Frederica C. E. Law-Turner

Freddie is an author and art historian, with a particular fascination with medieval and renaissance art, and with art-historical puzzles. After completing a PhD at the Courtauld Institute, she taught and lectured widely both in the UK and the USA, and was a Senior Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York

Her study of the magnificent Ormesby Psalter, in the Bodleain Library, Oxford, explained one the most enigmatic of English Gothic manuscripts as the product of a series of campaigns for successive patrons, and for the first time associated the major pages with specific events in the life of John de Warenne, Earl of Surrey and Sussex, and his ward, Richard Foliot.

The superbly-illustrated 'Sing a New Song - the Psams in Medieval Art and Life' accompanies an exhibition at the Morgan Museum and Library in New York (September 2025), and examines the importance of the psalter in medieval art and spirituality. Freddie was co-curator of this exhibition, and in her chapter explains the various ways in which psalters were illustrated in the Middle Ages.

She is currently working on the famous Hunt of the Unicorn Tapestries, now in The Met Cloisters, New York. Long interpreted as obscure religious or erotic symbolism, these can now be understood as a precise political allegory of the wars between France and Venice in the early 16th century.

Freddie lives in Hampshire with her family, five sheep, two horses and a cat.