Leaf from a Book of Hours: Text with Illustrated Border (verso)

This leaf came from a highly customized and lavish book of hours made in Rouen, a major center for book production. Intended for a female patron, the original book, to which the museum owns three leaves, contained numerous illuminations and marginalia. The book was whole until the 1980s, when it was dismembered and the leaves sold separately. Other leaves from the same book are now in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, and the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England. This leaf precedes the opening of the Hours of the Virgin and the traditional first scene of the Annunciation.

Credit: The Jeanne Miles Blackburn Collection