My illuminated manuscript

The Magi and the Annunciation – from Bel Mooney’s book of hours

It is impossible to know where obsessions start.

Was it as I first practised my own teenage signature in curly script, exaggerating the swoop of the ‘y’? Or first turned the pages of a book on Giotto in my local library? Or carefully calligraphed and illustrated all the poems in Yeats’s early volume The Rose as a gift for my new husband?

By then, I was 22 and fatally mesmerised by the glitter of ornate initials, rich blue and red pigments, and the hypnotic swirls of acanthus in wide, riotous margins.

My English degree required the study of Anglo-Saxon, Early Middle English and Later Middle English and I became entranced by reproductions of manuscripts in my textbooks.

What hand made those marks on animal skin? Who read the words aloud to bestow life?

But there was also a deeper edge to this interest. Even through my years of professed atheism, I was drawn to altarpieces in Italian churches – not the mighty Baroque, but the gravity of the Quattrocento, followed by that extraordinary explosion of skill and narrative detail as the early-15th century heralded the Renaissance.

The glow of candlelight on flat planes of gold leaf beckoned me across centuries, as unavoidable as the dread swoosh of Gabriel’s wings, confirming Mary’s fate.

Mine, too. The glory of Christian culture intoxicated me, so that in my own late middle age I began to collect sacred art, gradually acquiring some preReformation objects.

But one item eluded me. For years, I longed to possess a book of hours. I’d bought two separate illuminated leaves

Inscription in the back of Bel’s book by an 18th-century owner

(sadly detached from their texts, as so many are), but would I ever obtain a whole volume?

Studying Christopher de Hamel’s Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts and Mary Wellesley’s Hidden Hands fed covetousness, my deadly sin.

The book of hours was a devotional text for private consumption – a sacred aide-mémoire, if you like. It incorporated a calendar, with the saints’ days in red – hence ‘red-letter day’. It also included Psalms, extracts from the Gospels, readings from the Mass, the Office of the Dead and the Hours of the Virgin Mary and devotions to be made during the eight canonical hours of the day.

Not all books of hours are the same, and no other type of manuscript has survived in such great numbers.

By the 14th century, it was the most used prayer book in Western Europe – a medieval bestseller. Many were made for women. The most lavish ones were status symbols and are now in museums around the world.

For some time, I have ogled manuscript books on dealer websites, but the prices were out of reach. The finest ones still would be. But, last autumn, I spotted a book of hours coming up for auction at Duke’s, in Dorchester.

The website displayed a couple of miniatures with the full description. It was impossible for me to travel to view. So – although I’ve never been a gambler – I had to go for telephone bidding.

And it so happened that the auction turned out well for the buyer, though disappointing for the seller. For a goodly sum but less than I expected, the c1480 book of hours became mine.

The precious object is French, produced in one of the many workshops of Burgundy, perhaps even in the shadow of the great Romanesque cathedral of St Lazare in Autun.

There are eight full-page miniatures (three more were probably planned, to judge by the gaps), all distinguished by an unusual geometric ‘frame’ on two sides which (to me) prefigures Art Deco. The Gothic ‘hand’ is excellent. But, to be honest, whoever painted the miniatures lacked a certain je ne sais quoi.

I imagine the scene in the workshop when the capable scribe hears which journeyman painter has been given the job of illustrating his text and groans, ‘Ah non!’

Still, among the eight (Annunciation, Visitation, Nativity, Shepherds, Magi, Pentecost, King David in meditation, Burial) is one real gem (pictured, far left). Two of the Magi are conventionally bearded and dressed while the third is an effete, 15th-century gallant straight out of the smartest bar in Autun, dressed in a yellow shirt and matching riding boots, a fancy blue tunic and a mauve turban.

He leans on his cane with a snooty look that says, ‘Faugh, comme ils sont pauvres, ces gens. Mon dieu, allons-y!’’

It looks like a portrait of a living dandy.

As I turn the vellum pages, I imagine other hands my book of hours has passed through over the centuries.

As it was being created, France was engaged in the Habsburg-Valois Wars in Italy. There followed the old, destructive pattern of treaty-conflict-treaty-conflict over centuries: the Wars of Religion, the Thirty Years’ War, the War of the Spanish Succession.

I imagine my book of hours tucked safely in a lady’s chamber (the majority of these devotional texts were owned by women), as she waited for her menfolk to return. Did tears smudge Gabriel’s banderole in the miniature of the Annunciation?

At the back of the book, it’s thrilling to see the elegant, sepia handwriting (pictured, left) of the first recorded owner. In formal French 18th-century script, the owner wrote, ‘I desire, my dear friend, that this should give you as much pleasure as I had in giving it to you,’ with an ornate, impossible-to-read signature.

The gift was given on 12th August 1744, with all the chaos and cruelty of the French Revolution a few decades away.

As that century turned, somebody called Willemin imposed himself sacrilegiously on the first illuminated page in the volume. In the bottom margin of the Annunciation, there is an angel bearing an escutcheon. What might have been written on it? ‘Ave Maria’, maybe?

But this man has painted over the original words to claim ownership: ‘Ex libris Willemin 1800.’ And, at the foot of January in the calendar, the owner wrote in ink, ‘Gesieus 1801– an 10 de la République Française.’

Is this the same owner – proudly commemorating the tenth year of the French Republic? Had he taken part in the Revolution? I love the mystery.

The First Republic was to last only from 1792 to 1804, when it became the First Empire under Napoleon Bonaparte.

I wonder if it was Willemin who encased the folios of the book of hours in this handsome, early-19th-century library binding in dark green morocco, tooled with gold. Whoever paid for the luxury misdated his possession ‘XIV Siècle.’

Quite soon after that, the book must have crossed the Channel, to be owned by one Sir John Dalton Bt, of an ancient seat, Thurnham, near Lancaster. His elaborate bookplate with the Thurnham shield is stuck in the front. The baronet died in the year of Victoria’s accession and eventually the title and property passed to another line of the family who took the Dalton name. Sure enough, over the page there is a pencilled signature – Sir James Dalton Fitzpatrick 1862.

But, after that, where did it go? Whose hands turned these pages, perhaps with the aid of an old Latin dictionary – as I do now?

All I know is that my book of hours – entrancing and imperfect – was sold by a Bournemouth dealer in 1963 and had at least one other owner before coming up for auction in 2021. And now it lives with this new, devoted, female custodian, for a while at least – deo volente.