De Brailes Hours Comparison

The De Brailes Hours, a manuscript designed and illuminated by William de Brailes and his workshop at Oxford in the year of 1240, was the first book of hours in the history of manuscripts. Caught in the boom of commercial book trade, in the mid-thirteenth century every artist could have the texts and images of the book selected by its buyer. Specially planned and customized for its patron—a laywoman named Susanna—and her devotional days, the De Brailes Hours’ format, content, and illustrations provided a model for many of the books of hours following in the next two centuries. After roughly seventeen decades (or more), the Bedford Hours was produced under the hands of the Bedford master and his workshop for the marriage of the Duke of Bedford

By examining the similarities and differences of these two manuscripts, one can discern a visible development in the function of books of hours from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries; that is, they gradually began to manifest various intentions of the patrons and carry more responsibilities than just for devotional purposes. In order to benefit the upcoming compare and contrast of the two books of hours, an introduction and a visual analysis of the De Brailes Hours is much needed. First of all, the dimension of the De Brailes Hours is 150 × 125 mm with a text space of 115 × 80 mm, an almost square-shaped size that is much smaller once compared to the Bedford Hours. The pages are made of vellum, bound with straps between two wooden boards that are originally covered in a brick-red

Same with the De Brailes Hours, the Bedford Hours is also a book of hours created for daily devotional prayers of its patron—who is also a female contemporary—with elaborate images and texts. Both of these manuscripts have the same format of a book, which is longer than it is wide. They are both made of vellum, on which there are both Latin and French, and the fonts seem to be of the same kind. There are historiated initials, full-page miniatures, and illustrated scenes from the Bible stories present in both books, as well as ornamentation that do not play a part in the narration. Medallions are used in the Bedford Hours, too, despite the difference in shapes (the De Brailes Hours sometimes have oval medallions, while every medallion in the Bedford Hours is round). In addition, the blank space at the end of each text line in the Bedford Hours is also filled with decoration. Last but not least, both of these two books of hours show a clear intervention of the patrons. There are a few pages cut out from the De Brailes Hours, and there is evidence that shown such was done before the binding under the agreement of the artist himself. There are also additional suffrage prayers with St. Lawrence on them, supposedly added after the book has been planned, which can only be a result of Susanna’s intervention. For the Bedford