In the course of the fourteenth century the Hours of the Blessed Virgin superseded the Psalter as the popular book of devotions for lay use. Throughout the fifteenth century magnificently illuminated manuscript copies were produced in France in great numbers, and it is thus not surprising that it was in illustrated editions of this book that French printers and publishers achieved their most noteworthy success.

Each of the Hours, we are told, had its mystical reference to some event in the lives of the Blessed Virgin and our Lord. Lauds referred to the visit of Mary to Elizabeth, Prime to the Nativity, Terce to the Angels' Message to the Shepherds, Sext to the Adoration by the Magi, Nones to the Circumcision, Vespers to the Flight into Egypt, Compline to the Assumption of the Virgin. The subsidiary Hours of the Passion naturally suggested the Crucifixion or, less frequently, the Invention or finding of the Cross by the Emperor Constantine, and those of the Holy Spirit the Day of Pentecost. We have here the subjects for nine pictures, which were almost invariably heralded by one of the Annunciation, and might easily be increased by a representation of the Adoration by the Shepherds, of the Murder of the Innocents, and the Death of the Virgin. Moreover, the contents of Books of Hours were gradually enlarged till they deserved the title, which has been given them, of the Lay-Folk's Prayer-Book. A typical Book of Hours would contain—

(i.) A Kalendar (one picture).

(ii.) Passages from the Gospels on the Passion of Christ. (One to three pictures.)

(iii.) Private Prayers.

(iv.) The Hours themselves—Horae intemeratae beatae Mariae Virginis—with the subsidiary Hours of the Passion and of the Holy Ghost. (Nine to thirteen pictures.)

(v.) The Seven Penitential Psalms. (One or two pictures.)

(vi.) The Litany of the Saints.

(vii.) The Vigils of the Dead. (One to four pictures.)

(viii.) Seven Psalms on Christ's Passion.

The Kalendar usually contained poetical directions for the preservation of health, and was therefore preluded by a rather ghastly anatomical picture of a man. The passages from the Gospel, which began with the first chapter of S. John, were illustrated by a picture of the evangelist's martyrdom, and the Passion by one of the Kiss of Judas, or of the Crucifixion. To the Penitential Psalms were sometimes prefixed pictures of Bathsheba bathing on her housetop, and of the death of Uriah, or, more rarely, of an angel appearing to David with weapons in his hand, signifying the three punishments between which he must choose for his sin in numbering the people. The Litany of the Saints offered too wide a field for full-page cuts to be assigned it, but was often illustrated by smaller ones set in the text. To the Vigils of the Dead the commonest illustrations at first were those of 'Les Trois Vifs et Les Trois Morts,' three gay cavaliers meeting their own grinning corpses. 'Dives and Lazarus' was first joined with these and afterwards superseded them. We also find pictures of the Day of Judgment, the Entombment, and in one instance of a funeral. Two illustrations in honour of the Eucharist are also of common occurrence—one of angels upholding a chalice,[19] the other of the Vision of S. Gregory, when he saw the crucified Christ appearing on the altar. If we add to these a picture of the Tree of Jesse, and another of the Church in heaven and on earth, we shall have exhausted the list of subjects which appear with any frequency, though pictures of the Creation and Fall, of David and Goliath, of the Descent from the Cross, and perhaps one or two others may occasionally be found. It should be mentioned that the illustrations to the Psalms on the Passion are usually repeated from others previously used, but putting these on one side, it will be found that we have accounted for the subjects of some five-and-twenty pictures, and this is in excess of the number found in any one book, which varies from six to twenty-two.

In some of the earlier Horae, as we shall see, the printers contented themselves with these large illustrations, and in others surrounded the text with purely decorative borders of flowers and birds. But in a typical edition the borders consist of a number of small blocks or plates, the figures in which reinforced the teaching of the main illustrations. In an edition printed by Jean Du PrÉ in February 1488-9, five pages are devoted to an explanation of these vignettes, and it will not be a waste of space to quote a few lines:

¶Cest le repertoire des histoires & figures de la bible tant du vieilz testament que du nouueau contenues dedens les vignettes de ces presentes heures imprimees en cuyure. En chascune desquelles vignettes sont contenues deux figures du vieilz testament signifians une vraye histoire du nouueau. Comme il appert par les chapitres cottez et alleguez au propos tant en latin que francoys en chascune desdits figures et histoires. ¶Et premierement en la pagee [sic] ensuyuante listoire de lannunciation est prefiguree la natiuite nostre dame. comme il appert par les deux figures de iesse et balaan. prouue par le liure de isaye, xi chapitre et des nombres xxiiii. chap. ¶Item en lautre pagee ensuyuante par Rebecca et Sara est entendu comme nostre dame fut espousee a ioseph. ainsi qu'on lit en genese xxiiii. c. & tho. vi.

Thus we see that, as first planned, the border vignettes formed a continuous series illustrating historically the teaching of the Horae by reference to Old Testament types, with chapter and verse for their significance. It will be noticed also that it is distinctly stated that the vignettes in this edition were 'imprimÉes en cuyvre,' printed on copper. Two months later, in an edition published by Antoine VÉrard (April 5, 1489), the same table was reproduced with very slight alterations. The words 'en cuyvre' were then omitted, but 'imprimÉes' was left in, awkwardly enough. There can be no doubt that the omission was deliberate, and we have thus two statements which reinforce the opinion of the best experts, that both wood and copper were employed in engraving different editions of these designs.

These Old Testament types do not appear to have long retained their popularity, and were soon superseded by a less continuous form of illustration. The Calendar offered an excuse for introducing one series of vignettes of the sports and occupations of each month, another of the signs of the zodiac, and a third giving pictures of the saints in connection with the days on which they were commemorated. The Gospels of the Passion were illustrated by vignettes on the same subject; the Hours themselves by a long series on the lives of Christ and of the Blessed Virgin. The Dance of Death was brought in to illustrate the Vigils of the Dead, and relief was given by some charming scenes of hunting and rural life, which formed the border to the Private Prayers and the Litany of the Saints. In addition to these, we have representations of the Prophets and Sibyls, of the Cardinal Virtues, and the Lives of the Saints, and an admixture of purely decorative or grotesque designs. Between the vignettes spaces were often left, which were filled in, sometimes with illustrative texts, sometimes with a continuous prayer or exhortation, either in French or Latin. Thus in the preliminary leaves of some of the Horae the text read:

Tout bon loyal et vaillant catholique qui commencer aucune euure ymagine doit inuoquer en toute sa pratique premierement la puissance diuine par ce beau nom iesus qui illumine tout cueur humain & tout entendement. Cest en tout fait ung beau commencement:

and when we turn to the Gospels of the Passion we find a prayer beginning 'Protecteur des bons catholiques donne nous croire tellement les paroles euangeliques,' &c. In VÉrard's earlier editions the book would have to be turned round to read the words on the lower border, but in Pigouchet's this defect was remedied, so that we are left free to imagine that the prayer was meant for devotional use, and not merely as a decoration.

The chief firms employed in the production of these beautiful prayer-books during the fifteenth century were (i.) Jean du PrÉ; (ii.) Antoine VÉrard; (iii.) Philippe Pigouchet, working chiefly for Simon Vostre, a publisher, but also for De Marnef, Laurens Philippe, and occasionally on his own account; (iv.) Thielman Kerver. The proportion of dated and undated editions is about equal, and with careful study it ought to be possible to trace the career of each of the important firms, noting when each new illustration or vignette makes its first appearance. Unfortunately great confusion has been introduced into the bibliography of Horae by the presence in them of calendars, mostly for twenty years, giving the dates of the moveable feasts. All that these calendars show is that the edition in which they occur must have been printed before, probably at least five or six years before, the last year for which they are reckoned. The fact that, e.g., the editions printed by Pigouchet in August and September 1498 have the 1488 to 1508 calendar is by itself sufficient to prove that they cannot do more than this. Unluckily a connection has often been assumed between the first year of the calendar and the year of publication—e.g. undated Horae with the calendar for 1488-1508 are frequently ascribed on that ground only to 1488, or with perverse ingenuity to 1487; as if a calendar of the moveable feasts were like an annual almanac, and must necessarily be printed in readiness for the new year. Great confusion has thus been caused, so that it is impossible to trust any conjectural date for an Horae unless we know the grounds on which it is based.

The earliest dated French Horae was finished by Antoine VÉrard on August 21, 1486, and followed by another the next year dated July 7, 1487; but the cuts in both of these are small and rude, mere guides to an illuminator, and as VÉrard's later editions bring him into connection with other publishers, it will be convenient to consider first three editions by Jean Du PrÉ, all of which are of great interest. The one which we must rank as the earliest is an undated Hore ad vsum Romanum, signed 'Jo. de Prato' (i.e. J. Du PrÉ) which can be shown to have been issued some little time before Feb. 19, 1488-9, the date of a Psalter printed by Antoine Cayllaut in which one of the cuts appears in a more worn condition. The text measures 4½ in. by 3¼. This is the only one of the three which was known to Brunet, whose list of Horae in the fifth volume of his Manuel du Libraire, long as it is, is very incomplete. Its text, including the borders, measures 5-5/8 in. by 3-5/8, and in addition to Du PrÉ's mark and the anatomical man is illustrated by nineteen engravings. Nine of these are the usual illustrations to the Hours themselves, and the subsidiary Hours of the Passion and of the Holy Ghost. The Penitential Psalms are illustrated by David's Bathsheba and the Death of Uriah, and the Vigils of the Dead by a figure of Death. In addition to these we have the Fall of Lucifer, Descent from the Cross, with emblems of the four evangelists, a figure of the Trinity, the Virgin and Child in glory, S. Christopher, S. Mary Magdalen, and the Vision of S. Gregory, with small pictures from the life of Christ and figures of the Saints. The borders carry out the plan of the table of vignettes, containing three scenes from the Bible and three heads, with explanatory text, on each page throughout the greater part of the book. Towards the end these are replaced by figures of saints and angels. The artist's designs have been rather spoilt by the engraver, whose strokes are frequently much too black.

The second of Du PrÉ's editions is a very interesting book, for the illustrations are printed in three colours—blue, red, and green. It is dated 1490, but without the mention of any month. It has some unusual illustrations—e.g. the three Maries with the body of Christ, David and Goliath, Lazarus in Abraham's bosom and Dives in torment, and S. Christopher. Many of the pages are without vignettes, and where these occur they are not joined neatly together to form a continuous border, but set, rather at haphazard, about the margin. Pictures and vignettes are printed sometimes in the same, sometimes in different colours. The page of text measures 5½ in. by 4, or without borders, 4 by 2½.

The last edition known to me by Du PrÉ is undated, and has a Latin title-page, Hore ad usum Romanum. Jo. de Prato. The text with borders measures 4½ in. by 3½. Its borders are similar to those of the large folios of the period, having a floral groundwork, into which birds, figures of men and women, angels and grotesques are introduced. To make up for the lack of vignettes there are seven small illustrations of the Passion set in the text. For the larger illustrations, which appear to be woodcuts, Du PrÉ again varied his subjects, introducing for the only time in these three editions Les Trois Vifs et Les Trois Morts, reduced reproductions of which are here given.

It was not to be expected that so enterprising a publisher as VÉrard would rest content with the very unpretentious Horae he produced in 1486 and 1487, but the precise date at which he first made a more ambitious essay is not easy to fix. The undated edition of his Grandes Heures for the use of Rome is constantly assigned to 1488, for no other reason than that it contains the 1488-1508 Almanac, though the breaks in the borders suffice to show that this was not the first appearance of the blocks. At the library at Toulouse there is said to be a VÉrard Horae ad usum Romanum dated April 3, 1488, that is, as the French year at this time began, at Easter, 1489, and this may be the first of VÉrard's new editions. This was followed the next year by the first edition of his Grandes Heures, with thirteen woodcuts and a frontispiece. I have not been fortunate enough to see a copy of either of these editions, but three undated Horae in the British Museum, printed by VÉrard, seem to belong to the same type as the Grandes Heures. In addition to a poorly cut Vision of Heaven, the Anatomical Man, and the Chalice, they contain, in varying order, fourteen large woodcuts—(i.) The Fall of Lucifer; (ii.) the history of Adam and Eve; (iii.) a double picture, the upper half showing the strife between Mercy, Justice, Peace, and Reason in the presence of God, and the lower half the Annunciation, which followed the triumph of Mercy; (iv.) the Marriage of Joseph and Mary; (v.) the Invention of the Cross; (vi.) the Gift of the Spirit; (vii.) a double picture of the Nativity and the Adoration by the Shepherds; (viii.) the Adoration by the Magi; (ix.) a double picture of the Annunciation to the Shepherds and of peasants dancing round a tree; (x.) the Circumcision; (xi.) the Killing of the Innocents; (xii.) the Crowning of the Virgin; (xiii.) David entering a castle, with the words 'Tibi soli peccavi,'—against Thee only have I sinned,—issuing from his mouth; (xiv.) a funeral service, the hearse standing before the altar. The cut of the Message to the Shepherds here shown will give a fair idea of the characteristics of this series, as well as of the borders by which they were accompanied.[20] A full list of the larger subjects has been given because some of them often occur in later editions joined with other pictures of the school of Pigouchet, and it is useful to be able to fix their origin at a glance.[21] Six of them form the only large illustrations in the little Horae, printed for VÉrard, April 5, 1489, in which, as we have already noted, the words 'on copper' appear to have been deliberately omitted from the table of the vignettes. The size of the Grandes Heures is 8 in. by 5, that of the edition of April 1489, 6 in. by 4. Brunet enumerates altogether thirty editions of Horae printed by VÉrard, the last of which bearing a date belongs to the year 1510. So far as I am acquainted with them these later editions have few distinguishing characteristics, but are mostly made up with illustrations designed for other firms.

We come now to the most celebrated of all the series of Horae, those printed by Pigouchet, chiefly for Simon Vostre. Brunet in his list rightly discredits the existence of an edition by this printer dated as early as January 5, 1486. He accepts, however, and briefly describes as if he had himself seen, one of September 16, 1488, and mentions also an edition printed April 8, 1488-9. No copy of either of these editions has come to light during the twenty years in which the present writer has been interested in Horae, and it seems fairly certain that Pigouchet's first illustrated work is to be found in an edition Ad usum Parisiensem, dated December 1, 1491. The large cuts in this are fairly good, but a little stiff; the small border-cuts include a long set of incidents in the life of Christ with Old Testament types after the manner of the Biblia Pauperum. A Horae of May 8, 1492, substitutes floral borders for these little pictures. In another set of editions in which Pigouchet was concerned, apparently between 1493 and 1495, the borders are made up of vignettes of very varying size, which may be recognised by many of them being marked with Gothic letters, mostly large minuscules. Sometimes one, sometimes two, vignettes thus lettered occur on a page, and we may presume that the lettering, which is certainly a disfigurement, was intended to facilitate the arrangement of the borders. In these Horae, also, the designs are comparatively coarse and poor. Some of the large illustrations are divided into an upper compartment, containing the main subject, and two lower compartments, containing its 'types.'

Certainly by 1496, and possibly in earlier editions which I have not seen, Pigouchet had arrived at his typical style, of which a good specimen-page is given in our illustration from the edition of August 22, 1498. His original idea appears to have been for editions with a page of text measuring 5½ in. by 3½, such as he issued on April 17, 1496, and January 18, 1496-97. But at least as early as November 4, 1497, he added another inch both to the height and breadth of his page by the insertion of the little figures, which will be noticed at the left of the lower corner and on the right at the top. The extra inch was valuable, for it enabled him to surround his large illustrations with vignettes, but the borders themselves are not improved by them, for they mar the rich effect of the best work in which the backgrounds are of black with pricks of white.

These same dotted backgrounds, which we have already noticed as present in some of the finest of the printers' marks, appear also in three plates, which are found in the 1498 editions, and thenceforward, but, as far as I can ascertain, not earlier. These three plates illustrate (i.) the Tree of Jesse; (ii.) the Church Militant and Triumphant; (iii.) the Adoration of the Shepherds. All three plates are of great beauty, and the last is noticeable for the names—'Mahault,' 'Aloris,' 'Alison,' 'Gobin le Gay,' and 'le beau Roger'—which are assigned to the shepherds and their wives, and which are the same as those by which they are known in the French mystery-plays. The artists who used these dotted backgrounds evidently viewed the Horae rather from the mystery-play standpoint. They cared little for the 'types' which VÉrard and Du PrÉ so carefully explained in their early editions, but delighted in the Dance of Death and in scenes of hunting and rural life, or failing these in grotesques. They placed their talents at the disposal of religion, but they bargained to be allowed to introduce a good deal of humour as well.

The best French Horae were all published within about ten years. During this decade, which just overlaps the fifteenth century, the only serious rival of Pigouchet was Thielman Kerver, who began printing in 1497, and by dint of close imitation approached very near indeed to Pigouchet's success. With the lessening of Pigouchet's activity about 1505, there came an after-flood of bad taste, which swept everything before it. The old French designs were displaced by reproductions of German work utterly unsuited to the French types and ornaments, and along with these there came an equally disastrous substitution of florid Renaissance borders of pillars and cherubs for Pigouchet's charming vignettes and hunting scenes. Thielman Kerver, who had begun with better things, soon made his surrender to the new fashion, and his firm continued to print Horae, for which it is difficult to find a good word until about 1556. His activity was more than equalled by Gilles Hardouyn, who with his successors was responsible for some seventy editions during the first half of the sixteenth century. Guillaume Eustace, Guillaume Godard, and FranÇois Regnault were less formidable competitors, and besides these some thirty or forty editions are attributable to other printers.

On January 16th (or to use the affected style of the colophon itself, 'xvii. Kal. Febr.'), 1525, Geoffroy Tory, the scholar, artist, and printer, in conjunction with his friend Simon Colines, brought out a Horae, which is certainly not open to the charge of bad taste. The printed page measures 6¼ in. by 3¾, the type used is a delicate Roman letter with a slight employment of red ink, but no hand work, the borders are in the most delicate style of the Renaissance. The illustrations number twelve, of which one, that of the Annunciation, occupies two pages. There are no unusual subjects, except that in the picture of the Crucifixion Tory displays his classical pedantry by surrounding the central picture with four vignettes illustrating Virgil's 'Sic vos non vobis' quatrain, on the sheep, the bees, the birds, and the oxen, whose life enriches others but not themselves. In the picture of the Adoration by the Magi, here given, Tory obtains an unusually rich effect by the figure of the negro. He repeats this, on a smaller scale, in the black raven, croaking Cras, Cras, in the picture of the Triumph of Death. The tone of the other illustrations is rather thin, and the length of the faces and slight angularity in the figures (effects which Tory, the most affected of artists, no doubt deliberately sought for) cause them just to fall short of beauty. Compared, however, with the contemporary editions of other printers, Tory's Horae seem possessed of every beauty. We know of five editions before his death or retirement in 1533, and of some seven others before the close of the half century. After 1550 the publication of Horae in France almost entirely ceased, but some pretty editions were issued at Antwerp by the French printer Christopher Plantin in 1565 and 1575, and perhaps in other years. The decree of Pope Pius V. making the use of the Office no longer obligatory on the clergy seems to have been preceded by a great falling off of the popularity of the Hours among the laity, in whom the booksellers had found their chief customers, and after 1568 a very few editions sufficed to supply the demand of those who were still wedded to their use.

[19] I join this with the other illustration as having a Eucharistic significance, but in one of VÉrard's editions the full explanation is given: 'Cest la mesure de la playe du coste de notre seigneur iesucrist qui fut apportee de Constantinople au noble empereur Saint Charlemaine afin que nulz ennemys ne luy peussent nuire en bataille.'