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Egerton MS 1151
- Record Id:
- 032-001984238
- Hierarchy Root Ancestor Record Id:
- 032-001984238
- MDARK:
- ark:/81055/vdc_100000000057.0x0000de
- LARK:
- ark:/81055/vdc_100132823647.0x000001
- SLARK:
- Format:
- ISAD(G)
- Reference (shelfmark):
- Egerton MS 1151
- Title:
- Book of Hours
- Scope & Content:
-
A Book of Hours made c. 1260–70 by the workshop of William of Devon for the use of a laywoman. The calendar and litany include many saints associated with Worcestershire and the West Midlands such as Sts Frideswide, Oswald, Chad, Wulfstan, Milburga, Wilfrid, Birinus, Dunstan and Egwin. The high grading of St Victor and the inclusion of St Marcellus and St Opportuna in the Litany may indicate a connection with a Victorine house. Some rubics are in French.
ff. 1r-6v: calendar, with saints associated with Worcestershire and the West Midlands; ff. 7r-63r: Hours of the Virgin, imperfect; ff. 64r-74v: Penitential Psalms, imperfect; ff. 75r-83r: Litany; ff. 84r-94v: Long Hours of the Holy Spirit, imperfect; ff. 95r-117r: Hours of the Passion of Christ; ff. 118r-158r: Office of the Dead, imperfect.
Decoration, attributed to William of Devon or his group:
12 large historiated initials (5-7 lines) in colours and gold at major divisions, each usually accompanied by a partial or three-sided border with animals and hybrids: Matins, the Virgin and Child with censing angels and a patron portrait of a woman (f. 7r); Prime, a man observing the sun rise (f. 38r); None, people dancing and playing the fiddle (f. 47r); Vespers, priests reading and a woman praying before an altar (f. 50r); Compline, two people making their beds (f. 57v); Prime, a man waking up in bed as the sun rises with the dove of the Holy Spirit descending (f. 88v); Terce, monks praying before an altar with the dove of the Holy Spirit descending (f. 90r); Vespers, monks reading before an altar with the dove of the Holy Spirit descending (f. 92r); Compline, a man making his bed with the dove of the Holy Spirit descending (f. 93v); Prime, the Arrest of Christ (f. 95v); Compline, the Resurrection of Christ (f. 114r); a funeral service (f. 118r).
Numerous 2-line initials in colours and gold, many with extensions into the border and historiated or decorated with humans, animals and hybrids.
12 large 'KL' letters in gold on blue and red grounds (ff. 1-6v).
Small initials in blue with red penwork decoration and pen-flourishing, or in gold with blue penwork decoration or pen-flourishing. Small initials in blue or gold. Line-fillers and diagonal line-extensions into the lower borders in red, blue, and gold. Ruling in green in the calendar (ff. 1-6v).
- Collection Area:
- Western Manuscripts
- Project / Collection:
- Egerton Manuscripts
- Hierarchy Tree:
- [{ "id" : "032-001984238", "parent" : "#", "text" : "Egerton MS 1151: Book of Hours" , "li_attr" : {"class": "orderable"} }]
- Hierarchy Record Ids:
- 032-001984238
- Is part of:
- not applicable
- Hierarchy:
- 032-001984238
- Container:
- not applicable
- Record Type (Level):
- Fonds
- Extent:
- A parchment codex
- Digitised Content:
- http://access.bl.uk/item/viewer/ark:/81055/vdc_100132823647.0x000001 (digital images currently unavailable)
- Thumbnail:
-
- Languages:
- French
Latin - Scripts:
- Latin
- Start Date:
- 1255
- End Date:
- 1270
- Date Range:
- c. 1260-70
- Era:
- CE
- Access:
-
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- User Conditions:
- Letter of introduction required to view this manuscript
- Physical Characteristics:
-
Materials: Parchment.
Dimensions: 160 x 105 mm (text space: 90 x 60 mm).
Foliation: ff. 159 (+ 3 unfoliated modern paper flyleaves and 2 parchment flyleaves at the beginning, and 3 unfoliated modern paper flyleaves at the end + 2 unfoliated leaves after f. 6).
Binding: Post-1600. Red leather covers, with the arms of the Farnborough family in gold tooling on the front and back.
- Custodial History:
-
Origin: England, S. or Central (Oxford or West Midlands?).
Provenance:
? A woman: depicted in prayer in two initials (ff. 7r, 50r).
Robert Colston, 15th century: his ownership inscription, 'Iste liber attinet . deny it if you can / Ad me Rob[er]t[u]m Colston a By honest man' (ff. 159r); also inscribed in a 17th-century hand 'Robert Colston in Nottingham' (f. 159v), perhaps by a later owner trying to identify him.
Mistress Phyllis or Felice, early 16th-century: inscribed 'Ihs Marya/ Mysterys Felys owyth thys boke/ and she yt lose and you yt fynde/ I pray you to take the payne/ to bryng my boke home agayne/ Ihs Maria' (f. 159r, cf. 159v).
A circular heraldic bookplate ? removed from f. [6b] v.
Thomas Rodd the younger (b. 1796, d. 1849), London bookseller: purchased from him by the British Museum on 9 December 1848 using the Farnborough Fund (£3,000 bequeathed in 1838 by Charles Long, Baron Farnborough (b. 1761, d. 1838), a cousin of Francis Henry Egerton, 8th Earl of Bridgewater (b. 1756, d. 1829), founder of the collection.
- Publications:
-
Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts in the British Museum in the Years 1848-1853 (London: British Museum, 1868), p. 294.
Georg Graf Vitzthum, Die Pariser Miniaturmalerei: von der Zeit des hl. Ludwig bis zu Philipp von Valois und ihr Verhältnis zur Malerei in Nordwesteuropa (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1907), p. 90.
George Warner, Reproductions from Illuminated Manuscripts, Series I, (London: British Museum, 1907), pl. 12.
Christopher Wordsworth and Henry Littlehales, The Old Service-Books of the English Church, 2nd edn (London: Methuen & Co., 1910), pp. 61, 251.
J. A. Herbert, Illuminated Manuscripts (London: Methuen and Co., 1911), p. 188.
Schools of Illumination: Reproductions from Manuscripts in the British Museum, 6 vols (London: British Museum, 1914-1930), II: English 12th and 13th Centuries(1915), pls. 12a, 12b.
J. A. Herbert, British Museum: Reproductions from Illuminated Manuscripts, Series 1, 3rd edn (London: British Museum, 1923), pl. XII.
J. A. Herbert, Illuminated Manuscripts and Bindings of Manuscripts Exhibited in The Grenville Library, Guide to the Exhibited Manuscripts, 3 (Oxford: British Museum, 1923), no. 22.
Eric. G. Millar, English Illuminated Manuscripts from the Xth to the XIIIth Century (Paris: Van Oest, 1926), p. 128.
A Guide to the Exhibition of Some Part of the Egerton Collection of Manuscripts in the British Museum (London: British Museum, 1929), no. 9.
Guide to an Exhibition of English Art (London: British Museum, 1934), no. 111.
Eric G. Millar, 'Fresh Materials for the Study of English Illumination', in Studies in Art and Literature for Belle da Costa Greene, ed. by Dorothy Miner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), pp. 286-94 (p. 289).
Peter Brieger, English Art 1216-1307, Oxford History of English Art, 4 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1957), p. 158 n. 1.
Margaret Rickert, Painting in Britain: the Middle Ages, 2nd edn (London: Penguin Books, 1965), pp. 103-04.
Lilian M. C. Randall, Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966). p. 31.
Bruce Watson, 'The Place of the Cuerden Psalter in English Illumination', Gesta, 9 (1970), 34-41 (p. 37, figs 8, 9).
Philippe Verdier, Peter Brieger, Marie Farquhar, Art and the Courts: France and England from 1259 to 1328, The National Gallery of Canada, 27 April-2 July 1972 (Ottowa: National Galley of Canada, 1972), no. 25 [with additional bibliography].
Adelaide L. Bennett, 'Additions to the William of Devon Group', The Art Bulletin, 54:1 (1972), 31–40.
Nigel Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts, 2 vols, A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles, 4 (London Harvey Miller, 1982-1988), II: 1250-1285, no. 161 [with additional bibliography].
The Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagent England 1200-1400, ed. by Jonathan Alexander and Paul Binski (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1987), no. 41 [exhibition catalogue].
Claire Donovan, 'The Mise-en-Page of Early Books of Hours in England' in Medieval Book Production: Assessing the Evidence, ed. by Linda L. Brownrigg, Proceedings of the Second Conference of The Seminar in the History of the Book to 1500, Oxford, July 1988 (Los Altos Hills, California: Anderson-Lovelace, 1990), pp 147-61 (pp. 150-1, 157, 159, 181 n. 48, fig. 7).
Claire Donovan, The de Brailes Hours: Shaping the Book of Hours in Thirteenth-Century Oxford (London: British Library, 1991), p. 204 no. 39.
John Higgitt, The Murthly Hours: Devotion, Literacy and Luxury in Paris, England and the Gaelic West (London: British Library, 2000), pp. 162 n. 53, 182-3, 188 n. 35, 258.
Nigel Morgan, ‘The Decorative Ornament of the Text and Page in Thirteenth-century England: Initials, Border Extensions and Line Fillers’, in Decoration and Illustration in Medieval English Manuscripts, English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700, 10 (London: British Library, 2002), pp. 1-33 (pp. 28-29, pl. 29).
C. M. Kauffmann, Biblical Imagery in Medieval England 700-1500 (London: Harvey Miller, 2003), p. 162.
Kathryn A. Smith, Art, Identity and Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England: Three Women and their Books of Hours, (London: British Library, 2003), p. 147 n. 105.
Paul Binski, Becket’s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England 1170-1300 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 281, pl. 232.
Nigel Morgan, ‘Patrons and their Devotions in the Historiated Initials and Full-Page Miniatures of 13th-Century English Psalters’, in The Illuminated Psalter: Studies in the Content, Purpose and Placement of its Images, ed. by F. O. Büttner, (Belgium: Brepols, 2004), pp. 309-22 (p. 317 n. 49).
Alexa Sand, Vision, Devotion, and Self-Representation in Late Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 171-73.
Dorothy Kim, 'Ancrene Wisse and the Egerton Hours', in Medieval Anchorites in their Communities, ed. by Cate Gunn and Liz Herbert McAvoy (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2017), 199-220.
- Material Type:
- Archives and Manuscripts
- Legal Status:
- Not Public Record(s)