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Picturing Kingship: History and Painting in the Psalter of Saint Louis. By Harvey Stahl. (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. 2008. Pp. xvi, 371. $85.00. ISBN 978-0-271-02863-7.)
The St. Louis Psalter, now MS lat. 10525 in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, is one of the most famous of all gothic illuminated manuscripts and is certainly one of the works that has assured thirteenth-century Paris its reputation as the major center of book illumination of the period. The psalter was intended for a male reader, but it has a sister manuscript intended for a female- the so-called Isabella Psalter in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Both books are the subject of a substantial literature, but the latest study by the late Harvey Stahl (d. 2002) is much the most comprehensive, handsome, and thoroughgoing; it was brought to completion by Melissa Moss. Central to the manuscript's importance is its association with King Louis IX of France (1226-70, canonized 1297). The link to Louis is recognized as being "circumstantial" but beyond reasonable doubt; a flyleaf has a fifteenth-century inscription stating,...