The Fitzwilliam Book of Hours (Folio Society Limited Edition)

PANAYOTOVA, Stella (commentary; Keeper of Manuscripts and Printed Books, Fitzwilliam Museum). The Fitzwilliam Book of Hours: MS 1058–1975. London: The Folio Society, 2009. 2 vols.

Small 8vo (230 × 160 mm). Facsimile volume: bound in full blue Jacquard silk brocade, woven exclusively for this edition by Stephen Walters and Sons, Suffolk, blocked in gilt with a design echoing the manuscript's page borders. All edges gilt. Dark blue ribbon page marker. Plain blue endpapers. 370 pp. (185 leaves printed both sides), reproducing the manuscript in full colour throughout, including 63 full-page gilded miniatures and continuous illuminated borders. Commentary volume: dark blue quarter cloth with gilt-lettered spine, over light blue paper boards with paper title label to front board. 144 pp., with index and one colour plate. Both volumes bound by Smith Settle, West Yorkshire, printed by Beacon Press, Sussex, on Furioso paper. Housed together in a blue cloth solander case with decorative gilt lettering to spine. Facsimile limited edition. Limited to 1,180 numbered copies for sale, plus 20 lettered copies not for sale, this being number 18.

The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge holds one of the largest and finest collections of Books of Hours in the world, with more than 250 examples dating from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Among this extraordinary collection, MS 1058–1975 is singled out by the Museum's own curatorial staff as a work of particular distinction.

The manuscript was produced in Flanders around 1510, at the very summit of the tradition of Flemish manuscript illumination. The principal illuminator has been identified as the artist known as the Master of Additional 15677, named for a manuscript attributed to him in the British Library, and his hand is responsible for the sixty-three full-page miniatures that adorn this volume's devotional structure. Around these miniatures, and continuing across every page of text, runs an unbroken sequence of illuminated borders and interspersed with visual jokes and teasing double meanings characteristic of the genre at its most sophisticated.

A Book of Hours was, in the world that produced this manuscript, both a devotional instrument and a status object — a personal prayer book structured around the liturgical hours of the day, customised for its owner with prayers, calendars, and imagery reflecting their particular devotions and their means. Manuscripts of this quality, produced for the wealthiest patrons in Flanders at the height of the form's artistic development, represent the summit of what private devotional book production could achieve before the printing press began, within decades, to make such personalised luxury increasingly rare.

This set includes a commentary volume by Stella Panayotova, Keeper of Manuscripts and Printed Books at the Fitzwilliam Museum and one of the foremost scholars of medieval manuscript illumination. It provides a comprehensive account of the manuscript's production, iconography, and place within the broader tradition of Flemish Books of Hours. The facsimile itself, printed on heavy mock vellum paper with a fidelity of colour reproduction that captures the brilliance of the original miniatures, allows the manuscript to be studied and enjoyed without the restrictions that access to the original, held under museum conditions, would necessarily impose.

Fine. Presents like new throughout. A truly stunning facsimile edition and among the Folio Society's finest work.

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Catalogue Number: HH000660