Petrus Lombardus, Magna glossatura in psalmos

University Library, MS Add. 4084, f. 2v
France (South West?), second half of the twelfth century
Vellum, 278 x 190 mm (274 x 123 mm), 262 ff.
(Binski Zutshi 305)

Peter Lombard (Novara, c. 1100–Paris, c. 1160) was a theologian and teacher at the cathedral school of Notre Dame, and author of the Libri quatuor sententiarum (‘Four books of sentences’), which served as one of the primary theological textbooks across medieval. The Psalms were a very important part of biblical studies in religious houses, especially in Benedictine monasteries. This enormous (and now fragile) manuscript containing Peter’s Magna glossa (‘Great gloss’) on the Psalms was regularly an object of study, as several different hands (all in red) have added their own glosses to the text in the margins. Visible at the top right of the page are the words ‘Maestro de las Sentencias’ (‘Master of Sentences’), a famous epithet of Peter’s, added to the manuscript in the sixteenth century when it belonged to the monks of Santo Domingo de Silos in Spain. This manuscript was bequeathed to the University Library by Samuel Sandars in 1894.