Book of Hours

LIBRO D'ORE. – From the ecclesiastical Latin “Horae” (the seven parts into which the divine office is divided), this is a devotional book for the use of the faithful, characterized by the presence of the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin and the Office of the Dead, which constitute its essential part. Composed in part of liturgical texts drawn from the Breviary, so that it might be called the Breviary of the laity, the L. d'O. (in French Livres d'Heures, English Prymers, Spanish L. de Horas, German Stundenbuch) belongs to the extraliturgical euchology that nourished the piety of the faithful during the last centuries of the Middle Ages and the early modern period.

I. ORIGIN AND CONTENT

The L. d’O. must be confused neither with the Libelli precum or the Preces devotee, whose prototypes date back to the Carolingian period (cf. ed. by A. Wilmart, Precum libelli quattuor aevi Karolini, Rome 1940; id., Mannel de prières de st Jean Guallbert, in Rev. bénéd., 48 [1936], pp. 259–92, an eleventh-century copy of a ninth-century prototype), nor with the Psalter, which was in practice the most common prayer book through the entire thirteenth century. From Corneliminister and the great Carolingian Benedictine abbeys (the reform of s. Benedetto di Aniane) there arose the practice, later rendered almost universal through the influence of Cluny, of adding to the choral office a certain number of supplementary prayers, such as the seven penitential psalms, the litanies of the saints, the Office of the Dead, the Little Office of the Virgin, and suffrages in honour of God and the saints. These supplementary prayers would become precisely the essential elements of the L. d’O., which, in the manuscript tradition down to the first printed editions at the end of the fifteenth century, appear with a rich range of variations in their secondary constituent elements. Only with printing did the various types of L. d’O., according to the place of their origin, assume a more clearly defined character. At its origin, the L. d’O. (late twelfth and thirteenth centuries) began as a supplement inserted at the end of the Psalter (rarely in the Missal, and very rarely in the Breviary); toward the end of the thirteenth century it became detached from it, thereby giving rise, with the addition of certain new elements, to the true L. d’O., which fifteenth-century copyists multiplied extraordinarily (at the end of the Hundred Years’ War, owning an L. d’O. was fashionable), and which sixteenth-century illuminators and publishers transformed into exquisite masterpieces of art, of unsurpassed gaiety and vividness of colour. The Psalter–L. d’O. constitutes the transitional point from the Psalter properly so called to the L. d’O. It should be noted that the expressions Great or Little Hours (grandes or petites Heures) refer solely to the format.

The essential elements of the L. d’O. are: 1) the calendar, often enriched by the copyist’s imagination; 2) fragments from the four Gospels (Io. 1:1–14; Lc. 1:26–38; Mt. 2:1–12; Mc. 16:14–20); 3) the prayers to the Virgin Obsecro te and O Intemerato, which are found in almost all manuscripts, but in different versions; 4) the Little Office of the Virgin (Cursus or Hore Virginis Marie, whence the name of the book), which is its essential part. The structure of this Office, of which the earliest information dates from the end of the tenth century, varies according to the dioceses, abbeys, or religious Orders; for this reason it must always be studied with particular care in order to determine the place of origin of the L. d’O. that contains it; 5) the Hours of the Cross (Parvus ordo de Cruce and Ordo Magnus de Cruce); 6) the Hours of the Holy Spirit (Parus hore de Sancto Spiritu); 7) the seven penitential psalms (Pst. 6, 31, 37, 50, 101, 129, 142); 8) the Office of the Dead, of which the earliest testimonies date from the ninth century. The structure of this Office also varies from one diocese to another and must therefore be taken into consideration in determining the place of origin of the L. d’O., as stated above for the Office of the Virgin; 9) the suffrages (antiphons, verses, and prayers in honour of God and the saints, which in the divine office are recited at Lauds and Vespers; few in the eleventh century, they became extraordinarily numerous in the thirteenth); 10) the litanies of the saints (the presence of local saints can help establish the origin of the book). The secondary or accessory elements, whose presence is not constant, are: 1) the Passio according to s. Giovanni (18:1–19:42); 2) the joys of the Virgin and the seven petitions to Our Lord; 3) the fifteen gradual psalms (Pst. 119–33); 4) the Psalter of s. Girolamo, that is, more than a hundred verses taken from Psalms 5–142; 5) other prayers in Latin or in the vernacular, some of touching simplicity, but at times bearing a superstitious character; 6) texts that are entirely profane, etc. Despite the beauty of the ornamentation and miniatures, the orthography of the texts is very often highly defective; not even the famous Hours of the duke of Berry are free from this fault. Finally, it should be noted that the preparation of the L. d’O. was left to the discretion of the commissioner or the copyist, given its essentially private character.

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could logically exercise his imagination with greater freedom, and the portraits of the persons for whom the book was illuminated. The L. d’O. were, in fact, almost always prepared for nobles and sovereigns, and those by French and Flemish artists are deservedly famous; but the Italian ones (especially Lombard) must also be counted among the finest productions of this genre.

Among the Italian examples, mention may be made here of the Horae per Bianca Visconti (Munich, Staatsbibliothek, cod. 23.215), illuminated between 1350 and 1378 by Giovanni di Benedetto da Como; the related examples—perhaps the work of the same workshop—in the Bibliothèque nationale of Paris (ms. lat. 757), illuminated ca. 1380; the Horae di Gian Galeazzo e Fil. Maria Visconti (Florence, Biblioteca Landau-Finaly), with miniatures by Giovannino and Salomone de’ Grassi and artists of the first half of the fifteenth century; and the Horae per Bona Sforza (ca. 1484–94; British Museum Addt. 34.294), with beautiful miniatures, perhaps the work of Antonio da Monza. From the Florentine workshop of Francesco di Antonio del Chierico, on the other hand, came the Horae per Lorenzo il Magnifico (ca. 1490; Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, Ashb. 1874), while from Ferrara, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, came the Horae per Alfonso I d’Este, in a private collection in Paris.

Among those of the French and Flemish schools, famous are the Heures de Jean Pucelle (second half of the fourteenth century; Paris, M. de Rothschild collection); the Très riches Heures of Chantilly, a work of the early fifteenth century due largely to the Limbourg brothers (Chantilly, Musée Condé, ms. lat. 1284): of the thirty-nine large miniatures, two medium-sized ones, and twenty-four small ones by these famous Flemish miniaturists, those of the Calendar are especially admirable, with representations of courtly and rural life, full of poetry and naturalistic details arising from that direct observation of things which would characterize fifteenth-century art; the Grandes and the Petites Heures de Jean de Berry and the Très Belles Heures de Bruxelles, the work of Jacquemart de Hesdin, who is recorded in 1384 as being in the service of the famous bibliophile Jean de Berry; the Horae di Torino (Turin, Biblioteca nazionale; Principe Trivulzio and M. De Rothschild), with miniatures that were already regarded as early works by Jean Van Eyck and that reveal pictorial achievements already wholly characteristic of the fifteenth century; the Grandes Heures de Rohan (first half of the fifteenth century; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, ms. lat. 9471); the Horae d’Etienne Chevalier (Chantilly, Musée Condé and elsewhere), illuminated ca. 1455 by Jean Fouquet; the Horae di Adelaide di Savoia duchessa di Borgogna (first half of the fifteenth century; Chantilly, Musée Condé, ms. lat. 1362); a L. d’O. dated 1460 and decorated for Mary van Vronensteen (or Voornesteyn), of the Utrecht school. Toward the end of the fifteenth century, in the wake of Fouquet’s art, Jean Bourdichon illuminated the Horae per Federico d’Aragona e Ferdinando I, kings of Naples (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, ms. lat. 10.532), and the very beautiful Horae per Anna di Bretagna (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, ms. lat. 9474), rich in forty-nine full-page miniatures, in addition to the twelve of the calendar, as well as a wonderful profusion of decoration. From the middle of the sixteenth century, mention should be made of the Livre d’Heures dit de Jeannè la Folle (also known as L. d’H. Hennesy), with miniatures of the Flemish school, one of the jewels of the Bibliothèque de Bourgogne in Brussels; and, in the same Library, the Livre d’Heures d’un Tournaisien, attributable to the same hand.

A fine example of English miniature painting is offered by the Horae per John Lancaster, brother of Henry V (ca. 1414–35; London, British Museum).

With the sixteenth century, the production of manuscript and illuminated Horae came to an end, and they were replaced by printed editions decorated with woodcuts. — Vedi tav. LXXXVI.