Psalter of Frederick II (Riccardiana Psalter)
Psalterium Friderici II (Biblioteca Riccardiana, Cod. Ricc. 323)
Dominus regit me et nihil mihi deerit; in loco pascuae ibi me collocavit.
Our renderingThe Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want — he makes me lie down in green pastures.
What it is
This Byzantine-inflected illuminated psalter was commissioned by Emperor Frederick II as a lavish wedding gift for his third wife, Isabella of England, whom he married in 1235, and was intended to accompany her in daily prayer. Its origin is actively debated: some scholars assign production to a scriptorium at Acri in Calabria, others to a workshop within the territory of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and no consensus has been reached. The manuscript blends the colour palette of Byzantine illumination with the plastic figure rendering of the Italian school, decorated with a monumental full-page Nativity initial and eight large miniatures from the life of Christ. That the psalms formed the core of royal private devotion even under the theologically heterodox Frederick II testifies to the psalter's inescapable centrality in medieval Christian life. The manuscript is now held at the Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence.
Why it still matters
The 150 psalms this book contains remain among the most universally recommended devotional texts in all of Christian history; praying them in structured daily cycles, as Isabella of England would have done, is a practice current in Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions alike.
Kept alongside
Symphonia Armonie Celestium Revelationum (Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations)
Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum
A collection of seventy-seven liturgical chants (antiphons, hymns, sequences, responsories) with original texts and melodies composed by Hildegard for use in her Rupertsberg community's divine office. The Dendermonde Codex (Belgium, St.-Pieters-&-Paulusabdij Cod. 9, c. 1174/75) was made under Hildegard's supervision and gifted to the Cistercian monks of Villers in Brabant, while the Riesenkodex (Wiesbaden, Hessische Landesbibliothek Hs. 2, c. 1180–85) is the comprehensive surviving collection. The chants were sung in the monastic liturgy of the Rupertsberg house, which operated under imperial protection from Frederick Barbarossa.
Laudes Regiae (Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat)
Laudes Regiae
The Laudes Regiae are liturgical acclamations in the form of a litany, characteristically opening with the tricolon 'Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat,' chanted at the coronation of emperors and on major feast days throughout the Ottonian, Salian, and Hohenstaufen courts. Ernst Kantorowicz's foundational 1946 study documented their use as the defining act of sacred imperial acclamation, showing how the chant interweaves royal acclaim with petitions to saints to locate earthly rulers within a cosmic divine order. The earliest notated sources survive from tenth-century Ottonian manuscripts, though the formula likely predates 800 in its Frankish antecedents, and the form was continuously adapted across each imperial dynasty. Because the chant was performed in cathedral and court contexts with an assembled congregation, it occupied a semi-public register between private liturgy and civic ceremony.
Penitential Psalms and Litany of Saints (as compiled in Ottonian royal use)
Psalmi poenitentiales cum litania sanctorum
The seven Penitential Psalms (Psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, 143) combined with the Litany of Saints form the core private prayer structure documented directly in the Prayerbook of Otto III (BSB Clm 30111), where Archbishop Bernward of Hildesheim employed them in the young emperor's spiritual formation. This pairing — penitential self-examination before God followed by intercession from the whole company of heaven — was used by Christian teachers as early as Origen and Augustine, ordered for Lenten use by Pope Innocent III, and embedded in the Use of Sarum and successive Books of Common Prayer. Its place in the weekly devotional rhythm of the Salian and Hohenstaufen courts via their breviary traditions makes it the single most broadly transmitted prayer form in this dataset, extending across all dynasties and centuries. The sequence remains structurally unchanged in the Roman Rite today.