few years later this was done in a more systematic way by Anton Springer, who not only described all the 150 psalms, but also made an occasional comparison with the three Canterbury psalters and the Byzantine Khludoff Psalter from the tenth century.31 These comparisons were further worked out by Johan Jakob Tikkanen, who laid the foundations of the modern study of the Utrecht Psalter.32

Art historians

Where theologians and paleographers had failed to date and localise the Utrecht Psalter, art historians finally were successful. In the 1890s the German scholar Adolph Goldschmidt and the French scholar Paul Durrieu, apparently independent of each other, pointed to the unmistakable similarities between the drawings in the Utrecht Psalter and those in the Ebo Gospels, made in Hautvillers near Reims in the early ninth century. Both relied on the facsimile edition of the Utrecht Psalter, besides the other publications about the manuscript to date. Neither appears to have seen the manuscript itself Durrieu even admits that for the coloured initial he relied on Westwood's book.33

Both scholars opened up a whole new range of manuscripts and other objects for comparison. It appeared that scenes as we find them in the Utrecht Psalter were copied into several other manuscripts and ivory book covers.34 This happened especially at the court of Charles the Bald (king of West Francia, 843-877), whose imperial throne, given to the pope in 875, has a scene which we also find in the Utrecht Psalter.35 The Utrecht Psalter was now firmly established as a Carolingian manuscript, and in 1911 it was photographed anew in Utrecht, now at the expense of the Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft for its inclusion in the series Denkmäler der deutschen

Kunst.36 After the First World War this initiative would lead to the series Die karolingische Miniaturen, of which the first volume was issued in 1930. The part on the school of Reims which includes the Utrecht Psalter would finally be published in 1994.37

Scholars were now also able to appreciate the relationship between the Utrecht Psalter and other manuscripts and artifacts. This showed not only that the iconography of the Utrecht Psalter was reproduced from the time of Ebo of Reims onwards, but also that its sketchy, dynamic style had been highly influential. In English manuscript studies is spoken of the ‘Utrecht Psalter Style’, which even the manufacturers of the Bayeux Tapestry were to imitate.38 Hence the subject of ‘reproduction’ was part of the history of the Utrecht Psalter from the time of its inception. But scholars also began to discuss to what extent the Utrecht Psalter itself was a copy of Late Roman or Byzantine psalters - a question which is still not quite resolved until this day.39

New facsimiles

Although in the decades around 1900 several studies with reproductions of the Utrecht Psalter had been published, there lingered a need for a deeper analysis of the images in their relationship with the psalms and the cantica. And since the facsimile of 1875 was not widely available, Geerto A.S. Snijder, curator at the Kunsthistorisch Instituut (Institute of Art History) in Utrecht, convinced professor Charles Rufus Morey of Princeton University of the necessity to produce a new facsimile. The photographs of the manuscript were made by Gerrit Albert Evers and C.P.A.A. Buyen van Weelderen, who both worked at the university library and also photographed other manuscripts for publications.40 In the new facsimile of 1932, Ernest T. DeWald follows the approach by De Gray Birch, Springer and Tikkanen, so that the pictures of the psalter-and-cantica proper are preceded by a detailed description of each psalm and canticum, often with reference to the Latin psalm verse which is depicted.41 The pictures are less dark and brownish or sepia than the facsimile of 1875, but also have less contrast, so that they look a bit more vague. A comparison between the two shows that DeWald's edition shows more of the vellum; the older edition is marred by photographical trimming.42 DeWald's edition also contains an index, so that it can be checked where, for example, the hand of God, Christ treading on the lion and adder, or sea-monsters are depicted.43 This formed a formidable research tool which opened up the Utrecht Psalter in a new way.

However, the possibilities were not yet exhausted. In 1978 Suzy Dufrenne published the results of a monumental cut-and-paste job, in which all images with the same motif were clustered. Hence we find, for example, that planche 77 (covering four pages) gives 40 images of the motif of the hand of God as found in the Utrecht Psalter. There are 105 motifs in total, covering a wide range of subjects.44

While the facsimile of 1875 and certainly the edition of DeWald were able to serve the scholarly community quite well, they had their restrictions, and as time passed and techniques improved, a call for a colour facsimile became louder. The first correspondence on this topic in the archives of the Utrecht University Library dates from 1964, when the Utrecht publishers Haentjens, Dekker & Gumbert offered to produce a new facsimile.45 They stipulated that the manuscript would have to be disbound first, otherwise no satisfactory pictures could be taken. A contract was drafted in December 1967, in which the Provinciaal Utrechts Genootschap voor Kunsten en Wetenschappen or pug (Utrecht Provincial Society for Arts and Sciences) was given the right of reproduction. However, matters went slowly, also because after some time the printing company Van Leer in Amsterdam decided they lacked sufficient expertise to guarantee a good quality facsimile. Van Dooren in Vlaardingen took their place. In the meantime the pug had offered to publish the facsimile to celebrate their 200th anniversary, due in 1973. In 1970 this resulted in a new project, and finally the first prospectus was issued, which set the price per copy at fl.1650.- (almost €750). Unfortunately, it did not generate sufficient interest to guarantee that the costs would be met. In January 1973 a new prospectus was distributed, but in the end there were only 280 subscriptions instead of the 350 needed. The project was abandoned, although the pug did celebrate their anniversary in 1973 with a publication about the Utrecht Psalter published by Haentjens, Dekker & Gumbert.46 Members also received a facsimile of a page of the Utrecht Psalter, which gives an impression of how the whole facsimile would have looked.

Now the pug had relinquished their rights to reproduction, the Utrecht University Library tried to interest other Dutch publishers in the project. Unknown to the library, Haentjens, Dekker & Gumbert were also still trying to realise a colour facsimile edition, and had established good contacts with adeva (Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt) in Graz. In 1976 the Utrecht University Board rejected the claim that the Utrecht firm still had a right to publish a facsimile, and went ahead with Asher in Amsterdam instead. Yet the contract signed in June 1977 stipulated that Asher had to cooperate with adeva. In May that year sister Lucie M. Grimbère of the Benedictines in Oosterhout had already started with her careful cleaning and restoration of the Utrecht Psalter. Its unbound state made it suitable to be photographed by three photographers from adeva, which happened in July.

Thereafter the manuscript was rebound reusing its seventeenth-century binding. In the end only adeva remained as publisher, but from the correspondence and the prospectus it is clear that the production of the facsimile was an unusually difficult undertaking. It was finally published in 1982 as volume 75 of the series Codices Selecti.47 900 numbered plus 40 unnumbered copies were printed, of which the university library received three for free. In the prospectus the price of one copy is set at dm.3430.- or fl.4080.- (about €1850.-). It is the first coloured facsimile edition of a complete medieval manuscript in a Dutch collection.48 The commentary volume appeared two years later, in 1984. The preface by Koert van der Horst shows that he had finished his text by the end of 1980. He wrote an extensive description of the manuscript and its history, in which he incorporated the chapters which had already been written by the franciscan art historian Jacobus H.A. Engelbregt, who had died in 1979.49 Because of the short time given to complete the whole work, no new iconographic description was given, but a German translation of the text of DeWald was incorporated, with a number of corrections and additions based on the work of Dufrenne and Engelbregt's and Van der Horst's own findings.50

The Utrecht Psalter goes digital

Through the facsimile edition and its supplement the interest in the Utrecht Psalter had gained momentum, but plans to organise a symposium about the psalter in 1986, the lustrum year of Utrecht University, could not be realised. Finally, ten years later, the international exhibition Het Utrechts Psalter: middeleeuwse meesterwerken rond een beroemd handschrift (The Utrecht Psalter: medieval masterpieces around a famous manuscript) in Museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht was the climax of years of work to give the Utrecht Psalter its due attention. The accompanying catalogue, with contributions from various international specialists, is still the standard work on the manuscript.51 On this occasion, a new and innovative digital ‘facsimile’ was also published: a cd-rom in which a digital image of a page with a psalm or canticum is presented next to the Vulgate text of the psalms.52 One can click on a (part of a) psalm verse that is illustrated, and the illustration itself is then framed by thin lines. One can choose between four frame colours. The other way around works as well: by clicking on an illustration the relevant (part of a) psalm verse is highlighted. This is less easy than it may sound, for various psalm verses can be depicted in one illustration, or a psalm verse can be illustrated by two illustrations which are on opposite sides of a page. The user can zoom in on the digital images, though not in great detail, and it is possible to cut out an illustration, open it in a new window, and thus compare various illustrations side by side. Navigation can be by both folio number and psalm/canticum. Each psalm illustration has a separate digital page, even if two illustrations are on the same page in the manuscript. The text of the psalms is given in four languages: Latin, Dutch, English

and French, and is searchable. The description of the psalm illustration, based on DeWald and the ensuing corrections, can be viewed simultaneously.



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Figure 3. Screenshot from the cd-rom version of 1996 as published on the internet in 2002


As a graphic operation system Microsoft Windows (95, 3.1x and nt 3.5x) was chosen. The costs were deemed too high to make the cd-rom suitable for other operation systems, such as those used for the Apple Macintosh. Computers had to be able to deal with at least 256 colours with a screen resolution of 800 × 600 dpi, which in 1996 was suitable for a standard svga screen. More colours or a higher resolution would make the programme too slow for many common personal computers, and less advanced screens would be unable to show it. It was decided not to add any videos, animations, sounds or the like,53 which would only have worked properly on advanced desktops anyway. The cd-rom was made by Koert van der Horst, keeper of manuscripts, in cooperation with ict specialist Frits Ankersmit and photographer Frans Verdonk of the Centrum voor Informatisering en Mediagebruik (Centre for Information Technology and Multimedia). Verdonk made 4 × 5 inch (10 × 12,5 cm] ektachromes, which were scanned at 72 dpi for the cd-rom.54

Cd-roms became commonly used for the storage of texts, databases or images from about 1993 onwards, when they could be produced relatively easy and for a reasonable price.55 At that time a number of projects had already been started to combine images of manuscripts with searchable edited text, such as the Beowulf Project and the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive.56 Reputedly, the first cd-rom with a complete digitised medieval manuscript was the Czech Antiphonarium Sedlecense, published in 1995, which cost $595.-. It was issued as a response to the unesco Memory of the World project, which was started in 1992.57 The year 1996 saw an electronic edition of The Wife of Bath's Prologue on cd-rom, the initial release in The Canterbury Tales Project from Cambridge, at the cost of $365.-.58 Compared with these, the fl.67,50 or £25.- (about €30.-) which was asked for a cd-rom of the Utrecht Psalter was quite cheap, and even formed an attractive alternative to the printed facsimile edition.59 Hence it can be said that the cd-rom of the Utrecht Psalter was quite unique and revolutionary in the world of manuscript studies. It was one of the first individual manuscripts to be graced with a digital edition, it was innovative because it linked image and text in a new way (besides other interesting features), and was easy to use, of good quality and attractively priced to boot. Hence it was bought by the people at large, as was clear at the exhibition.60 It was also suitable for educational purposes. According to Catherine Cubitt the Utrecht cd-rom ‘provides a way of introducing students to the complexities of biblical exegesis that can capture their imagination’.61 Once again the Utrecht Psalter stood at the forefront of new reproductional techniques.

On the internet

With the digital revolution gathering pace, the Utrecht University Library started the project ‘Digitale ontsluiting handschriftenbezit’ (Digital accessability of the manuscript collection) in 2001. This resulted in, for example, the websites ‘Virtuele vitrine’, a digital showcase of forty highlights in the Special Collections, each with a description and one image; ‘Quaerite’, a database which gives access to the secondary literature on its manuscripts; and ‘Digitaal Repertorium’, a digital repository of the library's (archival) collections. As part of this project, the cd-rom of the Utrecht Psalter was placed online as an independent website in September 2002. By this

time the cd-rom edition was no longer state of the art (if not less useful), and had proved to have a limited digital durability. As with so many of the first generation digital facsimiles, the cd-rom was incompatible with the later successors of Windows 95. The internet version did not function properly anymore with Internet Explorer 8, which was released in 2009. Neither the cd-rom nor the online version worked on Apple software. In 2011 it was decided to take it offline. This was part of a general trend to curb the increasing amount of various unconnected websites, and to centralise digital information. This also lead to the demise of websites such as ‘Virtuele vitrine’ and ‘Quaerite’, while others were updated and extended, including ‘Digitaal Repertorium’.

In the same period the general presentation of digitised manuscripts and books was becoming outdated. The university library had started with the digitisation of books in 1997 after purchasing a simple black and white scanner, and planned to make scans of complete books available on the internet following a standard procedure or workflow.62 At that time various initiatives were launched to digitise books on a larger scale,63 a couple of years before mass digitisation started in earnest with Google Print, the forerunner of Google Books.

The website ‘Digitized Special Collections’ became operative in 2002, after a professional grayscale scanner had been bought. Although the scale of digitisation was limited, within a decade the ‘Digitized Special Collections’ became too large for a simple website. By this time its digital infrastructure and layout also called for an update. A new portal for Special Collections, online in December 2011, clustered various web pages of and about Special Collections in a uniform presentation. It also offered the possibility to write short introductory texts about certain noteworthy digitised documents in the rubrics ‘Recently digitized’ and ‘From the treasury’.64

The outdated cd-rom and online presentation of the Utrecht Psalter made it necessary to digitise the manuscript according to modern standards. There were also other pressing reasons to do so. The Utrecht Psalter is without doubt the most often reproduced medieval manuscript, if not the most often reproduced manuscript in general, in any Dutch collection. Every year several new publications appear which include one or more images from the Utrecht Psalter. In the 1980s and 1990s it was usual to send large black-and-white photographs to authors or publishers for this purpose, which the library kept on stock, and the ektachromes made in 1996 for colour reproductions. In the following decade the demand for digital images increased steadily, and for this purpose the quality of the current digital scans was not good enough. In 2007 photographer Erik de Groot scanned the ektachromes anew at 400 dpi. Yet even these were not suitable for the reproduction of details, and to hire a photographer each time a new image was ordered was too expensive and cumbersome. Although the University Library had purchased a colour scanner in 2008, its maximum resolution of 600 dpi was not deemed sufficient for a new digital presentation. Hence the Utrecht Psalter was digitally photographed with a high resolution camera by Peter Rothengatter from Het FotoAtelier in

Utrecht. In the iip viewer of the digital Utrecht Psalter the original tiff files are downsized to a jpg file (from c. 75 mb to c. 1 mb) on the fly, with an advanced zoom function making it possible to inspect details better than with the naked eye. The digital images can be downloaded as one pdf file, and are used already for new kinds of research.65



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Figure 4. Screenshot from the new website of the Utrecht Psalter, online since November 2014, showing the rubric ‘About the Psalter’ and links to two animated videos


In October 2013 the whole Utrecht Psalter, from cover to cover, was digitally available on the internet for the first time.66 However, this did not make up for the loss of the presentation of the cd-rom edition. Via a crowdfunding campaign among the alumni of Utrecht University and other subsidies a new website on the Utrecht Psalter was financed. It was online in November 2014 via www.utrecht-psalter.nl, and on that occasion it was also announced that the Utrecht Psalter had been nominated for the unesco Memory of the World Register for documentary heritage. The new website has five rubrics with, for example, two animated video's, news items, highlights, essays about the history of the psalter and the digital annotated edition, the successor of the cd-rom edition.67 It had to be suitable for all the current major internet browsers for desktops and tablets.68 This spe-

cific requirement made it impossible to translate the cd-rom edition to the new digital environment in any easy way, and the initial estimations of the necessary time and manpower were exceeded several times over. Yet at the same time the annotated edition is designed in such a way that its functionalities are also suitable to present other digitised manuscripts in the collection of the Utrecht University Library in a similar way, such as the Zwolle Bible, with its graffiti of visitors of St Mary's Church in Utrecht in the decades around 1700, or the illuminated Pontifical of St Mary's.69

The basic features of the cd-rom edition have remained, albeit in a different layout. This means that there is the same link between image and psalm text in four languages, although the images can be viewed in much greater detail. Yet there are also differences.70 As said, in the new edition the whole manuscript is covered, not only the Utrecht Psalter proper, and one can navigate through the whole manuscript by thumbnails at the bottom of the webpage. The descriptions of the psalms are, as in the cd-rom edition, based on DeWald, but also other parts of the manuscript which are worthwhile to note or to explain are described, such as the cover with Robert Cotton's family crest, the list of contents written in Cotton's time, pen trials, additional drawings in the margin, textual corrections and the ‘blind’ signature of Mary Talbott on fol. 57v,71 as well as features of the Northumbrian gospel fragments (fol. 94-105).

In the cd-rom the search option only worked for the psalm texts, not for the descriptions of DeWald. In the new edition the latter can be searched as well, so that all the instances that for example a lion is mentioned in the description can be found. Another significant addition is the rubric ‘Annotation’ which sums up the secondary literature where a specific psalm illustration or another feature is discussed. New information is easy to add, so that the annotated edition, and indeed the whole new website, is dynamic rather than static.

While these are all improvements, some problems remain which call for a solution, if probably on the long term. The new edition only allows for square frames, not polygon shapes as in the cd-rom edition. This makes it more difficult to capture disparate or divided scenes in one frame. The translations are also problematic. The Dutch translation is from 1941, the French from 1925 and the English from 1906, and is even based on the Douay-Rheims translation of 1609. It has the verbal endings in -eth (dwelleth, showeth, etc.) and is full of thy's, thou's, thee's and ye's. Charming, perhaps, but definitely old-fashioned. At times the English translation differs from the one given by DeWald in his description. This is a problem not easily solved, for on the one hand a literal translation of the Vulgate is necessary to bring out the connection with the illustrations, on the other hand the outdated translations hamper easy reading and sometimes even understanding what the psalm text is about. This apart from the fact that the Utrecht Psalter has the Gallican version of the Vulgate,72 with quite a number of mistakes or even omissions, especially in the

psalm headings, as compared with the standard Vulgate edition. Even if these differences are not always serious, the user has to be aware of such matters.



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Figure 5. Screenshot of the test-version of the new annotated digital edition of the Utrecht Psalter (22-1-2015), showing fol. 4v, psalm 8


Another problem with DeWald is that he is not always consistent. For example, in the textually almost identical psalms 13 (fol. 7v) and 52 (fol. 30v), which are also illustrated much alike in the Utrecht Psalter (albeit by two different draughtsmen), the man with a sword on his lap under a canopy is described by DeWald for psalm 13 as ‘a ruler’, but for psalm 52 as ‘a judge or prince’,73 although it clearly concerns the same person. Similarly, in psalms 95 and 96 (fol. 56r and 56v) angels each time hold an identical instrument, which in the first is described as ‘balances’, in the second as ‘a pair of scales’. In his index DeWald only has the lemmas ‘prince’ and ‘scales’. Although for the analysis of an individual psalm this makes not much difference, when searching with an index or electronically one can easily miss such synonyms. The descriptions of DeWald remain very useful, but one feels that after more than 80 years of research there is much that needs to be changed, while also new electronic search possibilities have to be taken into account. But as with the commentary volume of the colour facsimile, it was chosen to stick to DeWald for the moment,74 as rewriting all the descriptions is a time-consuming endeavor which would necessitate new research.



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Figure 6. Utrecht University Library, ms. 32, fol. 8v, illustrating psalms 14 and 15 (Vulgate)




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Figure 7. Peter Rothengatter and assistant digitising the Utrecht Psalter in one of the depots of the university library, December 2012. Photo: Bart Jaski


Conclusion

The history of the reproduction of the Utrecht Psalter stretches from the time of its inception around 830 to the present time - with the added remark that in part it is a reproduction of other manuscripts itself. From the ninth century in Francia and the eleventh and twelfth centuries in Canterbury its style and iconography were reproduced on an impressive scale. The Psalter has always been regarded as an extraordinary manuscript. Its fiercely debated place in the textual history of the Athanasian Creed, if in hindsight overstated, catered for an increasing need of reproductions in the second half of the nineteenth century. This finally resulted in the first significant photographic facsimile in 1875. It set art historians on the trail of the psalter's provenance, and their continuous interest led to the (incomplete) facsimile edition of DeWald in 1932, in which the illustrations were also described. Its successors were the colour facsimile and commentary volume of 1982 and 1984, and the innovative cd-rom of 1996, which was published on the internet in 2002. The new digitisation of 2012 and the website of 2014 are attempts to honour the increasing demands for higher resolution, annotation and additional information. And this is certainly not the end of the line, for in February 2015 a start was made with a digital interactive 3d presentation of the Utrecht Psalter.

The reproductions of the Utrecht Psalter stimulated research and led to important new insights and discoveries, as they made copies of the manuscript increasingly wider and better available to researchers and the general public alike. Yet handwritten, printed or digital, they still remain surrogates, mere substitutes which can bring one closer to the manuscript, without being able to replace it. Set the original next to the colour facsimile, and one can see the latter's flaws; compare the original to the digital images of the cd-rom or on the internet and ask yourself if the latter will also last for about 1200 years. For all their usefulness, reproductions are simply not the real thing, and will never be able to generate the historical sensation of seeing, smelling, holding and touching the Utrecht Psalter itself. But since this is not possible for most of us (the keeper of manuscripts of the University Library of Utrecht being a rare exception), reproductions, in whatever form, are often the next best thing, and we should be grateful to those experts who have been involved in the often difficult job to manufacture and publish them.



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Figuur 1. Historie van Alexander. Gouda, Gheraert Leeu, 1477. Fol. A1r: het begin van de tekst. Berlijn, Staatsbibliothek, Inc. 4894



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