Breviary of Charles the Bold and Margaret of York
Bréviaire de Charles le Téméraire et de Marguerite d'York
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
Documentary evidence records a breviary of exceptional scale — 624 folios, 95 full-page miniatures by Simon Marmion, 12 calendar vignettes, and thousands of decorated initials — begun for Philip the Good in 1467 and completed for Charles the Bold and his new wife Margaret of York by c. 1470. The manuscript is now almost entirely lost; only two detached leaves survive, one at the Cleveland Museum of Art (2005.55, the Martyrdom of Saint Denis) and one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Holy Virgins). These fragments confirm the breathtaking ambition of what was evidently one of the greatest Flemish manuscripts of the fifteenth century. The breviary served both the ducal chapel's liturgical needs and the private Hours of the married couple.
Why it still matters
The breviary form — structuring prayer across all seven canonical hours of the day through Psalms, antiphons, readings, and hymns — is the oldest continuous daily prayer system in Western Christianity and remains fully usable in adapted form today through the Liturgy of the Hours.
Kept alongside
Hours of Mary of Burgundy
Getijdenboek van Maria van Bourgondië
One of the supreme achievements of Flemish manuscript illumination, this Book of Hours (Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. Vindobonensis 1857) was made c. 1470–1477 for Mary of Burgundy herself — feminine gender endings in the prayers and recurring pairs of gold armorial shields point to production for her forthcoming marriage, and no surviving document identifies any other commissioner or donor. Its famous 'window miniatures' depict Mary at prayer gazing through a painted window onto Gospel scenes, making the act of private devotion itself the subject of the art and establishing a compositional model that influenced Flemish painting for generations. The manuscript contains the standard Hours of the Virgin, Penitential Psalms, Office of the Dead, and suffrages to saints, all in a refined Flemish Batarda script attributed to Nicolas Spierinc. It passed through the Habsburg inheritance and remains one of the most studied and reproduced devotional manuscripts in the world.
Hours of Philip the Good (Grisaille Hours)
Getijdenboek van Filips de Goede
Koninklijke Bibliotheek (The Hague), Ms. 76 F 2 was written by Philip the Good's secretary Jean Miélot and illuminated by Jean le Tavernier in a pioneering grisaille monochrome technique, making it the earliest dateable grisaille manuscript at the Burgundian court. A ducal payment record long associated with this manuscript has since been reassigned by recent scholarship to a different book of hours in Philip's library; the manuscript is nonetheless confirmed as Philip's personal devotional book by its miniature depicting him kneeling in prayer with the words 'Patre nostre' in gold. It contains the Hours of the Virgin, Hours of the Holy Spirit, the seven Penitential Psalms, and the Office of the Dead — the core devotional canon of late-medieval lay piety. The grisaille technique, unusual for a patron of Philip's wealth, suggests a deliberate aesthetic choice to foreground contemplative sobriety over decorative splendour.
Book of Hours (Use of Geert Groote) — Getijdenboek
Geert Groote's translation of the Latin Book of Hours into Middle Dutch (c. 1383–84) became the most widely read Middle Dutch book of the later Middle Ages, surviving in at least 850 manuscripts and in print editions from 1480 onward. Groote composed it initially for the women living communally in his Deventer house, but it spread rapidly among literate laypeople and urban patricians of the Low Countries. It incorporated the Hours of the Eternal Wisdom (translated from Henry Suso's Cursus Aeternae Sapientiae) and the Hours of the Holy Spirit alongside the standard Hours of the Virgin, penitential psalms, and Office of the Dead. Its vernacular accessibility was deliberate: the Devotio Moderna insisted that people must understand what they pray, and ownership marks in surviving copies confirm its reach among prosperous laywomen and civic elites.