A Nun’s Bespoke Prayer Book, 16th Century
In addition to the rare printed texts that it contains—a sammelband of two extremely early illustrated liturgical texts—this remarkable volume proffers perhaps the most complex and fascinating examples of bespoke extra-illustration and scribal adaptation in the Women of the Book Collection. As such, it merits extensive description here in order to relay the variety and richness that even seemingly mundane liturgical texts could assume within the cloister.
The first of the two imprints is an unusual 1516 Lyon book of hours, perhaps the only such imprint from that century designed specifically for Carmelite use (i.e., the titular “vsum Hierosolymitanum”) and lavishly illustrated with elaborate border woodcuts in a distinctive Venetian style. Among these are several holy figures of particular interest to the Carmelites, including the biblical Elijah and Elias, Saint Albert of Jerusalem, and the charismatic Carmelite preacher and rector of the Confraternity of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel in Mantua, Bartolomeo Fanti, who had died just two decades prior to his illustration in this imprint (d. 1495). The larger woodcuts appear to be nearly identical recuts from an earlier Venetian Office of the Virgin printed by Bernardino Stagnino on September 26, 1507.
The second (ca. 1500–1502) volume, bound together with the first, is a psalter printed by the celebrated printer of books of hours, Thielmann Kerver, who illustrated the present edition with large metalcuts and metalcut borders. All are attributable to the “Master of the Apocalypse Rose,” who was employed by Kerver in a number of different editions of books of hours. There are only two recorded copies of the 1516 hours, and three of the psalter; the only other institution besides Johns Hopkins to hold both is the British Library.
Both volumes are nestled in a handsome mid-to-late-sixteenth-century northern French or Flemish dark-brown tanned calfskin binding set over couched-laminate boards. Not only is the binding extremely early, but it is also an incredibly rare example of a clear and luxurious statement of ownership. Both covers are decorated with a single gilt rule border and central crucifixion medallion, and a further cartouche bearing the owner’s gilt-lettered supralibros S[OEUR]: CATHERINE R[A]OV[L]. An extreme rarity for women religious sworn to oaths of poverty, the volume is made even more precious by its two extant metal fore-edge clasps with original hinge and catch plates, which are engraved K[A]THERINE and RAOVL. Though these wonderfully personalized clasps appear to have replaced an earlier pair of fastenings (evident from evenly spaced holes on both covers), we have been unable to identify any comparable examples so named, least of all among books associated with women religious.
If the rarity of the imprints and the unique qualities of this binding were not enough, the volume has also been scribally augmented and extra-illustrated. These include suggestions of provenance including, perhaps as late as the eighteenth century, “Domus Nannetensis Societ[atis] BVM,” which suggests perhaps the Carmelite convent of Les Couëts near Nantes. Among the more extensive enhancements is a considerable sequence of manuscript prayers in prose and verse bound at the front and back of the book, amounting to some sixteen leaves of scribal prayers in several sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French hands. Among these are a leaf of Latin prayers, followed by a later manuscript list of indulgences entitled “Loue soit le tres sainct Sacrement de lautel” [Praise be to the most holy sacrament of the altar], dated 1614 and 1629. One of these invokes the wearing of amulets and medallions—material artifacts that also count among the contents of the Women of the Book Collection.
The leaf that follows these indulgences presents, in the same hand as the former, an original French vernacular Carmelite prayer in verse, beginning, “Mon coeur plein de tristesse soupire tous les jours / plain de merancolie [sic] se tourmante tousiours” [My heart, full of sadness, sighs every day / full of melancholy, it is tormented always]. The same prayer includes repeated invocations of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, the title given to the Virgin Mary denoting her particular role as patroness of the Carmelite order. In the blank spaces at the foot of the versos of the last two leaves of the psalter appear two more short manuscript prayers in French, written in red ink in a neat sixteenth-century hand. Of the fifteen leaves that follow, the first ten present French prayers to the Virgin Mary, followed by a sequence of Latin prayers in various hands, including one dedicated to the feast day (September 15) of Maria de Pietate (Our Lady of Sorrows).
The bespoke quality of this volume extends to several individually mounted engravings including a woodcut of the medieval Saint Maria d’Avia that represents her imprisoned and receiving the Eucharist from Christ. The caption below, “Sancta Avia, ora pro nobis,” calls up Avia’s name in the immediate context of the traditional litany of saints. Further along, a small print of the Holy Family signed by the Flemish engraver Pierre Firens (1580–1638) is mounted with the caption “Qui pascitur inter lilia Cant. 2,” evoking the biblical Song of Solomon 6:2: “Ego dilecto meo et dilectus meus mihi qui pascitur inter lilia” (My beloved is gone down into his garden, to the bed of aromatical spices, to feed in the gardens, and to gather lilies).
A third, smaller engraving, “L’Amour en forme de veneur” (Love in the form of a huntsman), is signed by the prolific French engraver and print publisher Jean Messager and taken from a print series by Ludovicus van Leuven, Amoris divini et humani antipathia (1629). Finally, on the rear pastedown is mounted another seventeenth-century engraving of a rose with a circular medallion at its center representing the Flagellation of Christ, with the caption “Ipse vulneratus est propter iniquitates,” echoing the familiar antiphon derived from Isaiah 53:5: “Ipse autem vulneratus est propter iniquitates nostras adtritus est propter scelera nostra disciplina pacis nostrae super eum et livore eius sanati sumus” (“But he was wounded for our iniquities, he was bruised for our sins: the chastisement of our peace was upon him, and by his bruises we are healed”).
—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens
Bibliography
Martina Bagnoli, “Prayers in Code: Books of Hours from Renaissance France,” in Martina Bagnoli (ed.), Prayers in Code: Books of Hours from Renaissance France (Walters Art Museum, 2009), 1–14; Virginia Reinburg, French Books of Hours: Making an Archive of Prayer, c.1400–1600 (Cambridge University Press, 2012); Mary Beth Winn, “Illustrations in Parisian Books of Hours: Borders and Repertoires,” in Kristian Jensen (ed.), Incunabula and their Readers: Printing, Selling and Using Books in the Fifteenth Century (The British Library, 2003), esp. 46–52; Mary Beth Winn and Daniel Sheerin, “Mixing Manuscript and Print: Franciscan Offices, Venetian Borders, and Kerver’s 1510 Hours in Newberry Library Wing MS ZW 5351.1,” La Bibliofilía 114:2 (2012), 161–20; Kathleen Jones (ed.), Butler’s Lives of the Saints: December (Burns & Oates, 2000), 56.
