The Ormesby Psalter (Bodleian Library MS. Douce 366), is not a bestiary. It is a psalter, a collection of Psalms meant for contemplative reading. The wealthy would commission such manuscripts, and many of them are richly illustrated. Some of them used bestiary themes in their marginal illustrations (the Queen Mary Psalter has most of a […]

It’s not a large update, though there are a few hundred more images, mostly from the Bodleian Library. There are also more bibliography items, manuscript information, and other miscellaneous stuff. I am aware that some of the image pages don’t display very well. I have started using larger images, and they sometimes break my primitive […]

Google has a new toy, called Ngrams. Since they have digitized over a million books, and converted them (roughly) to searchable text, they have a huge database of word usage from before 1700 to 2008. Ngrams is a tool that charts the occurrence of words or sets of words in that database. Of course the […]