Livre d'Heures de Marguerite de Bourbon
Heures de Marguerite de Bourbon
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
This richly illuminated manuscript was owned by Marguerite de Bourbon (1438–1483), daughter of Duke Charles I de Bourbon and Agnes of Burgundy, and served as her personal daily prayer book; the manuscript survives at the Biblioteca Lázaro Galdiano in Madrid (Reg. 6). It contains thirteen full-page miniatures, the Office of the Hours of the Virgin, the Office of the Dead, and other standard liturgical texts in Gothic script, illuminated in the style of the Bedford Master's French workshop. As the most securely documented physical Book of Hours owned by a member of the House of Bourbon, it is a primary artifact of fifteenth-century aristocratic Marian devotion within the dynasty.
Why it still matters
The Hours of the Virgin and Office of the Dead it contains are ancestral forms of the Liturgy of the Hours, which millions still pray today; the same prayers can be used by any Christian as a structured framework for morning, daytime, and evening prayer.
Kept alongside
Oraisons funèbres
Bossuet's funeral orations were delivered at the solemn liturgical rites of major figures of the Bourbon court and its orbit, including Henrietta Maria of England (1669), Henrietta Anne of England (1670), and the Prince of Condé (1687). They functioned as profound theological meditations on mortality, Providence, and the vanity of earthly greatness, delivered before the assembled court and subsequently circulated in print to a wider educated public. Bossuet had attended Henrietta Anne personally in her final hours, lending these orations an extraordinary devotional intimacy alongside their rhetorical grandeur. They are considered masterpieces of French prose and remain among the most widely read seventeenth-century Catholic homiletic texts.
Psalter (for the Education of Giovanni de' Medici)
The documented use of the Latin Psalter as the basis of young Giovanni de' Medici's religious instruction by his mother Clarice Orsini is one of the most precisely attested Medici devotional education episodes. When Poliziano attempted to teach the Medici boys using Homer and classical authors, Clarice expelled him from the villa at Cafaggiolo (c. 1479) and substituted the Latin Psalter, insisting on traditional Catholic instruction. Giovanni later became Pope Leo X, giving the episode retrospective significance; it is documented through Poliziano's own letters and subsequent Renaissance scholarship. The underlying text — the Psalter itself — was the universal prayer book of medieval and Renaissance Christendom and carries the highest possible devotional relevance independent of this particular episode.
English Primer (The Prymer)
Prymer or Lay Folks' Prayer Book
The English Primer ('Prymer') was the standard lay devotional book in England from the 14th to 16th centuries, used by children and adults alike to learn both literacy and prayer. Beginning as a first reading book combining the alphabet, Pater Noster, Ave Maria, and Creed, it grew to include the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Seven Penitential Psalms, the Fifteen Gradual Psalms, the Litany of the Saints, and the Office of the Dead. Chaucer's reference in the Prioress's Tale (c. 1386) to a seven-year-old boy learning his 'primer' confirms its role in children's formation, and Eleanor of Castile purchased 'seven primers' in Cambridge in 1289 for royal household use. The royal culmination was Henry VIII's King's Primer (1545), principally compiled by Archbishop Cranmer and prescribed by royal proclamation as the only permitted primer in England.