The extraction of illustrations, calendars, and other decorative pages from books of hours was common in the early nineteen-hundreds, which is when she assumed the dismantling had taken place.īut she was intrigued by the book’s intact ex libris, which identified Arnold as a former owner. Treharne told me that, at first, she wasn’t alarmed by the state of the book, which she had purchased as a teaching aid. Within its nineteenth-century leather binding and silk flyleaves, only the seven rearmost of the book’s original two hundred and fifty-four leaves remained. In the nineteen-twenties, Arnold’s estate sold the book to Sotheby’s it appeared on the auction block again at a Christie’s sale, in 2010, where it sold for twenty-five thousand pounds (then about forty thousand dollars) to an anonymous bidder.īy the time that Elaine Treharne, a medievalist at Stanford, purchased the manuscript from a colleague for seven hundred dollars, in November, it resembled not so much a book as an old, empty wallet. By this time, it had received a new morocco binding and its illustrations had been touched up, probably by the artist Caleb William Wing. Such opulent books of hours became prized collectors’ items among the cognoscenti in later centuries, which may be how this one found its way into the private library of a nineteenth-century British collector named Edward Arnold. Its final leaves contained an early owner’s translations of a few Latin prayers into medieval French. There were seventeen full-page Biblical illustrations. Its pages were expertly calligraphed, embellished with gold leaf, and decorated with sprays of blue acanthus, pheasants, swans, peacocks, and dancing villagers. Sometime in the fourteen-sixties, a private Christian devotional was produced in northern France.
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