Judith of Flanders’ Gospel Books

Abstract

In 1063–1070, Judith of Flanders commissioned four Gospel books. Two are now in New York (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS M.708 and MS M.709); the others are in Italy and Germany (Monte Cassino, Archivio della Badia, Cod. 437; Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Cod. Aa.21). All four are deluxe productions that displayed Judith’s wealth, piety, and cosmopolitan taste throughout her communities; she was the wife of Tostig Godwinson, Earl of Northumbria, sister-in-law to the English Queen Edith, and related by blood or marriage to most of the Northern European aristocracy. Most unusually, two of the books include donor portraits presenting Judith interacting with figures from Christian narrative; both portraits present Judith as a wealthy, literate, sophisticated, and pious woman. Judith’s commissioning of these display books formed a critical part of her strategies to proclaim her social, cultural, and political prominence throughout Northern Europe. Because of the huge loss of early English manuscripts through the later medieval period and the English reformation, Judith seems unique: we have no other “set” of personally commissioned books from the period, whether for a man or a woman. As such, Judith’s books now stand alone as the stellar examples of secular female patronage in pre-Conquest England.