Spinola Hours
Spinola Hours (Heures Spinola)
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
Now at the J. Paul Getty Museum (Ms. Ludwig IX 18), the Spinola Hours is attributed to the workshop of the Master of James IV of Scotland, widely identified with Gerard Horenbout. The Getty Museum describes the patron as 'probably Margaret of Austria,' an identification resting on stylistic and circumstantial grounds — including Horenbout's documented role as Margaret's court painter — rather than confirmed heraldic or archival evidence. Five masters contributed to its 312 folios and more than 80 illuminated pages, making it one of the most lavishly decorated Books of Hours to survive. Its specialized weekday offices, masses, and supplemental devotional sequences expand the private prayer life well beyond the standard Book of Hours formula.
Why it still matters
The Spinola Hours represents the Book of Hours tradition at its most expansive and personally customized; its weekday offices and supplemental devotional sequences offer a model for building a rich, structured household prayer life that can be directly adapted today.
Kept alongside
Hours of Joanna I of Castile
Heures de Jeanne de Castille / Hours of Joanna the Mad
Now British Library Add MS 35313, this Flemish Book of Hours was produced for Joanna I of Castile (Joanna the Mad) and her husband Philip the Fair of Burgundy, with Joanna's personal arms and portraits of the queen at prayer confirming direct ownership, as documented in the 1545 inventory of Joanna's possessions. It includes 75 full-page miniatures and an unusually high proportion of suffrages to female saints, tailored to Joanna's gendered piety. Its Flemish Guardian Angel prayers alongside Iberian saints such as James fuse two court devotional cultures — Burgundian Flemish and Castilian Iberian — into a single prayer book reflecting Joanna's dynastic position between them. The manuscript was purchased from the Tobin family by the British Museum in 1852.
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.
Book of Common Prayer (1559 Elizabethan edition)
The Book of Common Prayer provided the complete liturgical and devotional framework for the English Protestant monarchy and aristocracy, combining Daily Morning and Evening Prayer, the Eucharist, the Psalter, and occasional offices into a single vernacular text. The 1559 Elizabethan revision drew primarily from Cranmer's 1552 edition and remained in use substantially unchanged through the Stuart period, making it the formative devotional text for every English royal and noble family for nearly a century. Its Collect for Purity, the General Confession, and the Comfortable Words represent some of the most durable penitential and eucharistic prose in the English language. The BCP was simultaneously a royal political instrument and a genuine instrument of mass devotional formation across all levels of English society.