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The Egbert Psalter, also called the Gertrude Psalter, owes its two names not only to a change of ownership between the late-tenth and the mid-eleventh centuries, but also to the transformation of its textual and iconographical content. Polish Princess Gertrude indeed commissioned four Byzantine-style images to enrich the manuscript. These were made in Kiev either by local artists or foreign artists following the local style. This unexpected enrichment of the manuscript shows how an aristocratic laywoman was able to take ownership of a Psalter originally created for a bishop. It also attests to the intensity of the political, matrimonial, artistic and religious relationships between the western and eastern Christian realms despite the Great Schism of 1054. The Psalter’s history echoes the studies about cultural exchanges in Hans Belting’s Florence and Bagdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science.

Based on a limited corpus of three manuscripts dating from the XlVth and XVth centuries, this study proposes to delve into the theoretical question of the relationship between a parallel series of descriptive texts and images which show nine (or fourteen) ways Saint Dominic prayed. This analysis shows the discrepencies between the described and illustrated gestures, then the different ways each manuscript treated them, from one historical moment to another. In any case, it seems that each one of these three series is structured, and that the three are structured in a comparable manner. This syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis leads to a final question on the sociological and ideological functions of the document, which attempted to provide a means for the religious followers to identify with the saintly founder of their order through ¡mage, voice and gesture.