page_title: Amesbury Priory
section_title: The Amesbury Psalter
hierarchical_section_title: Amesbury Priory / Life of the Priory / The Amesbury Psalter
context_page_description: Amesbury Priory was a Benedictine monastery at Amesbury in Wiltshire, England, belonging to the Order of Fontevraud, a Benedictine reform. It was founded in 1177 to replace the earlier Amesbury Abbey, a Saxon foundation established about the year 979. The Anglo-Norman Amesbury Priory was disbanded at the Dissolution of the monasteries and ceased to exist as a monastic house in 1539.
  While the earlier Amesbury Abbey had been exclusively a nunnery or house of women, its successor, Amesbury Priory, following the particular structures of its parent Order of Fontevraud, was both a convent of nuns and a corresponding monastery of men, both governed locally by a prioress and ultimately by the Abbess of Fontevraud Abbey, situated in Anjou, part of the territories in what is now France that were then ruled by the English royal house.
context_section_description: A 13th-century illuminated Psalter of English workmanship (Oxford, All Souls College, Ms. 6) is known as the Amesbury Psalter. Dated around c. 1250, it is one of a group of five illuminated manuscripts (comprising another psalter, a Missal, a Bible, and an Apocalypse). All were produced c. 1245-1255 and illuminated in that timeframe by an unknown artist. A consensus regards them as representing the attainment of maturity by the English early Gothic style. The Amesbury Psalter is regarded as the finest of them all and has been described as “the purest gem of English medieval painting” It contains two mentions of the feasts of St Melor, the Amesbury patron Saint, but in other respects does not seem to follow exactly the Amesbury calendar and is likely to have been owned not by a nun but by a wealthy laywoman. It contains four full-page miniatures, as well as various illuminated initials.
caption: Page from the Amesbury Psalter (English, c. 1249)
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