Lay Folk and the Psalms: Learning by the Book The Saint John’s Bible and Contemplative Landscape

Carol Neel, a historian of medieval spirituality, will talk about the ways that the Book of Psalms helped frame the emotional and religious lives of ordinary people from the past. Her lecture, “Lay Folk and the Psalms: Learning by the Book,” part of the Illuminating the Word: The Saint John’s Bible and Contemplative Landscape lecture series, takes place on Sunday, Nov. 6, at 2 pm, in the History Museum Auditorium. The event is free with admission; Sundays are free to NM residents.

In the generations before publishing houses and, later, e-books made literature of all kinds readily available, even people who couldn’t afford a deluxe Book of Hours were able to frame their spiritual experience in terms of the psalms of David. Neel will focus on examples of ordinary people from the ninth, 12th, and 15th centuries, emphasizing the impact that handwritten books like The Saint John’s Bible had on people then and now.

The Saint John’s Bible represents the first handwritten and illuminated Bible commissioned by Benedictine monks in more than 500 years. It was completed just this September, and pages of it will be on exhibit at the History Museum through April 7.

The work of the Benedictine predecessors of the monks of Saint John's Abbey, who commissioned the work, extended far beyond monastic walls and influenced European religious culture throughout the medieval millennium.  Beautifully rendered scriptural text shaped European culture during the Reformation and colonialism of the 16th century, spreading so far as the North American fringes of the Catholic world.

Neel is a professor of history at Colorado College whose publications include Medieval Families: Perspectives on Marriage, Household, and Children (University of Toronto Press, 2004).