Original leaf from a manuscript Book of Hours. 15 lines of hand-ruled text written in Latin on animal vellum in brown ink. (184 x 125mm – 7 ¼ x 4 7/8’’)
The panel borders contain a highly decorative floral design with flowers, berries, and acanthus leaves in blue, red, green, pink, and burnished gold.
France (Anjou), Use of Angers, c. 1450-75.
This leaf continues the popular medieval prayer, the O Intemerata - a prayer which stresses the faithfulness of the Virgin Mary and John the Evangelist during the Crucifixion: “Incomparabilis…” (incomparable virgin Mary, Mother of God, most pleasing temple of God, the sacred place of the Holy Ghost, the gate of the kingdom of heaven, through whom next unto God the whole world liveth. For the only begotten Son of God, true and omnipotent God, did make of you his most sacred mother: taking in addition from you that most sacred flesh through which the world, which was lost, was saved, by whose own most precious blood the world itself was redeemed and sins remitted, forming it in thy most precious womb from thy most precious blood, and uniting it to his eternal and unchanging Godhead, from which all things good proceed, through which all things are made. Whom I adore. Who gives his own most sacred flesh with his own most precious blood every day to his faithful in the form of bread and wine as a viaticum toward the salutary and vital renewal of souls. He who will have worthily consumed this will have eternal life, but he who will have unworthily consumed it, consumes and drinks judgment just as many times I have done. Through my sin, my sin, my sin, my most grievous sin…).
Angers was the cradle of the Plantagenet dynasty and one of the intellectual centers of Europe during the reign of Rene of Anjou, (1434-80). When this leaf was scribed the two branches of the Plantagenet dynasty, House of Lancaster & House of York, were engaged in the War of the Roses.
Presented in an archival 14 x 11'' mat
