Book of Hours, Use of Sarum, in Latin, with an added prayer in Middle English, illuminated manuscript on vellum

provenance

(1) Like many late medieval books for the English market, the present manuscript was doubtless written and illuminated in Bruges for export and it was then embellished further on arrival in England.  The Use is that of Sarum throughout.  The Calendar includes many English saints, but with Flemish spellings, such as ‘Zwichun’ for Swithun (2 July) as well as the Ghent/Bruges feasts of Saints Donatian and Bavo.  Several additions were made to the Calendar in the fifteenth century, including the translations of Saints Thomas Becket, Swithun and Osmund (which took place in 1457) and the Transfiguration (‘sente Saveur’, 6 August) which was officially promulgated in 1457, through known in England earlier. Added at the end is a long rubric in Middle English, beginning, “What mane or womane that wyl sey dureng x dayes every day C Ave maria tyl y^t he have seyde iii^c Ave maria eyther knelyng or stondyng ...”.

(2) The book may well have belonged to a continental recusant community after the Reformation.  The binding seems to be continental (a binder in England would not have used a Crucifix), the feasts of St. Thomas Becket are undamaged, which is rare, and there is a scribbled French donation inscription on the flyleaf.

(3) H.P. Kraus, Illuminated Manuscripts, from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Centuries, cat.159 (1981), no.14, at $68,000.

(4) Sold in our rooms, 23 June 1987, lot 121, bought by Lawrence Schoenberg, the present owner; it is his LJS.4; exhibited, Bibliotheca Schoenbergiensis, An Exhibition from the Collection of Lawrence J. Schoenberg, University of Pennsylvania, 1995-96, no.4, and Bibliotheca Schoenbergiensis, Selections from the Manuscript Collection of Lawrence J. Schoenberg, 1996, Trout Gallery, Dickinson College, Pennsylvania, no.4.

text

A Calendar (fol.1r); Suffrages to the Trinity (fol.8r) and to Saint George, Saint Christopher, Saint Thomas Becket, Saint Katherine, Saint Anne, Saint Mary Magdalene; the Fifteen O’s (fol.20r); the Hours of the Virgin [Use of Sarum], with Matins (fol.28r), Lauds (fol.36r, incorporating further suffrages), Prime (fol.51r), Terce (fol.53r), Sext (fol.60r), None (fol.64r), Vespers (fol.66r, lacking beginning) and Compline (fol.68r); the rhyming Hymn Salve virgo virginum stella matutina (fol.74r), the O intemerata (fol.78r) and Obsecro te;  the Joys of the Virgin (fol.84r), preceded by an offer of 100 days’ indulgence; votive prayers and prayers to Christ (fol.88r), including Bede’s prayer on the Seven Words of the Cross and another worth 2000 years’ indulgence; the Penitential Psalms (fol.97r) and Litany; the Office of the Dead (fol.116r); the Commendation of Souls (fol.140r);  the Psalms of the Passion (fol.155r) and the Psalter of St. Jerome (fol.165r),  preceded by a lengthy rubric explaining that its users will be saved from shipwreck, death in battle and other dangers.

illumination

This manuscript has an intriguing place in the history of the English book trade and indeed of the absolute origins of printing in the generation before Gutenberg.  All fifteen full-page miniatures here are signed with printed marks by the artists, a small Gothic letter ‘i’ in a pink circle stamped just outside the upper right-hand corner of the frames of the miniatures.  The miniatures are by the Master of Otto van Moerdrecht or one of the artists in his immediate circle, and show all the characteristics of this workshop: the oval faces with greenish shadows, landscapes with jagged hills and mushroom trees, tiled floors in black and silver, distinctive pinkish brown and bright orange pigments, and backgrounds of highly burnished gold; cf. Pächt and Alexander, I, pl.XV, figs. 211a-b; L.M.J. Delaissé, A Century of Dutch Manuscript Illumination, 1968, fig.125; J.J.G. Alexander, Medieval and Early Renaissance Treasures of the North West, 1976, fig.9a; J.J.G. Alexander, Medieval Illuminators and their Methods of Work, 1992, pp.125-6, citing the present manuscript on p.174, n.30; A. Arnould and J.M. Massing, Splendours of Flanders, 1993, pp.116-21, nos.33-5; L.M.C. Randall, Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Walters Art Gallery, III, Belgium, 1250-1530, I, 1997, p.162, citing the present manuscript, twice, in fact, from the Kraus catalogue and from the exhibition of the Schoenberg library, University of Pennsylvania, 1995-6, no.4; the Foyle sale at Christie’s, 11 July 2000, lot 54, and the sale in these rooms, 17 June 2003, lot 91; and J.R. Tannis in Leaves of Gold, Manuscript Illumination from Philadelphia Collections, 2001, pp.121-2, no.40.  

In 1980 Professor J.D. Farquhar published his remarkable discovery that the miniatures from this workshop have artists’ marks stamped in their corners, rather like personal masons’ or merchants’ marks, as officially recognized symbols of an individual’s work.  He related these to the guild regulations of Bruges requiring manuscript painters to pay a fee to the painters’ and saddlemakers’ Guild of St. Luke in order to register their marks and to be permitted to paint miniatures for books.  This statute was certainly in operation by 1426, but the only surviving groups of miniatures in which such stamped marks occur with any consistency are those from the present workshop of the Master of Otto van Moerdrecht (see Farquhar, ‘Identity in an Anonymous Age: Bruges Manuscript Illuminators and their Signs’, Viator, XI, 1980, pp.371-83, figs.1-12; and also M. Smeyers and H. Cardon, ‘Merktekens in de Brugse miniatuurkunst’, Merken opmerken, Typologie en methode, ed. C. Van Vlierden and M. Smeyers, 1990, pp.45-70).  The enforcement in 1426 of the requirement to mark miniatures with stamps was precisely because, as the lawsuit complained, Bruges booksellers ‘repeatedly buy images made in Utrecht and in other places outside the city of Bruges, images that they sell in the city, both with and without books, and which they peddle to one another’ (cited in Farquhar, p.372).  In other words, the statute was to prevent the importation of miniatures by authorising local miniaturists who were officially registered within Bruges.  Peddlers in foreign miniatures were then liable to prosecution precisely because they were not registered. Clearly, not many Bruges miniaturists took the statute seriously and demonstrably Bruges miniatures of this period seldom have any marks.  In any case, the Bruges style of illumination is so unlike that of Holland that there was little room for confusion.  With the Masters of Otto van Moerdrecht, however, the opposite applies: their miniatures are typically northern Dutch in style and their work might easily have been confused with the undesirable pirated miniatures sent down illicitly from the north.  Probably the workshop, including the artist Claes Brouwer, comprised native Dutch workers domiciled in Bruges.  That is certainly why they registered their marks, and why they in particular applied them systematically to all their miniatures.  As we suggested in the catalogue of the Donaueschingen sale in these rooms, 21 June 1982, lot 15, it is intriguing that these marks are formed of separate stamped letters of the alphabet, printed presumably by northern Dutch craftsmen at exactly the period when the mythical Laurens Coster of Haarlem is said to have experimented with ‘boecprinten … in een seer ruyde maniere’ (J. Poortenaar, Coster – niet Gutenberg, 1947, pp.63-4).  This is not a printed book and it was not made by Coster, who very probably never existed, but such marks, seen in the 1430s stamped into books exported from the Netherlands, might have given rise to the legend.

All of the miniatures are marked with artist’s stamps. The subjects are:

1. Folio 7v, The Trinity enthroned, 112mm. by 69mm., God the Father seated below a canopy holding a Crucifix with a diminutive dove hovering above Christ’s head; set in a gothic room, with lattice windows and a tiled floor.

2. Folio 10v, Saint George and the Dragon, 112mm. by 72mm., the saint on horseback lancing the dragon watched from behind a hill by the kneeling princess; set in landscape with a rising (or setting) sun beyond a many-towered city.

3. Folio 13v, The Martyrdom of St. Thomas Becket, 111mm. by 70, the saint praying at an altar as four soldiers set upon him from behind, set in a gothic chapel with a silver and black tiled floor.

4. Folio 17v, St. Mary Magdalene, 111mm. by 69mm., the saint seated on two cushions and holding a gold jar and an open book; set in a gothic room, with lattice windows and a tiled floor.

5. Folio 19v, The Agony in the Garden, 113mm. by 70mm., Christ kneeling before a golden chalice on a hilltop in a garden enclosed by a brick wall, with the apostles hunched up asleep over an open book behind him; set against a sunset sky with the face of God watching from Heaven.

6. Folio 27v, The Annunciation, 111mm. by 69mm., the Virgin turning from reading a book to gaze placidly at Gabriel who holds a long banderole, “Ave gracia plena dominus tecum”; set in a gothic room, with lattice windows and a tiled floor.

7. Folio 50v, Christ before Pilate, 115mm. by 68mm., Christ in a pale purple robe being led forward by a bearded official and four soldiers, Pilate turning from washing his hands in a basin; set in a gothic room, with lattice windows and a tiled floor.

8. Folio 59v, Christ carrying the Cross, 112mm. by 71mm., Christ being helped by the Virgin and other saints and being led forward through a hilly landscape by Jewish officials and soldiers; red night sky.

9. Folio 63v, The Crucifixion, 110mm. by 66mm., the Virgin on the left, Saint John on the right, set in a landscape against a burnished gold sky.

10. Folio 67v, The Entombment, 115mm. by 69mm., Joseph of Arimathea and another man lower the Body into the sarcophagus, watched by the Virgin, Saint John and Saint Mary Magdalene.

11. Folio 73v, The Virgin and Child, 112mm. by 69mm., the Virgin standing with the Child in her arms as he kisses her cheek; set in a gothic room, with lattice windows, a curtain, and a tiled floor.

12. Folio 96v, The Last Judgement, 113mm. by 68mm., Christ seated on a rainbow with the tips of two swords pointing towards him, the Virgin and Saint John the Evangelist kneeling in prayer, and the dead just beginning to emerge from their graves; against a burnished gold sky.

13. Folio 115v, A funeral service, 112mm. by 69mm., two priests reading from a vast book, the black-hooded mourners standing by the bier, an altar behind; set in a gothic room, with lattice windows and a tiled floor.

14. Folio 154v, Christ as the Man of Sorrows, 110mm. by 69mm., Christ standing in the sarcophagus held by an angel and surrounded by the Instruments of the Passion; set in a landscape with a burnished gold sky.

15. Folio 164v, Saint Jerome, 110mm. by 70mm., the saint dressed as a cardinal seated with a book as a diminutive lion jumps up; set in a gothic room, with lattice windows and a tiled floor.