The Bedford Hours: The Making of a Medieval Masterpiece (review)

This translation of König’s contribution to the commentary volume of the complete facsimile published in 2006 by Faksimile Verlag Luzern of the Bedford Hours makes this important study available to a wider audience. Named after its first known owner, John, Duke of Bedford, the regent of France from 1422 until his death in 1435, the Bedford Hours is one of the treasures of the British Library (Add. MS 18850). König places its makers in the contexts of early-fifteenth-century French manuscript illumination and of European art in general. He understands the Bedford Hours as a totality produced by distinct makers in a number of stages extending from perhaps as early as 1410 until about 1430. In tracing the history of the book, König is attentive to the codicological clues presented by the physical structure of the book as well as to its distinct decorative and pictorial elements. König’s keen observation of style allows him to make connections between the contributions of the makers of the Bedford Hours and related manuscripts. His identification of the different stages in the production of the Bedford Hours is convincing.

König returns to a thesis first proposed by Paul Durrieu of identifying the Bedford Master with the illuminator Haincelin de Haguenau, documented in Paris between 1403 and 1415.² König finds clues to the origins of the Bedford style in Alsace or the Upper Rhine, the presumed homeland of Haincelin. The documentation for Haincelin de Haguenau as an enlumineur en titre and valet de chambre of the dauphin, Louis, duc de Guyenne, from 1409 allows König to identify the contributions of Haincelin in books associated with the dauphin. These include the Térence des ducs (Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 664), a Breviary in Châteauroux (Bibliothèque municipale, MS 2), and an unfinished Missal (Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, MS 406). These manuscripts contain distinctive acanthus borders and miniature styles associated with the Bedford Master. König attributes these works to Haincelin de Haguenau. He links the acanthus borders in these manuscripts with those in a book of hours in Oxford (Bodleian Library, MS Douce 144), the earliest securely dated Parisian manuscript to use acanthus borders.³

While these associations are convincing, König’s emphasis on the acanthus decoration in these manuscripts leads him to overlook the traditional painted and penned rinceaux decoration found on the pages attributed to Haincelin de Haguenau. Study of the rinceaux decoration as well as the acanthus decoration points to a larger group of manuscripts that can be associated with this artisan. The rinceaux decoration of the miniature pages in Douce 144 can be compared to that of two copies of Jean Petit’s Justification du duc de Bourgogne: Paris, BnF, MS fr. 5733 and Vienna, ONB, MS 2657. This hand was responsible for the decoration of the outer border of the frontispiece as well as a good part of the decoration of the Livre de la Chasse manuscript in New York (Pierpont Morgan Library, M. 1044). The same combination of acanthus and rinceaux decoration can be found in Books of Hours in London (British Library, Add. 30899), Philadelphia (Philadelphia, Free Library, Widener 6), and Vienna (ONB, MS 1840). The uniformity in the treatment of the rinceaux and acanthus decoration in these manuscripts makes it likely that they are all the work of the same hand, possibly Haincelin de Haguenau. However, the attribution of the decoration of the Bedford Hours to this artisan is not convincing. More detailed study of these manuscripts and their relationship to the Bedford Hours is warranted. Rather than understanding Haincelin de Haguenau as the Bedford Master, it appears that he was one of a number of artisans working in a shared style, much like the Limbourg Brothers shared a common style. This conclusion echoes those of...