Introduction to Queen Mary's Psalter: Miniatures And Drawings by an English Artist of the 14th Century Reproduced from Royal MS. 2 B. VII in the British Museum

by Sir George Warner, D.Litt., F.B.A., F.S.A.

Trustees of the British Museum
London, 1912

This text is the Introduction, by George Warner, of the facsimile of the Queen Mary Psalter, MS. 2. VII in the British Library. The manuscript contains a pictorial bestiary starting at folio 85r and continuing throgh folio 130v. The text of the manuscript does not refer to the bestiary. The bestiary images appear at the bottom of each page, and have no relation to the text on the page. The sequence of beasts follows that of the Anglo-Norman bestiary of Guillaume le Clerc.

This digital edition is not a complete copy of the printed edition of the book, which contains facsimiles of all of the illustrations in the manuscript. The digital edition includes only Warner's Preface and Introduction, which provide a good description of the manuscript and the illustrations. The bestiary illustrations can be found on this site, in the gallery pages for the Queen Mary Psalter, and in the gallery pages for individual beasts.

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Plain text edition (no formatting, text only, Unicode UTF-8 character set - 141 KB file)

The print edition of this text was published in London in 1912; the digital edition was created from the original in 2003 by David Badke. The original print edition by George Warner(1845-1936) is believed to be in the public domain. The digital edition is copyright 2003 by David Badke, but can be used for any non-commercial purpose without further permission. See the copyright notice in the digital edition for more information.

The digital edition has been published as a PDF (Portable Document Format) file. To read it, you will need the free Adobe Acrobat Reader (version 4+), available from the Adobe Web site.