Name: In Quires (and places where they sing)
Start: 2026-06-03T17:30:00+01:00
End: 2026-06-03T20:00:00+01:00
Location: The Warburg Institute

In Quires (and places where they sing): Heraldry in English medieval psalters
Revd Dr Margaret Joachim
About this Event

In Quires (and places where they sing): Heraldry in English medieval psalters
Speaker: Revd Dr Margaret Joachim

This lecture will take place at the The Warburg Insitute.

The lecture will also be simultaneously broadcast on Zoom.
If you are attending in London please register for the London ticket.
If you are attending the Zoom meeting please register for the Zoom ticket.
The meeting will start at 17.30, the lecture will commence at 18.00

In his Rule for monastic life, written in the sixth century, St Benedict dictated that the 150 biblical psalms must be recited every week. The psalter therefore became an essential element of religious life, not only in ecclesiastical establishments but also for members of the laity for whom regular devotions were important. Initially the manuscripts were written and sometimes illuminated in monastic scriptoria; later their production migrated to secular workshops. Wealthy members of the nobility and gentry might commission a bespoke manuscript for their own household or for donation to a religious institution, or could purchase an ‘off the shelf’ text and have it decorated to their own requirements. As the use of personal heraldry to embellish possessions became more widespread in the thirteenth century it began to appear in books, and the layout of the psalter proved particularly suitable for this form of decoration. These expensive, lavishly illustrated and gilded manuscripts have been extensively studied by art historians, but the heraldry they sometimes contain has either been overlooked or the assumption has generally been made that it was the medieval equivalent of a bookplate. Recent research shows that its use was much more deliberate and sophisticated, and that it could tell a detailed story to anyone able to decode the combination of different coats of arms and their placement within the text.

Revd Dr Margaret Joachim
Margaret drew lions rampant and imaginary coats of arms in her school exercise books, but then abandoned any interest in heraldry for degrees in geology, a career in IT programme management and ordination as a Church of England priest. It was only after retirement while pursuing an interest in book history, that her attention was drawn to a coat of arms on a page of a medieval psalter in Lambeth Palace Library. The librarian didn’t know whose it was or why it was there, so Margaret set off to find out. This culminated ten years later in membership of the Heraldry Society, a grant of arms in memory of her late husband, and a PhD thesis on the heraldry in twenty-nine thirteenth and fourteenth-century psalters. She is, however, no better at drawing lions rampant than she was at age 10.