of the 13th century the manuscript was at the nunnery of Shaftesbury Abbey, to judge by a series of additions made to the calendar History It is not known where the manuscript was between the 13th century and 1638, when it appears in a catalogue of the collection formed by the antiquary Sir Robert Cotton between about 1588 and 1629, and added to by his son and grandson. The manuscript was damaged in the fire in 1731 at Ashburnham House in which many of the Cotton manuscripts were damaged. As a result, the bifolia were split into single leaves, and there is some uncertainty about their original sequence, which has been partly resolved by the recent discovery of verdigris offsets which confirm which miniatures originally faced each other. Cotton's library formed one of the foundation collections of the British Museum, from which the British Library was formed in 1973. The manuscript was on semi-permanent exhibition at the British Museum, but is now rarely exhibited at the St Pancras site of the British Library. Notes Literature Dodwell, C.R.; The Pictorial arts of the West, 800-1200, 1993, Yale UP, Evans, Helen C. & Wixom, William D., The glory of Byzantium: art and culture of the Middle Byzantine era, A.D. 843-1261, no. 312, 1997, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, ; full text available online from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries Haney, Kristine Edmondson, The Winchester Psalter; an iconographic study, 1986, Leicester University Press, . All the miniatures are reproduced. Heslop, Thomas Alexander, 'Romanesque painting and social distinction: the Magi and the shepherds', in England in the Twelfth Century, Proceedings of the 1988 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. by Daniel Williams (1990), pp. 137–52. C. M. Kauffmann, Romanesque manuscripts: 1066–1190. ed. by J. J. G. Alexander (London, 1975), no. 78. Francis Wormald, The Winchester Psalter (London, 1973). This book reproduces all the main decoration and prints or itemizes all the textual contents. Mara R. Witzling, 'An Archaeological Reconstruction of a Previous State of the Winchester Psalter', Gesta, XVII (1978), 29–31. Mara R. Witzling, 'The Winchester Psalter: A Re-ordering of Its Prefatory Miniatures According to the Scriptural Sequence', Gesta, XXIII (1984), 17–25. Older works Edward Maunde Thompson, English illuminated manuscripts (London, 1895), pp. 29–33, pl. 9. G. F. Warner, Illuminated manuscripts in the British Museum (London, 1903), pl. 12. External links Complete digital version on the British Library's Digitised Manuscripts site 12th-century illuminated psalters