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medieval imaginations:
literature and visual culture in the middle ages



picture data:

medium: manuscript 
date: 14th century
episodes: All
owner/location: Bodleian Library, Oxford
catalogue information: Bodleian Library, MS Gough liturg 8, fol 37v
related images: 106  110  458  459  460  461  465  468 
Christ Before Herod and the High Priest

Image 457 One of 26 surviving full-page miniatures from the Gough Psalter (c.1300-1310). His hands tied and accompanied by devilish figures, Christ stands before Caiaphas (in bishop's mitre) and Annas (in Jewish tri-cornered hat). This image is from a cycle of scenes from the life of Christ, part of a much longer prefatory cycle for a psalter. On stylistic grounds the Gough Psalter belongs to the early 14th-century Fenland group of MSS associated with the Benedictine monasteries in the Peterborough area (see Images 110, 106, 468 for the Peterborough, Ramsey and Barlow Psalters). The Gough Psalter miniatures are the work of artists who also worked on the Peterborough Psalter now in Brussels, and the figure style has been compared to that of medieval English embroidery, the 'Opus Anglicanum'. It has been said of the Gough Psalter's miniatures that the figures are always arranged as if passing across a line of vision on a stage, with entrances on the left and exits on the right; figures are sometimes cut off by the frame on the left, and either do not quite reach the frame on the right or pass in front rather than behind it. The now sadly damaged state of many Gough miniatures only heightens a sense of their original quality. Sandler 1974

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further reading:
Sandler, Lucy Freeman, The Peterborough Psalter in Brussels and other Fenland Manuscripts, London 1974