Pairings: Teresa Webber

Teresa Webber

Fellow in Palaeography

My first visit to Trinity College was to meet a medieval manuscript, not a person. Nevertheless, first encounters with manuscripts are not unlike those with people, and especially for the young scholar (as I was then) they engender a sense of nervous anticipation.

The manuscript I had come to see was MS R.17.1, at the time known more familiarly as ‘The Canterbury Psalter’, a twelfth-century illustrated copy of the Psalms in three Latin versions, with Old English and Anglo-Norman French translations. On one of the final leaves, an imposing full-page portrait, framed with self-laudatory verses, commemorates one Eadwine, the ‘prince of scribes’, an otherwise unknown monk from Christ Church, Canterbury, the monastery at which the psalter was made.

For myself and the group of scholars with whom I was collaborating, as our admiration grew for this extraordinary feat of twelfth-century book-design, its pages rivalling the complex jigsaw of texts and images of a homepage from the web, the manuscript took on the personality of the scribe that it commemorated, and became known to us simply as ‘Eadwine’. More than 30 years on, it is now one of my greatest pleasures to bring visitors to the Library to introduce them to Eadwine, my oldest friend in the College.