Hours of Mary of Burgundy
Getijdenboek van Maria van Bourgondië
Ad Matutinas. Domine, labia mea aperies, et os meum annuntiabit laudem tuam.
Our renderingAt Matins: O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth shall declare your praise.
What it is
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.
Why it still matters
A Christian today can follow the same canonical structure of Hours — Matins, Lauds, Vespers, Compline — that Mary prayed from this book, using the opening versicle 'Domine, labia mea aperies' to begin each session of prayer as the Western church has done since Benedict's Rule.
Kept alongside
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.
Hours of Philip the Bold
Heures de Philippe le Hardi
Commissioned by Philip the Bold in 1376 and completed by 1379, this monumental manuscript passed through three generations of Valois-Burgundian hands: John the Fearless inherited it in 1404 and Philip the Good in 1419, the latter having it rebound in two volumes in 1451 with new grisaille illuminations. The manuscript is now split between the Fitzwilliam Museum (MS 3-1954) and the Royal Library of Belgium (MS 11035-37), preserving some 150 illuminations alongside the Hours of the Virgin, Hours of the Holy Spirit, Penitential Psalms, Office of the Dead, masses, and hymns. Spanning three reigns and a century of use, it is a rare example of a Book of Hours treated as a living dynastic heirloom rather than a display object. Its scribe Jean L'Avenant and its three named illumination masters represent the peak of Parisian courtly book production in the 1370s.