St Albans Psalter (Psalter of Christina of Markyate)
Psalterium Sancti Albani
Dirigatur oratio mea sicut incensum in conspectu tuo; elevatio manuum mearum sacrificium vespertinum.
Our renderingMay my prayer be set before you like incense; may the lifting up of my hands be like the evening sacrifice. (Psalm 140:2, Gallican text)
What it is
The St Albans Psalter (Dombibliothek Hildesheim, MS St Godehard 1) is one of the greatest achievements of English Romanesque illumination, created at St Albans Abbey c. 1120–1145 during the abbacy of Geoffrey de Gorham and most probably made for or associated with Christina of Markyate (c. 1098–c. 1155–1166), anchoress and prioress with whom Abbot Geoffrey had a deep spiritual friendship. Its 209 folios contain a calendar, over 40 full-page miniatures depicting the Life of Christ, the earliest surviving example of French literature (the Chanson de St Alexis), the 150 psalms, canticles, a litany, and collects. Recent scholarship debates whether it was intended for Christina from the outset or adapted and given to her later; her ownership is now described as likely rather than definitively confirmed. The psalter is prized as a landmark of both devotional literature and the history of Romanesque art.
Why it still matters
The St Albans Psalter's narrative miniature cycle and the Alexis life-story make it a rich guide for meditative reading (lectio divina); Christians can access the fully digitised manuscript at albanspsalter.uni-goettingen.de to pray the psalms alongside images that generations of devout readers have used.
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.