Psalter of Eleanor of Aquitaine (KB 76 F 13, National Library of the Netherlands)
Psalterium Alienorae Reginae Angliae (Fécamp Psalter)
Beatus vir qui non abiit in consilio impiorum, et in via peccatorum non stetit.
Our renderingBlessed is the man who has not walked in the counsel of the wicked, nor stood in the way of sinners.
What it is
This illuminated psalter (KB 76 F 13, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague), previously known as the Fécamp Psalter, was proposed as Eleanor of Aquitaine's personal psalter by the National Library of the Netherlands in 2019, based on Eleanor's documented presence near Fécamp in 1185, a possible donor portrait of a high-status woman, and calendrical connections to saints of her lineage. The attribution is scholarly rather than documented: the 'Lady Donor' figure is not uniquely identifiable as Eleanor, and the proposal has not achieved universal acceptance among manuscript scholars. A 1369 notarial document records the psalter's donation to the convent at Étrun, confirming northern French provenance. If the attribution holds, it would place one of the most consequential women of medieval Europe in daily dialogue with the full psalter, from Psalm 1 through the closing doxologies.
Why it still matters
Whether or not Eleanor herself used this psalter, the psalms it contains were the daily prayer of the powerful as much as the poor throughout the medieval world; their use today is a levelling and humanising practice equally suited to leaders and those they serve.
Kept alongside
Orthodox Psalter (Chasoslovnyi Psaltyr)
Псалтирь
The complete Psalter, divided into twenty kathismata, was read through weekly at Orthodox services and served as the foundational personal devotional text across the entire Romanov era and the whole of Byzantine-Slavic Christianity. Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich kept the Psalter among his personal desk-books alongside the Horologion, as documented by the Presidential Library of Russia. Empress Alexandra's Bible in Church Slavonic, recovered at Ekaterinburg with underlined passages and dried herbs pressed between pages, testifies to the Psalter's intimate daily use during captivity. The Psalter was also the primary text from which the Romanov children learned to read Church Slavonic.
Te Deum laudamus
The great Latin hymn of praise and thanksgiving, performed at Napoleon's coronation Mass by Paisiello on 2 December 1804, at his Italian coronation in Milan on 26 May 1805, and ordered sung in all diocesan churches after each major imperial victory. Napoleon issued formal letters mandating the Te Deum after key battles, and Jean-François Le Sueur composed a solemn setting for the imperial court chapel. The attribution to Nicetas of Remesiana, long standard, was conclusively challenged by Ernst Kähler in 1958 and the hymn is now considered anonymous; its late 4th-century date and Ambrosian stylistic milieu are not in dispute. The text moves from the praise of the heavenly court to intercession for the Church militant, ending with a sustained sequence of psalm verses.
Seven Penitential Psalms
Septem Psalmi Poenitentiales
The Seven Penitential Psalms are a sub-group of the canonical Psalter — Psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130 (De Profundis), and 143 — collected by Cassiodorus and declared a standard Lenten devotion by Pope Innocent III (1198–1216). They appear in virtually every surviving royal and noble Book of Hours between 1250 and 1550 as a fixed section following the Office of the Virgin, and were also recited publicly by penitents in church. They express the sinner's plea for mercy and forgiveness across the full range of human distress — sickness, sin, shame, desolation — and were believed to shorten souls' time in Purgatory, giving them urgent personal relevance for nobility who prayed daily for deceased family members. Their presence across every corner of medieval European devotional practice makes them the most universally transmitted prayer texts in the entire Books of Hours tradition.