Treasures of Mediaeval and Renaissance Perthshire
Dr Kylie Murray
Kylie.murray@gmail.com
1. The Coupar Angus Psalter, now Vatican Library MS Pal. Lat. 65.
• All 150 Psalms in Latin, copied in a Celtic or ‘insular’ hand of the 12/13th c.
• More readily associated with Gaelic than Latin – but Perth part of the Gaeltacht across both sides of the Irish sea.
• ‘Ex Libris de Sancte Marie Cupre’ – from the Library of St Mary at Coupar (Angus), founded in 1164 by Malcolm IV.
• Part of the biggest information gathering network of the pre-modern age: medieval google!
• A local Coupar Angus addition towards the end of the manuscript.
2. Pewter mirror case, now in Perth Museum.
• Scotland’s earliest known engagement with romance literature and narrative.
• Arthurian legend concerning Cornish knight Tristan and Irish Princess Isolde, who is to marry King Mark of Cornwall.
• Toxicity of love potion – the case depicts potion being prepared, with a gap above the name ‘Marcius’ (where the figure of Mark has probably been removed).
3. The Kingis Quair: Scotland’s first love-poem, and Perth’s role in a 600-year authorship debate about James I as love poet:
• James I marries Joan Beaufort and returns to Scotland in 1424, after 18 years in English captivity.
• Crowned at Scone in May 1424. The poem dates from this time.
• The poem recounts the biography of young James including being captured at sea, kept in captivity, and falling in love whilst captive.
• Dream sequence involves meeting goddesses of love, wisdom, and fortune, who provide tools James needs to secure freedom, govern himself and his kingdom. Exact centre- or sovereign midpoint of entire poem, Venus addressed in imagery specific to the Virgin Mary. Sovereign midpoint of the poem – earthly and divine love mix.
• ‘Hye quene of lufe! sterre of beneuolence!’ (99.687), ‘blis- full havin / …O anker and keye of oure gude auenture’ (100.697–8)
The Carthusian seal of approval – commemorating the love poem and its authorship by James?
• Institutions would visually commemorate their founder and benefactor on their documentary seal.
• Highly distinctive seal with unusually prominent suppliant – royal- crown emphasised.
• From reign of Henry I onwards, the Coronation of the Virgin is an allusion to royal marriage.
• Seal alluding to kingship, poem, and royal marriage- intersection of contexts showing James understood as author.
Scotichronicon epitaph (found uniquely in a 1480 copy of Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon produced by the Perth Carthusians, now National Library of Scotland, MS 35.6.7).
• Calls James ‘cultor amoris’ devotee of love
• Names the three goddesses from the Kingis Quair, and in the order they appear in the poem.
4. Perth Psalter, now National Library of Scotland, MS 652.
• Perth commission, c.1475-1500.
• Its calendar commemorates St Johns on 3 September – ‘ecclesie de Perth’
• A number of Scottish saints named in the calendar, including some associated with Perthshire – e.g. St Fillan and also St Crispinian, of the shoemakers’ altar in St John’s.
5. Britain’s Biggest Bell Collection
• 63 bells in total. 8 are pre-Reformation
• Bourdon Bell – made in 1506 Mehelin (Flanders) by Peter Weghevens.
• 15 further bells hanging in the South aisle of the Choir, including the Agnus Dei bell, dating to c.1340 – inscribed ‘Ecce agnus dei’ – ‘Behold the lamb of God’.
6. Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, printed Rouen, 1506: read in Dunkeld and Perth
• A European best-seller discussing adversity, faith, learning, and wheel of fortune.
• Owner: James Fentoun, precentor of song school at Dunkeld, chamberlain to George Brown, Bishop of Dunkeld, c.1483-1515.
7. Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, printed in Lyons, 1503: bought in Perth, read in Scone.
• John Philpson (canon of Scone, St Andrews student 1536-8)
• Duncan Campbell, 7th Laird of Glenorchy (1550-1631) tells us he bought this book in Perth.
8. Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy manuscript, now NLS MS Adv. 18.5.14, in Scotland c.1550.
• Owners and inscribers include John Hammyl (Canon of Dunblane d.1566)
• Johnny Hammyl (nephew; St Andrews student 1550s; minister in Dunning, deposed 1594) Robert Abercromby (Jesuit, treasurer of Dunkeld c.1561, converts James VI’s queen, Anne of Denmark).
• Thomas Drummond (minister of Dunblane, 1564)
• Alexander 3uill/Iulius (master of Stirling Grammar School, c.1578-1612).
9. Crucifix – a Milan Renaissance Treasure arrives in Victorian Perthshire.
• Attributed to Guitelo, c.1600, and comprising rock crystal, brass foot, loops, and Christ.
• Milan a celebrated centre of production of exquisite rock crystal: deemed a sacred material and often used for making devotional objects.
• Presented to the mission in Perth in 1867 by Frances Johnstone, 14th Lord Gray, and his wife.
• With thanks to the diocese of Dunkeld and St John’s RC Church, Melville Street, Perth.
Further Reading:
• Ian Cunningham, ‘Two Poems on the Virgin (NLS, Adv.MS 18.5.14)’, Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Treansactions (1988), 5.5, 32-41.
• Mark Hall and D. D. R. Owen, ‘A Tristram and Iseult Mirror-Case From Perth: Reflections on The Production and Consumption of Romance Culture’, Tayside and Fife Archaeological Journal, 4 (1998), 150-66.
• F. Henry and G.L.Marsh-Micheli,‘A Century of Irish Illumination (1070-1170)’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 62, section C, no. 5 (1962), 101-64.
• J. Higgitt, Medieval Scottish Libraries (London: British Library, 2005).
• F. C. Eeles, ‘The Perth Psalter’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 66 (1932), 426–441.
• Sally Mapstone, ‘Kingship and the Kingis Quair’, in Mapstone and Cooper (eds), The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays in Honour of Douglas Gray (Oxford, 1997), 51-69.
• Kylie Murray, ‘Visions of Royal Authority in the Courts of James I and James II, 1424-60’ in Buchanan, Dean, Penman (eds), Medieval and Early Modern Representations of Authority in Scotland and the British Isles (London, 2016), 211-34.
• Kylie Murray, The Making of the Scottish Dream-Vision (Oxford, 2025).
Kylie Murray
Perth
Nov 2024
Kylie.murray@gmail.com