File:Book of Hours for Sarum Use and Gallican Psalter with Canticles (Pembroke Hours) (IA 1945 65 2).pdf

Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, 1945‑65‑2. Bruges, Belgium, c. 1465‑1470, with additions c. 1550‑1565. This extraordinary Psalter-Hours is one of the largest and most elaborately illuminated devotional books made in the Netherlands for export to England during the fifteenth century and is the only known example of a fully illustrated Psalter produced either in or for England or the Netherlands at that time. It is remarkably singular in its robust cycle of ten full-page miniatures and one-hundred-seventy-four small miniatures, as the majority of these images are not derived from any familiar Psalter model. They were produced by at least six different illuminators and those which occur in the Psalter portion of the manuscript were done in the painterly style of the Master of Anthony of Burgundy. Most of the other illuminators worked in the style of Willem Vrelant, a leading illuminator in Bruges in the late fifteenth century. The rubrics which preface the psalms and canticles provide a running commentary on the historical and allegorical significance of the psalms and differ from those encountered in any other devotional book-making practice. Another strikingly unique feature of the Pembroke Psalter Hours is the text of the opening calendar, composed in the format of a continuous metrical poem of 365 Latin verses into which saints' names and feasts, written in gold and red, are occasionally integrated. It is the only known example of a Latin metrical text in a calendar of the late Middle Ages. Though nothing is known about the manuscript's first patron, in the mid-sixteenth century, it belonged to Sir William Herbert, the First Earl of Pembroke who added twenty folios of prayers to the beginning of the book and sixteen at the end, along with depictions of his coat of arms and emblems and a large miniature of himself in prayer (fol. 2V). The calendar section also contains a series of marginal annotations recording the dates of births and deaths of prominent noble adherents of the House of York and their victories against the Lancastrians in the War of the Roses.