Mirror in Parchment The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of
Medieval England The richly illuminated Luttrell Psalter was
created for the English nobleman Sir Geoffrey Luttrell
(1276-1345). Inexpensive mechanical illustration has since
disseminated the book's images to a much wider audience; hence
the Psalter's representations of manorial life have come to
profoundly shape our modern idea of what medieval English
people, high and low, looked like at work and at play. Alongside
such supposedly truthful representations, the Psalter presents
myriad images of fantastic monsters and beasts. These patently
false images have largely been disparaged or ignored by modern
historians and art historians alike, for they challenge the
credibility of those pictures in the Luttrell Psalter that we
wish to see as real. In the conviction that medieval images were
not generally intended to reflect daily life but rather to shape
a new reality, Michael Camille analyzes the Psalter's famous
pictures as representations of the world,