A Decorated Leaf from a 15th Century French Book of Hours, Part of the Famous Otto Ege Collection

Books of Hours, private devotional books, intended to guide their reader through daily prayer, emerged from the Psalter, a book used by monks and nuns to order their day. With the increase in book production in the thirteenth century, wealthy lay-people began to seek similar books, though with much richer illuminations which became the Book of Hours. This type of book was steadily produced throughout the Middle Ages into the Early Modern period, with the system of prayers remaining static (though variable depending on location), but the illumination and script changing to reflect the contemporary popular styles.

In the 9th century, Charlemagne campaigned to standardize handwriting across the Holy Roman Empire and a simple, clean script emerged, called Carolingian. This script evolved regionally, and the next major script was Gothic, emerging in the thirteenth century. The Gothic script, spiky and compressed, is what we typically see carved in the architecture of cathedrals in France and England, and which survived into twentieth century publishing by way of the German books printed in Fraktur. Gothic script, however, became too difficult to read. In the late fourteenth century Humanists, such as Francesco Petrarch and Poggio Bracciolini, advocated for a return to the simplicity of Roman script; however, their model was a bit later than Roman. The Humanist script is, in fact, a revival of the 9th century Carolingian script. We see in this leaf the clean separation between words and letters, relatively few abbreviations, and letterforms that we as modern readers find familiar (the latter is due to the print font, Times New Roman, being based on the Humanist script).

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, and more text-based, or less eye-catching leaves, creating the more affordable packets to appeal to a wide variety of collectors.

This leaf, likely from one of Ege’s compilations, demonstrates the canvas of constant text onto which the choice of conspicuous consumption was painted. Here, we see the the seminal prayer “Obsecro Te” (“I beseech you”), which is a standard inclusion in Books of Hours. The text is written in what is considered to be the final formal book hand of the Middle Ages.

Quotation from manuscript: “And through the five wounds of thy Son, through the contraction of His flesh because of the great pain of His wounds, through the sorrow thou didst have when thou didst see Him wounded, through the fountains of His blood, through all His passion, through all the sorrow of thy heart, and through the fountains of thy tears, I beseech thee along with all the saints and elect of God.”

More details

Single leaf, France, “Obsecro Te” from a Book of Hours, ca. 1500, likely ex Ege, 223 x 140mm, 31 lines ruled in pink, with crude exterior border, and single-side border of interlocking pattern with blue and gold acanthus and flowers. Humanist script with residual Gothic features. Verso concludes with a line-filler bar. Final line opening the Hours of the Virgin according to the Use of Rome.

Modern handwriting in pencil at the bottom margin is none other than that of Mrs. Ege. The leaf, however, does not appear in the Gwara handlist. Some of Ege’s portfolios only had a handful of leaves. This may be the first one to be identified.