It doesn’t boast a thrilling title, but the “St Albans Benefactors’ Book” is a rare and richly illustrated guide to life in the Middle Ages
MEDIEVAL ENGLAND has a bad reputation. The average British adult will shudder at the memory of school history lessons about plague, poverty and baffling poetry. Now these faulty notions are being swept away by a new book, or rather a very old book newly made available to the public. .
The abbey was already centuries old when the book began, and its original purpose was to showcase an illustrious heritage extending back to King Offa of Mercia, who founded the place in the 8th century. But the wily monks left many pages blank in anticipation of future donors. Over the years, as the pages filled up along with the abbey’s coffers, more and more blank sheets were pasted in, ready to be decorated with portraits of patrons.
While the monks of St Albans were putting their book together, not far away Geoffrey Chaucer penned his famous chronicle of medieval England, “The Canterbury Tales”. That collection of stories focuses on another religious site in Canterbury, yet it bears a similarity to the “Benefactors’ Book”, since both are a sort of “Who’s Who” of medieval England.
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