The Hours of Boussu (Part 2)

This is the second set of image from the Hours of Boussu, an extraordinarily rich illustrated books of Hours ever made, also called the Hours of Isabelle de Lalaing, after its original owner, made sometime after 1490 by an anonymous artist known as the Master of Antoine Rolin. This second part contains the images which accompany the Office of the Holy Cross (or ‘of the Passion’), the Penitential Psalms, the Litany of the Saints, the Athanasian Creed, the Suffrages, and the Office of the Dead.  

The Office of the Holy Cross is a Little Office similar in conception to that of the Virgin Mary, but much shorter. Each Hour consists of a brief hymn (two or three stanzas), an antiphon, but no psalmody, a versicle, and a prayer. (There does exist a longer version, which includes psalms, readings at Matins, etc., but which never caught on.) In this particular version, there is no antiphon, and there are two prayers per Hour, but what is much more notable is the highly elaborate and detailed repertoire of pictures that come with it. At Matins, we have the prayer in the garden, with the sleeping apostles in the foreground, and in the background, the soldiers coming from Jerusalem to arrest the Lord.

The beginning text block of each Hour includes not just a further image of the Passion, but also the instruments thereof in the decorative border. Here we see Christ standing before Pilate in the large letter D; in the border, the drops of blood which He shed while praying the garden (Luke 22, 44), and the Eucharistic symbol of the pelican, feeding its children (as medievals believed) with blood from its own breast.

The Office of the Cross has no Lauds distinct from Matins. Before Prime, the scourging at the column.

In the large letter, Christ blindfolded and buffeted by the soldiers; in the border, the scourges and whips.

Before Terce, the crowning with thorns.

In the large letter, the Ecce homo episode (John 19, 5); in the border, the crown of thorns, and many detached individual thorns. The branches among them seem to be palms, and perhaps this is a reminder of the fact that many of the people who acclaimed Our Lord as the Son of David on Palm Sunday were the same ones crying out, “Crucify him!” on Good Friday.

At Sext, the carrying of the Cross.

In the large letter, Our Lord is nailed to the Cross; in the border, the nails and the hammer, and the weeping eyes of those who beheld His sufferings.

At None, Christ on the Cross between the two thieves, with the Virgin Mary, St John, Mary Magdalene and Mary of Cleophas.

In the large letter, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus come with their servants to take the Lord’s body down from the cross. In the border, the darkness which accompanies the Lord’s death, and the bodies rising from the grave, as described in Matthew 27, 45 and 52-53.

At Vespers, the body of Christ is taken down from the Cross.

In the large letter, the Virgin holding the body of Christ before it is laid in the tomb, in the border, the words of the gradual of Holy Thursday and the Office of the Triduum (Phil. 2 8), “Christ has become for us obedient unto death, the death of the Cross.”

At Compline, the Lord is laid in the tomb.

In the large letter, the woman and St John depart from the tomb. The border of flowers on a trellis represents the garden where the tomb was located.

Most manuscripts that include the Hours of the Cross also include a similarly constructed set of Hours of the Holy Spirit; in this case, however, there is only one image to accompany them, before Matins. I confess that I am stumped by the iconography here, which seems to show Our Lord struggling to get into or out of a red garment, as the Holy Spirit descends upon the Virgin Mary and the Apostles.

The border around the first text block is filled with a large variety of birds, interspersed with a few flies and butterflies.

Before the Penitential Psalms is placed a full-page image of David, their principal author, slaying Goliath, symbolically representing the idea that prayer destroys the vices. Medieval commentators on the liturgy and the psalms often referred to the idea that each penitential psalm corresponded specifically to one of the seven capital vices.

In the large letter, David triumphantly holds aloft the decapitated head of Goliath. In the border are four sets of crossed arrows, a reference to the words of Psalm 37, 3, “For thy arrows are fastened in me.” At the lower right hand corner, King David is seen praying for the end to the plague that is described in the last chapter of II Samuel, symbolized by arrows; this episode often accompanies the Penitential Psalms in books of Hours. The other six psalms have no narrative pictures with them.

There follows the Litany of the Saints, which also has no pictures with it, since the Saints are amply represented in the suffrages (described below.) Then comes the Creed of St Athanasius, which is preceded by this image of the Holy Trinity.

The beginning of the Creed; it is not clear who the figure sitting at a reading desk in the large letter is supposed to be.

Most books of Hours include a number of suffrages, which is to say, commemorations of the Saints, consisting of the antiphons, versicles and prayers taken from their respective Offices. In some manuscripts, the iconography of the accompanying images is extremely rich; the book of Hours of Catherine of Cleves is a very well known example. In this case, there are more than 20 of them, and the images are small and not very detailed, so one example will suffice, the last one, which generally concludes the series is most versions of the Divine Office, a prayer for peace.

The last part of the book is taken up mostly with the Office of the Dead. Here we see Christ raising Lazarus; the scene is set in a medieval churchyard.

The beginning of Vespers, with a black border filled with a skull-and-bones motif. On the banderoles between them is written, “Cogita mori – think about death.”

Most of the marginal decorations have no connection to the text, but here the peacock is most likely deliberately chosen as a symbol of the resurrection of the body. This is a very ancient tradition, grounded in the fact that since peacocks are mostly feather, and their meat is very salty, it takes forever for them to rot when they die, and it was popularly believed that they did not decay at all.
 

Before Lauds of the Dead, an image of a woman dying in her bed, with clergy and members of her family praying for her. Through the window are seen God in heaven, and hell filled with fire and devils.

The beginning of the first Psalm of Lauds, the Miserere.