Printed Books of Hours c.1487-1530
in Danish Collections
Books of Hours |GKS||NKS||Thott||Additamenta||Arnamagnaeana|
|Calendars| |Use of the Hours of the Virgin| |CHD Guides| |Tutorial|
The contents of printed books of hours is a commonly neglected field in the research of the transitional period between late medieval thinking and the rapid developments in mentality, following the implementation of printing.
It is not possible to understand and evaluate the spiritual and artistic contents of the luxurious manuscript book of hours in its last flowering, without knowledge of the interaction between tradition and new invention in the popular printed editions. The impact of the new massproduced pictorial cycles on leading artists was immense, and the variety in the hundreds of editions issued in the short period between 1490 and 1530 is astonishing.
The explosive development in devotional readings during this period has similarities with the globalization in our time. We can speak of a "humanistic globalization", with fascinating controversial tendencies, in a generation of well educated citizens who came to witness both the Reformation and the gradual transformation of renaissance pictorial realism into the emblematic symbolism later favoured by the founders of the Jesuits from 1534.
It is the intention here to provide documentation from sources that otherwise are difficult to access, and therefore have been widely neglected by art historians.
Nowhere else is this development documented with such a convincing clarity than in the printed Books of Hours, the uncontested best-seller of the late medieval trade in books.
|Octavo Collation||Quarto Collation|
Copenhagen - Det kongelige Bibliotek - The Royal Library

Early Printed Books of Hours


|Calendars| |Use of the Hours of the Virgin| |CHD Guides| |Tutorial|
© CHD Erik Drigsdahl 1997-2003 (Last update 22/06/2003)