Browse Items (1319 total)

Breviaries consisted of psalms, antiphons, lectionary, martyrology, and other features. This breviary for Benedictine Use includes calendrical notes that point to a composition date circa 1431 and also includes an indulgence approved in 1431 by Pope…

The missal is a Christian service book that provides the texts necessary for the celebration of the Mass by a priest. It includes chants, prayers, scriptural readings, and directions (rubrics) written in red. The presence of location specific saints…

This portable breviary, used by a Franciscan friar in Italy during the fifteenth century, includes a calendar for the use of Rome with later handwritten additions indicating the feasts of several Franciscan saints. Illuminated with northern Italian…

Book is in complete condition which is rare but also shows the widespread and prolonged use of the item. Early missals like this one were printed without notation for the owner to fill in.

This 1706 version of the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer was specifically designed to fit a choir desk or lectern for public prayer. The large engraved frontispiece is a copy of that produced for the 1662 edition, showing worshippers…

This Quran is written in fine Arabic script with an interlinear Persian translation in red ink and manuscript annotations in the margins. First leaves illuminated with elaborate carpet borders of crimson, blue, gold, etc. Gilded borders and marginal…

Extremely colorful and resplendent with burnished gold leaf, the tiny book features fifteen miniatures and ten lively vignettes of the Labors of the Months in the calendar, each set within pinnacled Gothic niches and surrounded in the margins by…

Although the original owner and talented illuminator of this Book of Hours both remain unknown, the scribe who transcribed the text signed his name on folio 111 recto as "Biagio di Piero di Jacopo da Fiesole." The manuscript features four full-page…

A modest Book of Hours written in gothic batarde script in brown, red, and blue ink with numerous French rubrics, this manuscript includes four full-page miniatures. Ten additional pages feature large illuminated initials and elaborate borders…

This remarkable manuscript was illuminated by a Flemish-trained artist of great skill. It was produced after 1519, as it contains a commemoration and accompanying miniature of St. Franciscus de Paulo, who was canonized by Leo X that year. The program…

An incomplete Book of Hours that consists of at least three different manuscript fragments. The preserved sections of the oldest manuscript are likely from a Book of Hours for Troyes Use.

One 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 created a…

Example of one-volume portable Bibles popular in the thirteenth century. Includes decorated initials and filigree pen work in the margins.

This devotional and instructional volume can be read in either of two directions. The rectos of each leaf are numbered and can be read sequentially while the versos are printed upside down and also numbered for reading in a separate order and…

Produced in Flanders for use in England, this richly illuminated manuscript includes a set of eight illustrations of scenes from the Infancy of Christ, such as the Annunciation and the Nativity, which traditionally introduced the eight sections of…

Produced for instruction in the basic doctrines of the Catholic faith, this unusual book consists of full-page painted images accompanied by brief explanations written in Dutch on the facing pages. Later owned by the Carmelite friars of Nijmegen in…

In this Latin Bible printed in 1483, a late sixteenth-century English reader has inserted paper slips bearing handwritten English prologues for each book of the Bible. These added texts were transcribed directly from the prologues published in the…

Published by one of Rome's leading sixteenth-century engravers, this striking devotional image depicts St. Benedict of Nursia (ca. 480–543), the founder of Western monasticism. The broadside includes a central image of the saint and fourteen…

Intended to be used at Christmas time, this broadside provides the texts for a selection of fourteen popular carols that was not otherwise available in a hymnal. The inexpensive and ephemeral nature of the broadside is underlined by the low quality…

Intended for young readers, this rhyming German lithographic broadside narrates the story of Christ's Passion by means of a rebus, combining printed text and sixty-three hand colored images that stand in for particular words.

This French calendrical manual features several fold-out plates, three volvelles, twelve sliding paper strips for tracking the weekdays of every month, and the exhibited adjustable table for determining the major moveable feasts. This table utilizes…

This Ethiopian manuscript on parchment is preserved with its sturdy leather folding case, called a maḫdär, which features a shoulder strap. The carrying case was essential for the daily use of the book, as it not only gave protection to the book, but…

Known as a Breverl, this devotional amulet belongs to a genre that enjoyed widespread popularity among Catholics in eighteenth-century Bavaria and Austria and was believed to offer talismanic protection to its owner. It usually consisted of a printed…

Engraved devotional tryptich on paper depicting the Virgin and Child; both figures enshrined at center, depicted as hovering over ill or injured person to left and right. The single sheet of paper was cut and folded to form a small envelope that…

Miniature manuscript "library" of pious thoughts; each with a German keyword written on a small card, all housed alphabetically in six slipcase "volumes" with gilt red morocco spines (A-D; E-H; I-M; N-Q; R-U; V-Z) within a book-shaped box (9.5 cm).
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