Book of Hours, Use of York

Fols 13r-34v. Hours of the Virgin, with the rubric secundum usum sarum.

Matins (fols 13r- 17v) have hymn Quem terra ponthus (fol. 13v), ps. ant. Benedicta tu (fol. 15v) and three lessons Sancta maria uirgo (fol. 15), Sancta maria piarum plissima (fol. 16r), Sancta maria dei genitix (fol. 16v); lauds (fols. 17v-22v) contains capit. In omnibus requiem (fol. 21r), collect Concede nos (fol. 22r); prime (fols 22v-24v) contains ps. ant. Quando natis es (fol. 24r), and capit. In omnibus requiem (fol. 24v); terce (fols 24v-26r); sext (fols 26r-27v); none (fols 27v-29v) has ps. ant. Ecce maria (fol. 28v) and capit. (fol. 28v); vespers (fols 29v-31v); compline (fols 31v-34v). At the start of None (fol. 27v) ad terciam is repeated erroneously.

Fols 35r-39v. Penitential psalms.

Fols 40r-44r. Litany including SS. Alban, Oswald, Edmund, Germain, Augustine, Wilfrid, Willelme, Cuthbert, Swithin, Samson, Edmund, Jerome, Edward, Leonard, Benedict, Egidius, Anthony, Austreberta, Hilda, Everildis and Ethelreda.

Fols 44v-64v. Office of the Dead.

Fols 65r-72v. Commendation of Souls.

Program of Decoration and Illustration

lllustration is confined to the small rectangular miniatures (46 x 37 mm) of the labours of the months set in the decorated borders.

Fol. 1r. January. A man warming himself at a fire.

Fol. 2r. February. A man pruning trees.

Fol. 3r. March. A man digging.

Fol. 4r. April. An elegantly dressed man holding flowering branches [the frame is indented around an extended line of Calendar text].

Fol. 5r. The illustration for May has been excised.

Fol. 6r. June. A man scything.

Fol. 7r. July. A man harvesting.

Fol. 8r. August. A man threshing.

Fol. 9r. September. A man treading grapes.

Fol. 10r. October. A man sowing grain.

Fol. 11r. November. A man knocking down acorns for pigs.

Fol. 12 r. December. Two men involved in the slaughter of a pig.

Folio 1r bears the name ‘Lumley’, which has been scribbled over. This signature is apparently in the hand of Lord Lumley’s anonymous secretary. (The hand is illustrated in Jayne and Johnson, 1956, on plate II and discussed on p. 5). The manuscript does not appear in the 1609 copy of the 1596 register of the library of Lord Lumley (1534–1609). Presumably this is because it had been given away, although, it was catalogued in 1956 by Jayne and Johnson as having been a Lumley manuscript. These authors did not seem to know, however, that it had been acquired by the State Library of Victoria at the time they wrote (p. 304).

According to Seymour de Ricci, the manuscript had belonged to the nineteenth-century British Member of Parliament T.W. Bramston.[i] It was later acquired by Lord Amherst of Hackney (1838–1908) whose bookplate bearing his coat of arms and motto ‘Victoria Concordia Crescit’ is on the inside of the front cover. It was purchased for the State Library of Victoria from the bookseller, W.H. Robinson, through the Felton Bequest in 1933. A Felton Bequest bookplate is on the inside of the front cover. For some time the manuscript had the shelfmark *f096/R66 Hb.

[A.B. Foxcroft] Manuscripts and Books of Art Acquired under the Terms of the Felton Bequest, Melbourne, 1938 [pp. 6–8 and 17].

S. Jayne and F. Johnson, The Lumley Library, London, 1956, p. 304.

K.V. Sinclair, Descriptive Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Western Manuscripts in Australia, Sydney, 1969, pp. 353–54, no. 213.

J. Backhouse, The Madresfield Hours. A Fourteenth-Century Manuscript in the Library of Early Beauchamp, Roxburghe Club, 1975, pp. 8–9.

M.M. Manion and V.F. Vines, Medieval and Renaissance Illuminated Manuscripts in Australian Collections, London, 1984, pp. 135–36, no. 56, pl. 31, and figs 120–27.

M.M. Manion, ‘Illuminating Words’, Art Bulletin of Victoria, 28, 1987, 16–33, pp. 31–33, and fig. 13.

M.M. Manion, ‘21. Book of Hours’, in Gold and Vellum: Illuminated Manuscripts in Australia and New Zealand, exh. cat., University of Melbourne, Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2 August–30 September 1989, Melbourne, 1989, no. 21, unpaginated, with unnumbered illustration.

B. Hubber, ‘“Of the Numerous Opportunities”: The Origins of the Collection of Medieval Manuscripts at the State Library of Victoria’, La Trobe Library Journal, nos 51, 52, 1993, 3–11, p. 6.

V.F. Vines, ‘“The Daily Round, the Common Task”. Three Books of Hours in the State Library of Victoria’, La Trobe Library Journal, nos 51–52, 1993, pp. 80–82, 86, figs 19, 31, 32a, 32b, and back cover.

M.M. Manion, ‘9’, in The Book of Kells and the Art of Illumination, exh. cat., National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 25 February–7 May 2000, Canberra, 2000, pp. 41–42, no. 9, with unnumbered illustration.

N. Morgan, ‘49 Book of Hours, Use of York’, in The Medieval Imagination: Illuminated Manuscripts from Cambridge, Australia, and New Zealand, B. Stocks and N. Morgan (eds), exh. cat., State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, 28 March–15 June 2008, Melbourne, 2008, p. 154, fig. 21 and plate 49.

Seymour de Ricci thought that the style of the script was close to that employed by Colard Mansion and William Caxton in their printed books, and noted that John Lumley was descended from Elizabeth Plantagenet, daughter of Edward IV.[ii] He suggested, therefore, that the Hours might have been made in Mansion’s shop for Edward IV c. 1471 when he was exiled in Bruges, or alternatively for the Earl of Arundel, who was Caxton’s patron and whose book collection was inherited by Lord Lumley. De Ricci related the manuscript to a group of books produced by Caxton that were owned by Lumley. He suggested that these might have been presentation copies for a patron. These suggestions have not been followed by later writers.

Manion and Vines (1984, pp. 135–36) have, however, demonstrated that the large format, double columns of text, and the style of decoration and illustration in this Book of Hours closely match those of a group of manuscripts owned by Raphael de Marcatellis (1437–1508), the natural son of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy. For example, the border on fol. 13r of the Melbourne manuscript is similar the one on fol. 364 of the Aristotle Commentaries in the University Library at Ghent (MS72), which has Marcatellis’ ownership inscription dated 1479. Albert Derolez (The Library of Raphael de Marcatellis, Ghent, 1979) had previously argued that Marcatellis’ manuscripts were made by a Bruges workshop set up under his patronage, and that no manuscript was known with similar features that was not owned by Marcatellis. It is possible that the Melbourne Book of Hours may have been commissioned by Marcatellis as a gift for someone in England whose coat of arms was not known to him. Alternatively, the artists and craftsmen who made manuscripts for Marcatellis may occasionally have worked for themselves or others.

Chief Investigators (CIs) of the ARC project were Professor emeritus Margaret Manion (The University of Melbourne), Professor Bernard Muir (The University of Melbourne), and Dr Toby Burrows (The University of Western Australia). Graduate research assistants were Alexandra Ellem, Dr Hugh Hudson, Dr Elaine Shaw and postgraduate scholar Elizabeth Melzer (The University of Melbourne). Shane Carmody was the representative of the Chief Industry Partner (The State Library of Victoria). The following curators, conservators, photographers and computer specialists at The State Library of Victoria also contributed their expertise: Katrina Ben, Des Cowley, Ian Cox, Adrian Flint, Ross Genat, Jean Holland, Shelley Jamieson, Afsana Khan, Coralie McInnes, Monika McIntyre, Helen McPherson, Peter Mappin and Sarah Mason.

These detailed entries update the information in the earlier catalogues: K.V. Sinclair, Descriptive Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Western Manuscripts in Australia, Sydney, 1969, M. M. Manion and V. F. Vines, Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in Australian Collections, London, 1984, and B. Stocks and N. Morgan, eds, The Medieval Imagination: Illuminated Manuscripts from Cambridge, Australia and New Zealand, Melbourne, 2008. Our debt to these pioneering publications and dependence on them are acknowledged here.

Margaret M.Manion on behalf of the ARC team, October, 2013.