Book of Hours of Mary Stuart (Altshausen Hours)
A verified public-domain excerpt for this text is still being set. The folio is catalogued and linked below; an original Sub Rosa rendering will follow.
What it is
The Altshausen Hours (House of Württemberg collection, Altshausen, Germany) was commissioned for Claude of France, daughter of Anne of Brittany and Francis I; it subsequently passed to Mary Queen of Scots following the death of her husband Francis II of France, and bears a seventeenth-century inscription attributing it to her. The manuscript's association with Mary Stuart is strengthened by her documented rosary beads—hollow gold spheres with an enamel Virgin—which she carried to her execution at Fotheringhay in 1587 and bequeathed to Anne, Countess of Arundel, demonstrating the consistent and courageous Marian piety that characterized her life under imprisonment and martyrdom. Though the manuscript itself is known mainly to specialists, Mary Queen of Scots became one of the most romantically compelling figures of Catholic devotion in early modern Europe, and her association with it raises its popular profile. The Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the manuscript represents the same prayer tradition she maintained to her death.
Why it still matters
The Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary, as prayed in this manuscript, and the rosary devotion Mary practiced to the scaffold together represent a complete and living model of lay Marian spirituality available in full today.
Kept alongside
Grandes Heures of Anne of Brittany
Grandes Heures d'Anne de Bretagne
Commissioned 1503–1508 by Anne of Brittany — queen consort to two successive Valois kings, Charles VIII and Louis XII — and painted by Jean Bourdichon in Tours, this manuscript (BnF Ms. lat. 9474) contains 49 full-page miniatures, Latin prayers including the Obsecro te, and the offices for the canonical hours. Its 337 botanically precise plant borders give it a dual character as a prayer book and a natural encyclopedia, with each border plant identified in Latin and French. The royal family retained it until the Revolution, and it represents the high-water mark of personal Valois-court devotion executed in the Renaissance style; it is the most reproduced French book of hours after the Très Riches Heures.
The Holy Rosary (Fifteen Decades with Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries)
The Rosary in its standard fifteen-decade form was formally established by Pope Pius V's bull Consueverunt Romani Pontifices (1569) and is closely linked to the Battle of Lepanto (1571), at which Philip II of Spain organized the Holy League. Jakob Sprenger's Dominican confraternity at Cologne, founded in 1475, enrolled more than 100,000 members within its first decade, spreading the devotion throughout Europe. Mary Queen of Scots carried her personal gold-and-enamel rosary beads to her execution at Fotheringhay in 1587, bequeathing them to Anne, Countess of Arundel; these beads were held at Arundel Castle until stolen in May 2021. John Paul II added five Luminous Mysteries in 2002, expanding the standard form to twenty decades.
Hours of Isabella Stuart (Book of Hours, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)
This Book of Hours (Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 62) was originally made for Yolande of Aragon, Dowager Duchess of Anjou, by artists working in Angers; she gave it to her daughter Yolande of Anjou on the occasion of the latter's marriage to the future Duke Francis I of Brittany in 1431. After Yolande of Anjou's death in 1440, the manuscript passed to Francis I's second wife Isabella Stuart, and subsequently to their daughter Margaret of Brittany; Breton artists in Nantes adapted and added illuminations for each new owner. The manuscript contains the Obsecro te prayer at folio 20r, introducing it with a full-page miniature of the patron kneeling before the Virgin and Child, which makes the devotional purpose of the book unusually visible to scholars today. As an individual court manuscript never circulated beyond the dynastic women who owned it, its historical reach was extremely limited, even though its Marian prayers are of the universally accessible type.