Aliens in This World

An ordinary Catholic and a science fiction and fantasy fan.

Sunday, November 27, 2005

Take It with a Grain of Psalter



Check it out! The Paris Prose of the Paris Psalter -- 50 prose translations into Old English prose. (The other 100 psalms were translated into Old English poetry. Which I would think would also be web-suitable, but alas, I was not consulted.)

The more I read the Fathers and other traditional stuff, the more I feel that the psalms are getting a bit slighted by modern Christians. I mean, the psalms were nearly as important to traditional Christian thinking as the Gospels or the letters of Paul. People used to learn to read from reading the Psalms. You don't get more basic than that.

Here's some other psalmy stuff:
Fragments from Bishop Hippolytus on the psalms.

Some bits of St. Athanasius' commentary on the psalms.

A severely abridged version of St. Augustine's commentary on the psalms.

Methodius' Oration on the psalms.

Hilary of Poitiers' homilies on the psalms.



A medieval commentary on the Psalms.

St. Thomas Aquinas' Commentary on the Psalms. Another version of the commentary on Psalm 1.

Countess Marie de Champagne wrote a commentary on a psalm!?! Heh! Of course it's about courtly love!

The Burnet Psalter: actually more of an all-purpose prayerbook and book of hours. Every page is scanned, and the text given alongside in modern font and explained!

The Theodore Psalter, a Byzantine psalter, explored as a sort of paper hypertext. Note the similarities to the Book of Kells.

The Luttrell Psalter for dialup and broadband. The explanations are not totally enlightening, but better than nothing. Here's more info about the psalter, along with links to similar important works you can also look through.

The Macclesfield Psalter with some nice pictures of the manuscript. You can buy the whole schemozzle all scanned in as an Adobe Acrobat file, if you wish.

The Getty will let you look at this psalter's pages with initials. This one, too.

An exhibit on Books of Hours that explains some of the psalter conventions, and another Books of Hours explanation site.

Picture of a besieged psalmist.

A modern psalter -- in tanka form! (Not even as rengas, so a tad brief.)

A parallel Latin/English psalter, suitable for decoding medieval manuscript illos!

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