Petites Heures du Duc de Berry
Petites Heures de Jean de France, Duc de Berry
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 earliest of Jean de Berry's major Books of Hours, begun by Jean le Noir and completed by Jacquemart de Hesdin and the Pseudo-Jacquemart, the Petites Heures is held at the BNF as ms. lat. 18014 and listed in the Duke's own 1413 inventory. A single folio added by the Limbourg brothers around 1412 — depicting the Duke Setting off on a Trip — demonstrates that the manuscript remained in active personal use for decades after its initial completion, functioning as a living devotional companion rather than a static luxury object. Its intimate scale suited private daily prayer rather than ceremonial display, and it exemplifies the Book of Hours as an instrument of sustained spiritual formation across an entire adult life. Its continued personalisation across roughly four decades is among the best-documented instances of a medieval nobleman's ongoing relationship with a devotional text.
Why it still matters
The Petites Heures models the practice of praying from the same structured book for decades, allowing familiarity to deepen rather than diminish; this pattern of lifelong daily fidelity to a single form of prayer is itself a teachable discipline for modern Christians.
Kept alongside
Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry
Commissioned c. 1412 by Jean de France, Duc de Berry — son of King John II and brother of Charles V — this is the supreme surviving example of Valois private devotion in manuscript form. It contains the canonical hours structured around the Hours of the Virgin, Hours of the Cross, Hours of the Holy Ghost, Penitential Psalms, Office of the Dead, and additional offices and masses, all framed by the famous calendar illuminations depicting the labours of the months. The duke used it for daily private prayer in his châteaux, and it was left unfinished at his death in 1416, completed only in 1485–1489 by Jean Colombe for Charles I of Savoy. Its unmatched luxury simultaneously signals sincere personal piety and the Valois use of devotional objects as instruments of dynastic prestige.
Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry
Belles Heures du Duc de Berry
The only book of hours entirely completed by the Limbourg Brothers, made for Jean de Berry — uncle of King Charles VI and the pivotal Valois prince-patron — between 1405 and 1408/9, now held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Cloisters Collection). It contains the Hours of the Cross, Hours of the Holy Spirit, Penitential Psalms, Office of the Dead, and seven unprecedented pictorial saint-cycles (Catherine, Jerome, Anthony Abbot, the Baptist, Peter, Paul, and the Passion), plus the Fifteen Joys of the Virgin. Its 172 illuminations served the duke as a personal devotional companion in chapel and chamber; at his death it passed to Yolande of Aragon, mother of Charles VII. It is the most devotionally coherent and structurally complete of the Berry books of hours.
Grandes Heures du Duc de Berry
Grandes Heures de Jean, Duc de Berry
Completed in 1409, as attested by an inscription by the Duke's secretary Jean Flamel recorded in BNF ms. lat. 919, the Grandes Heures was the largest of Jean de Berry's Books of Hours and is now held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. It contains the Hours of the Virgin, Penitential Psalms, Litanies, Hours of the Cross and Holy Spirit, Office of the Passion, Office of the Holy Spirit, and Office of the Dead — making it one of the most structurally complete surviving examples of the Horae tradition. Though many of its full-page miniatures have been removed, one surviving illumination by Jacquemart de Hesdin depicting Christ Carrying the Cross is held in the Louvre. The manuscript's listing in the Duke's own 1413 inventory constitutes a direct ownership record and confirms its use within a generation of its creation.