Margaret Queen of Scots

An early Christmas gift is 'The Favourite Book of the Eleventh-century Queen of Scots'. The publication from the Bodleian Library comes very soon to the 16/11/2009 Post "Margaret of Scotland Marvellous Era".

St Margaret’s Gospel-book The Favourite Book of the eleventh Queen of Scots. Rebecca Rushforth Bodleian Library 2007 Book Jacket synopsis: A manuscript sold at auction in 1887 for £6 where it was incorrectly described as a fourteenth-century work was discovered on later inspection to be none other than the lost Gospel-book of St Margaret, the eleventh-century Queen of Scotland. St Margaret's Life relates the extraordinary story of how her favourite book of Gospel extracts, encrusted with gold and jewels, was lost while crossing a stream and later retrieved, miraculously unharmed. A young woman scholar reading the manuscript in the 1980s connected this incident from the Life with the same event described in a poem at the beginning of the newly purchased manuscript and realized that this was St. Margaret's own book. Rebecca Rushtorth explores St Margaret's life and Gospel-book, placing her in the context of the turbulent political shifts which saw her exile to Scotland after the Norman Conquest, and her marriage to Malcolm; her contribution to the making of Scotland as a European power; and her posthumous career as a saint, in which she was invoked as a force for stability and reconciliation as late as the Restoration. She describes step-by-step how St. Margaret's Gospel-book was made, exploring the writing, illumination, and binding of the manuscript. She also compares the book with other contemporary gospel books, examining their iconography and production. This work brings to life the story of a highly treasured personal book and the circumstances behind its creation, use, loss, and rediscovery.