Bibliography & Links

Selected Bibliography

Robert G. Calkins, "Stages of Execution: Procedures of Illumination as Revealed in an Unfinished Book of Hours," Gesta 17.1 (1978), 61-70.
Full Text

L. M. J. Delaissé, "The Importance of Books of Hours for the History of the Medieval Book," in Ursula E. McCracken, Lilian M. C. Randall and Richard H. Randall, Jr., eds., Gatherings in Honor of Dorothy E. Miner, pp. 203-225. Baltimore: Walters Art Gallery, 1974.
HOLLIS Record

John P. Harthan,  Books of Hours.  New York, 1977.
HOLLIS Record

Roger S. Wieck, Time Sanctified: The Book of Hours in Medieval Life and Art. New York, 1988.
HOLLIS Record

Roger S. Wieck, Painted Prayers: The Book of Hours in Medieval and Renaissance Art. New York, 1997.
HOLLIS Record

Web Links

The Wikipedia entry on the Books of Hours has a fairly general introduction to the genre and uses Houghton Library’s MS Richardson 7 as one of its live links presumably because it is fairly typical, digitized from cover to cover and freely available.

A Hypertext Book of Hours is included on the medievalist.net site.

A tutorial on the Book of Hours and an Index to a Selection of Uses is part of the website of the Institute for the Study of Illuminated Manuscripts in Denmark.

This commercial site includes a guide to the basic structure of a Book of Hours and an online tutorial.

You can see and listen to a series of brief lectures by Roger S. Wieck, Curator of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, on the Prayer Book of Queen Claude of France.

You can listen to a lecture by Nigel Morgan, an acknowledged world expert, on English Books of Hours which he delivered at a symposium on illuminated manuscripts at the State Library of Victoria in Australia on 3 April 2008.