The Stag, the Butterfly & the Bird: An Ornate 15th Century French Manuscript from a Well Known Collection, Assembled by Otto Ege in the 1950s

The stag was one of many animals known to represent Christ, in part because of the shedding and regrowing of antlers as a symbolic shedding of sin and renewal of the spirit. The butterfly could represent the soul.

 

Otto Ege, famed for his creation of portfolios of medieval manuscript leaves in the 1950s, had the objective of putting a medieval manuscript in every American home. His methodology was to create tiered packets, with the most luxurious pieces of each manuscript constituting higher status packets, while more text-based, or less eye-catching leaves, created the more affordable packets to appeal to a wide variety of collectors.

The manuscript

Heavily ornamented le­af from a fifteenth century French Book of Hours which must have been placed among the more luxurious packets, most of which have now been dispersed leaf-by-leaf. This is from a larger book Book of Hours likely created for an emerging class of wealthy patrons. Intertwined in the floral borders of this leaf, which opens the Hours of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Incipit hore Beate Marie virginis) for the Use of the Church of Rome, it has a leaping, spotted stag in the bottom margin. The right hand margin reveals a yellow bird with a red breast (slightly above the ornamental point in the text border), while the top margin contains an orange butterfly with black spots.

The medieval readership would have associated these animals with the allegorical lessons revealed by another popular genre of book, the Bestiary. The stag was one of many animals known to represent Christ, for reasons described above. Similarly, the butterfly, which became more common in the borders of manuscripts from the late 13th century onward, represented the soul (Nazari, “Chasing Butterflies in Medieval Europe”, 2014). The bird, however, remains a bit of a mystery. Without being able to identify the species, the exact bestiary meaning is obscured. Perhaps a canary, perhaps a robin, certainly a song bird of sorts, a general symbolic meaning may draw out the idea of the sung liturgy as a method of teaching (Leach, Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages, 2007).

Who was being taught and what were they being taught? The Book of Hours teaches its reader how to interact with the complex structure of prayers and liturgy in order to be pleasing to God. In a more literal sense, children were taught to read from Books of Hours (Hindman, Medieval Must Haves: Books of Hours, 2018).

The beautiful swirls of acanthus (a plant often depicted in the borders of medieval manuscripts, and often with fantastic colours beyond nature) and floral penwork are highlighted with shellgold embellishment, bringing the eye to the 5-line illuminated initial D, starting the word Domine (God). This initial contains an intricate pattern of vines and leaves which extend to create a border around the text.

More details

France, 15th c., Leaf of Book of Hours, Hours of the Virgin, Use of Rome. Inhabited border. 138x102mm. Single column, 17 lines. Reference: Gwara Handlist #192.