Printed Book of Hours

Heures a l’usaige de Rome tout au long sans riens requerir. Avec les figures de l’apocalipse [et] plusieurs aultres figures.
Paris: Gillet Hardouyn, ca. 1515. (BRA0841)

One remarkable publishing trend of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was the production of printed Books of Hours. Replacing hand-illuminated manuscripts with moveable type, woodcuts, and interchangeable marginal motifs, printers such as Gillet Hardouyn in Paris transformed the medieval best-seller into a mass-produced book available to more readers than ever before. This copy, printed on vellum, is embellished with hand-painted gold initials and other ornamentation in imitation of fine manuscripts.