weavingthetapestry:Historical Objects: St Margaret’s Gospel BookSaint Margaret of Scotland, qu

weavingthetapestry:Historical Objects: St Margaret’s Gospel BookSaint Margaret of Scotland, queen to King Malcolm III, is probably one of the most famous women in Scottish history, and the country’s only royal saint. As a granddaughter of Edmund Ironside and the sister of Edgar Aetheling, she was an eleventh-century princess of England’s pre-Norman royal family, the House of Wessex, who though she allegedly wished at first to be a nun, ended up marrying the Scottish king c.1070. As queen of Scotland, she is credited with helping revitalise the life of the Church in the country (founding many churches, such as that which later became Dunfermline Abbey, and helping revive interest in things like the shrine of Saint Andrew) as well as bringing the it more in line with the Roman tradition, and also with helping to transform the kingdom in a more secular sense. She was also the mother of three (possibly four) kings of Scotland and one queen of England, as well as  being the grandmother, through her two daughters, of the Empress Maud and her rival King Stephen’s wife Queen Matilda of Boulogne. Little wonder, then that she has remained famous and revered as a holy woman since even her own lifetime over nine hundred years ago.As a girl, Margaret may have spent some time at a nunnery- probably Wilton Abbey, Salisbury- and grew to be a very learned woman. To this end she possessed several books of which only two survive- a psalter in Edinburgh and this Gospel-Book, possibly her favourite of them all, which now resides in the Bodleian at Oxford. After Margaret’s death, the book passed through many different people’s hands, gradually becoming disassociated with its saintly owner, so that, by the late nineteenth century, when it arrived at the Bodleian, having been bought comparatively cheaply and (inaccurately) dated to the fourteenth century. However in 1887 a young woman named Lucy Hill, through the studying of a poem inscribed at the front of the book, realised that what she was holding was nothing other than Saint Margaret’s own Gospel-Book and, happily, brought her findings to light. But the book is not simply remarkable for having been thought lost for so long. It is also rare in that it is the subject of a particular allegedly miraculous event- in memory of which, the poem was inscribed at the front of the book and, perhaps more importantly, the poem matches up with a story told in the biography of Margaret written by Turgot at the request of her daughter Queen Matilda (or Edith). The story goes that St Margaret’s Gospel-Book (at that time with a cover of jewels and gold, though since replaced with a leather one), whilst being carried on a journey, slipped unnoticed from its holdings and fell into a fast-flowing river. When it was eventually recovered, the onlookers were sure that, with its silk covers washed away, its pages would be completely ruined but in an apparent miracle it was undamaged save for some slight moistening of the edges (and indeed, some water-staining on the manuscript would seem to support the tale). Thereafter, it is said that Margaret cherished it more than before with the result that the book now held by the Bodleian could very well be St Margaret of Scotland’s favourite book.But even without its miraculous story, the book would still have been extremely precious to its owner. Books were expensive and difficult to make in those days- since there was no paper available in England at the time, the parchment had to be made from animal skin, which had to go through an extremely arduous process before it could be written on. The scribe then would have had a tremendous amount of work to do when he or she came to write it, and the elaborate decoration of the words and pages are also testament to someone’s hard work. And to historians it is doubly precious in that it is a short, selective, Gospel-Book intended to be small and easily carried making it an extremely personal item in contrast to the full versions of the Gospel which Margaret may also have owned. The selections of texts in it tell us a lot about the Queen’s piety- for example, the large number of tales regarding women such as Martha and Mary Magdalene. Therefore, even if you’re not the type to believe in miracles, the identification and survival of St Margaret’s Gospel-Book is something of a miracle for history in itself- it’s existence gives us, in a way very few other things could, a glimpse into the mind of, and a physical link to, one of Scotland’s most remarkable queens.* And there were a LOT of remarkable Scottish queens. The picture above is not mine, sorry. It is worth noting that a copy of the Gospel-Book may be found in St Margaret’s Chapel at Edinburgh castle as well. For references, see Richard Oram’s ‘Domination and Lordship’, Rebecca Rushforth’s book on the Gospel-Book, and others. -- source link
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