Bethune Book of Hours
Southern FlandersCirca 1460
107 Folia
The work of a single scribe, the Bethune Breviary-Missal contains services for the first half of the ecclesiastical year (winter-spring). Most probably having its provenance in the Benedictine Abbey of St. Peter's Oudenburg, a village three miles from Bruges, the Breviary-Missal includes two gold bordered illuminations:
"These manuscripts belonged to my father's uncle, Monsignor Felix Bethune (1824-1909)," Ade Bethune later wrote. "My father, Gaston S. de Bethune (1877-1966), inherited them at Uncle Felix's death...I shall now be able to write [my sister] Francoise and announce to her that the Bethune Manuscripts are treasured in good home and that she will be able to share the satisfaction of having become a benefactor in memory of Uncle Felix, whose stories and artistic treasures enchanted our childhood."
In accepting the manuscripts, Dr. Julian Plante, then director of the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library, wrote, "I can say that the Missal-Breviary and the Book of Hours stand above our other manuscripts in artistic merit and the [former] as an important witness to Benedictine liturgical practice."
Though based primarily on the office chanted by monks and nuns, the Book of Hours served the spiritual needs of pious lay men and women, who frequently commissioned scribes and artists to prepare such prayer books suited to their individual tastes and pocketbooks. Scribes produced these books in a wide range of style and elegance, with some quite simple, and others quite elegant.
Nine of the thirteen illuminated pages in the Bethune Book of Hours remain. (Folia containing illuminations for the hours of None, Vespers, and Compline of the Hours of the Virgin have been excised.)
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