Mirror in Parchment

Examining how the past is represented through visual evidence and images, this text analyzes one medieval manuscript, created for the English nobleman Sir Geoffrey Luttrell (1276-1345), its patron, producers and historical progeny. The Psalter's representations of manorial life have come to profoundly shape the modern idea of what medieval people, high and low, looked like at work and at play. Alongside such supposedly truthful representations, the Psalter presents myriad images of fantastic monsters and beasts. The text examines how these patently false images have been disparaged or ignored by modern historians and art historians, for they challenge the credibility of those pictures in the Luttrell Psalter that we wish to see as real. The text addresses late medieval chivalric ideas, physical sites of power and the boundaries of Sir Geoffrey's imagined community, wherein agricultural labourers and monsters play a similar ideological role.