After 738 pages, 111 catalogue entries, fourteen appendices and three indices, I left this book with a taste for more. Solopova's erudite research sheds new light on familiar manuscripts and adds information on less well-known psalters. It is an impressive feat, and will remain the authoritative point of reference for years to come. It also has the potential to transform the way we think about medieval psalters. As a whole, this book lays the foundations for a new understanding of this important – and ever-present – class of manuscripts. Strange as it may be for such an impressive, long and intricate book, it merely marks the beginning of the way.

Why a catalogue of liturgical psalters? Richard Ovenden's preface (p. viii) briefly states the psalter's centrality as a personal devotional book, its position at the heart of liturgy and prayer, and its appeal to a variety of illuminations and addenda. This is only the tip of the iceberg. No other book in the medieval world can compete with the psalter's omnipresence (possibly similar to full Bibles in early modernity). It was chanted in monasteries and in homes; it was written in huge choir volumes as well as minute personal objects; it was possibly the only book to enjoy an overwhelming popularity among lay and religious, in monasteries and cathedrals, in parish churches (where it was one of the few books to be mandated by church councils), and in the hands of lay women and men. No other text has captured the imagination of literate and semi-literate groups and individuals, to reverberate in liturgical chant and literary narratives throughout the Middle Ages.

This catalogue's immediate forerunner is Victor Leroquais's Les Psautiers manuscrits latins des bibliothèques publiques de France (Macon 1940–1). The comparison between the two is most illuminating. Solopova's entries (subdivided into text, decoration, physical description, binding, provenance and bibliography) are more complex and informative, revealing an attention to illumination, materiality and reception lacking in Leroquais's seminal work. Leroquais's work ends with a table of manuscripts and a general index; Solopova's with no less than fourteen appendices, which trace illumination schemes, textual divisions, punctuation, canticles and music (at times cursorily). These appendices, joined by thorough indices (cited manuscripts, concordance of shelfmarks and general index), facilitate cross-comparison between individual psalters. This is further supported by the arrangement of the book, which is by country, subdivided chronologically. This makes navigation somehow cumbersome, but adds an immediate comparative and evolutionary aspect.

A holistic view of the 111 manuscripts quickly throws the reader into uncharted water. The short introduction (eight pages, compared with Leroquais's almost unwieldy 129 pages) reveals the inadequacy of traditional criteria for analysing psalters. The ‘Benedictine’ monastic subdivision does not appear in all Benedictine psalters, while ‘lay’ psalters ended up in nunneries and monasteries; any link between size and contents is tenuous, and national divides are blurred as English psalters ended up in France, while the Low Countries became centres of production for the British market. The evidence also blurs the divide between Books of Hours and psalters, as the latter were used by lay women and men in the later Middle Ages, engulfed by shared addenda. Survival patterns (beyond the scope of the current book, but assisted by its attention to later usage) complicate the picture even further: there is little evidence for parish psalters, and the proliferation of high-end illuminated psalters reflects collecting patterns rather than the medieval reality.

In place of these traditional (and often blunt) tools, careful reading of the catalogue suggests new and more refined ways of looking at psalters. Some reaffirm the regional nature of production: no Italian specimens contain the common order of the Canticles (short biblical hymns, which often appear in psalters), nor do they follow a ten-fold division of the Psalms; a three-fold division (dividing the Psalms into units of fifty, and hence called ‘fifties’) exists only in psalters from Germany and Austria. Dominican psalters, identified in the index, have an unsurprising preference for pocket books (eight out of ten being less than 20 cm. in length); they also attest to the preservation of regional patterns of production even for this highly pan-European order. The variety of psalters further assists in tracing the reception of artistic production, as, for example, the popular cycle of David-centred illuminations, originating in early thirteenth-century France.

The 111 Psalters described in this book (a substantial proportion of the Bodleian collection, omitting the handful of psalters from the Buchanan and Lyell collections, as well as three others) could be seen as part of a giant jigsaw. With the thorough nature of entries and aids, it can shed light not only on scribes, patrons and illuminators, but also on religious communities, lay piety (and the blurred boundaries between the two), as well as patterns of early modern reception and modern collectors. This catalogue, therefore, is of interest for scholars of religion, society, literature and literacy, to those studying medieval religious practices, orders and houses, as well as manuscript and art historians. The book is lavishly produced, with a plethora of colour plates of the highest quality. However, the constant leafing back and forth while trying to identify Dominican psalters or patterns of illumination leaves one to wonder whether some of its features would be better complemented by new technologies. Putting even some appendices into a machine searchable format would introduce a great ease into mining and querying this immense puzzle, adding another layer to our exploration of medieval psalters. It would also enable scholars whose libraries cannot afford to buy this catalogue to tap into the wealth of knowledge encoded in its entries.