Between Sacred and Profane: Carnival, Feasting, and Medieval Social Order in the Luttrell Psalter

The Luttrell Psalter, commissioned by Sir Geoffrey Luttrell in the early fourteenth century, contains an unusual amount of feasting and food imagery. Eating or vomiting grotesques frolic in the margins of the manuscript alongside scenes of games involving food and drink, images incorporating food symbolism, and narrative pictorial sequences depicting the cultivation of the patron’s lands and the preparation and consumption of a feast. The feasting imagery can be divided into two basic categories: diacritical feasts that uphold the dominant social order and carnivalesque feasts that invert and parody it. These two types of feasts exist in dynamic tension with one another, whether as individual images on the same page or as contradictory elements within the same image. Building on the findings of previous scholars of the Luttrell Psalter and drawing on elements of Michael Bakhtin’s and Johann Huizinga’s theories on medieval carnival, play, and culture, this thesis analyzes the significance and multidimensionality of the feasting imagery in the Luttrell Psalter.Bachelor of Art