The Codex Gertrudianus between text and image. A prayer book at the Kiev court of the eleventh century

This paper analyses the decorative and textual part of the Codex Gertrudianus, a Prayer Book of the second half of the eleventh century, commissioned by the Polish Princess Gertrud Piast (1025 ca.-1108 ca.). The Codex is kept inside an Ottonian masterpiece, Psalterium Egberti (Codex CXXXVI, Eg-berti), made for the Archbishop of Trier Egbert (977-983) at the end of the tenth century. Gertrud therefore, intervened on a preexisting luxury psalter by integrating it with a corpus of Latin prayers and five illuminations, inserted both in the sheets added in the eleventh century (Folia Gertrudiana) and in the free spaces inside the Ottonian psalter. After a brief historical and codicological analysis of the Codex Gertrudianus, the study focuses on the close relationships between text and image in order to propose a new dating of this medieval manuscript.