Christian Works : Book of Hours (Sarum Use)

Christian Works

<p style='text-align: justify;'> A fourteenth-century English <i>Book of Hours</i>, according to the Sarum Rite, stunningly illustrated with several full-page saints' portraits opening the work and the main text accompanied by a dazzling flurry of borders, marginalia and initials. Some saints' names featuring in the calendar with which the book opens suggest that it may have been originally produced according to practice local to the East Midlands, perhaps Lincoln, but the additions made to the calendar very early on in its life locate it firmly in East Anglia, and particularly, perhaps, around Ely and Huntingdon. The names of owners, Alice de Reydon, and John and Matilda Stranle, with their birth and death dates added alongside those saints, tell a story of continual spiritual practice and personal devotion as it passed from hand to hand. </p><p style='text-align: justify;'>This item was included in the Library’s 600th anniversary exhibition <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk/linesofthought/artifacts/personalising-a-prayer-book/'><i>Lines of Thought: Discoveries that changed the world</i></a>.</p>