Fragmented Hours: The Biography of a Printed Devotional Book by Thielman Kerver

Abstract

As the most richly illustrated and widely-owned texts of the late medieval and early modern eras, books of hours are essential to the study of art, religion, and the history of the book. Fragmented and altered books, while perhaps less coveted, are of particular value for what they may reveal of book owners and the changing meanings and uses of devotional texts and images over more than five centuries. This paper explores the compelling biography of a book of hours in the University of Florida Library that has undergone such extensive alteration prior to its acquisition in 1989 that cataloguers could not identify the printer and edition, leaving the book’s many dislocations, redactions, and annotations unexplored. Engaging with scholarship on the social history of books of hours, I identify the fragmented book as possibly the sole surviving copy of an edition produced by Thielman Kerver in Paris around 1510 and reconstruct its missing contents through comparison with relevant editions. Next, I examine the book’s complex web of redactions, erasures, and annotations in the context of sixteenth-century religious reform before turning to the book’s dislocations and the spoliation of images in the context of nineteenth and twentieth-century collecting trends.