Kenneth Spencer Research Library

Watch the unboxing of our newest medieval manuscript to adorn the shelves of Kenneth Spencer Research Library below!

Every year at Kenneth Spencer Research Library, through classes, tours, and events, hundreds of undergraduates, graduate students, professors, and visitors from the public get to touch, handle, and engage with our single most popular book: the Vosper Book of Hours (Call Number: Pryce MS C1), a manuscript written painstakingly by hand in the last decades of the 15th century, gleaming with gold and vivid illustrations of medieval scenes from the Bible to accompany the hourly prayers contained within, each page crammed with flourishing decorations in the margins.

But the “verso” to those sparkling memories, if you will, is the stress that such high-touch handling can place on the single most-used book in the building. In 2025, we pulled the Vosper Hours from its cozy home in our vault thirty-four times, more than once every two weeks. In total, it was viewed by over 600 people, though directly handled by some fewer. Medieval manuscripts are often shockingly robust, made from parchment that has withstood the test of time, but even the halest of manuscripts will strain from so many hands upon its pages.

And so, with an eye to continuing to preserve the longevity of our most-beloved Vosper Hours, I set about finding it a mate, something that could lighten its burden and share the yolk of labor the way the best spouse might, meeting its standards but not exceeding them, lest it simply replace the Vosper Hours as the more popular manuscript and reintroduce the risk of over-use.

The process of threading such a needle involved meeting and corresponding with various booksellers, domestic and international, who specialize in medieval manuscripts in order to get a full sense of the current market and available options. I discussed with them our goals for such an acquisition, as well as our limitations, explaining how we expected and hoped the manuscript might be used, and why we sought particular qualities. These booksellers then sent us offers of the manuscripts in their catalogs that they felt best fit our goals, and I in turn analyzed and evaluated those offerings, including corresponding with various KU teaching faculty, to gather their thoughts on the potential opportunities for instruction and research use of the manuscript. From those conversations and analyses, one candidate rose to the top.

And so, without further ado, meet our newest manuscript:

The very first moment unboxing the manuscript upon its arrival here at Kenneth Spencer Research Library!

Behold, Pryce MS D1. We’ve given her the rather lengthy title Prima dies mensis et septima truncat vt ensis, using the incipit (or the first line of the text), since most medieval manuscripts lack a formal title. Her catchier nickname will likely be the pithy “Book of Hours, Use of Sarum” to reflect that her contents are structured around the pattern of prayers for the Office of the Virgin Mary in Salisbury (or “Sarum”), England. Despite her English nickname, she hails from Bruges, Belgium, a center of book production in the fifteenth century, where she was almost certainly illuminated in a professional workshop known as the “Masters of Otto van Moerdrecht.” They are best known for their work on a manuscript of theologian Nicolaus de Lyra’s Postilla in Prophetas now held at the University of Utrecht (Ms. 252), but only twenty-six manuscripts survive today that include their art.

She’s more than just a pretty face, too: every unique attribute of the manuscript can reveal different aspects of history, of how we’ve used books and information over time to express ideas and identities, control trade, and more.

For example: this is an unusually hefty volume, especially for a Book of Hours. These books were designed to be easy to keep at hand so that the owner could carry it with them and pray at set hours of the day (hence “Book of Hours”). Most are small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, or perhaps a little larger. Books of Hours flourished as a genre among the laity (non-clergy) in the later Middle Ages and often became a status symbol, flaunting opulent consumption and wealth. Nobles and members of the rising merchant classes could purchase luxury Books of Hours custom designed for their personal tastes, with pigments sourced from precious gems like ultramarine, metals such as lead white and copper verdigris, and above all gold leaf.

Books of Hours this large are uncommon, excessive in their opulence and sacrificing any pretense of practicality. In a visiting class, we might ask students why an owner would sacrifice ease of use for the grandiosity of its size, inviting them to reflect on how books are used not only as texts, but as physical objects.

Another example: The manuscript’s international birth and ownership. Dating a manuscript and identifying its place of origin can often present a challenge, and scholars will resort to complex analyses of handwriting and art styles to justify their conclusions. Not so for this manuscript: each miniature is marked by a faint red stamp of “B” that proclaim its origins courtesy of a law implemented in 1427 that required illuminators who sold their artwork to identify it as a local product, in an effort to control the import of luxury illuminations. Meanwhile, the Masters of Otto van Moerdrecht likely left Bruges in 1436, and so we can confidently date our new manuscript down to a single decade. Those stamps testify to the vibrant ongoing trade in luxury manuscripts – and the efforts to control the production of books and art not only as information but as economic and cultural products – in the 15th century.

And while the manuscript was made in Bruges, it didn’t remain there for long. Despite its Belgian origins, it was likely made with an English owner in mind, as many of the prayers included in the Book were particularly popular in England. We know that’s where it found its home: a note added in a later hand states it was gifted to John Pullan by his uncle Richard Belasyse in the 16th century, again harkening to how information and art were traded over borders for profit.

Indeed, quite a few owners took their hand to this manuscript, tweaking, correcting, fixing, and editing it to suit their tastes and preferences over the centuries. The earliest patron who originally commissioned the manuscript, most likely, went so far as to amend the miniature of Saint Mary Magdalene shown below, painting over her ointment pot and adding in a scroll that labels her instead as “Saint Anne,” hinting that the patron may have intended to give it as a gift to someone named Anne and decided to fit her patron saint into the prayers. This, in turn, reflects the popularity of Books of Hours among women in the later Middle Ages, revealing the reading habits, literacy and book ownership of women that is otherwise often hidden.

Someone, perhaps that same Anne or her own child, added a note of the birth of Thomas Bentham on October 24, 1477, reflecting how the calendars of Saints’ Days in Books of Hours were often used to track family births since the book would be passed from parent to child over generations.

And the mark of the English Protestant Reformation is revealed through another, later owner who crossed out the names of English Catholic Saint Thomas Becket and the Pope, adding the note “vacat” (“empty” or “blank”) next to feast days. The owner either converted (or wished to appear that they had converted), or the manuscript fell into Protestant hands.

More than one hand has tried to repair damage to its pages, suggesting that the manuscript had at least one rough owner. Some holes in the vellum have been sewn together carefully with thread, but another, likely later, owner seems to have fixed cuts to some pages with an adhesive, though why or how the pages were cut is unclear. At some point the book was rebound into a lush and ostentatious velvet binding, into which William Alfred Westropp Foyle (1885-1963) added his bookplate.

All those changes and adaptations demonstrate how books rarely remain static as they’re handed down from parent to child or bought and sold and shipped this way and that. People change their books the way they change their information, adapting it to their needs, aesthetic preferences, religious devotions, and even idle whims.

Now it makes another home here on the shelves of Kenneth Spencer Research Library, and we’ve already added a touch of our own: a custom-fit box built to the best standards of conservation care. Here, it will make another life for itself and touch the hearts and imaginations of hundreds of students, visitors, and researchers while giving our Vosper Hours much-needed relief for its own use. Like all the books on our shelves, it is available for any and all to come and see in tours and showcases, in classes and instruction, and above all in our Reading Room.

Eve Wolynes
Special Collections Curator

Earlier this month Mitch Fraas at the University of Pennsylvania wrote a fascinating blog post in which he mapped data from Melissa Conway and Lisa Fagin Davis’s Directory of Institutions in the United States and Canada with Pre-1600 Manuscript Holdings (2014). Though, as Fraas notes, that the highest institutional concentrations of medieval and early modern manuscripts are found on the East and West Coasts, KU is responsible for one of the largest dots on the map in the middle of the country. In fact, the Kenneth Spencer Research Library ranks among the top fifteen institutions for holdings of pre-1600 manuscript codices (volumes), with its approximately 220 manuscript books, and fares even better when our over 2100 pre-1600 manuscript leaves, documents, and rolls are taken into account.

In light of these numbers, this week we’re highlighting four fifteenth-century manuscripts, each from a different country. Medievalists and early modern scholars take note; it’s worth making a stop in Lawrence, KS!

1. Vosper Book of Hours

Detail from the miniature of David in prayer (f. 83r) from the Vosper Book of Hours, France, ca. 1470.
Call #: MS Pryce C1. Click image to view full page.

Spencer’s most ornately decorated manuscript is a late-fifteenth-century book of hours from Eastern France. Named in honor of Robert Vosper (1913-1994), a former director of KU Libraries, this devotional volume includes seventeen large miniatures (or paintings), as well as stunning foliate borders, featuring birds and insects. In the image above, the darkish, opaque wings of the dragonfly are actually silver which has tarnished with time.

2. Minden Codex

Detail from: Gallus’s Malogranatum (folio 2r), one of several texts in the Minden Codex. Germany, mid-to-late 15^th century.
Call #: MS C164. Click Image to view full page.

The Minden Codex received its name from our catalogers because it once belonged to a Benedictine monastery in Minden, a city in the Westphalia region of Germany. It is a collection of more than fifteen religious texts that appear to have been copied out by different scribes in the mid-to-late 1400s and then bound together alongside a fragment of printed text. The codex begins with a portion of the first book of the Malogranatum, a dialogue intended as guidance for monks striving toward the perfection of their souls. This text is sometimes attributed to Gallus, an abbot of Königssaal (near Prague). The historiated initial in the detail above depicts Saint George slaying the dragon. Look closely and you’ll see that their entwined bodies form the letter “S” of the Latin word Sancta.

3. A Collection of Italian lyric poetry; primarily Petrarch’s Canzoniere

Opening of Petrarch’s Canzoniere in a collection of Italian lyric poetry. Italy, 15th century.
Call Number: MS C24. Click image to enlarge.

Though many of Spencer’s pre-1600 codices are religious in nature, the library also holds a wide range of secular texts, including classical and scientific works, legal and estate records, histories, and works of literature. The main text in this 15^th century miscellany of Italian verse is Petrarch’s Canzoniere (Songbook), a sequence of poems that tells the story of the poet’s love for “Laura.” The text begins with Petrarch’s famous sonnet, “Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il sono […],”  whose initial “V” is here illuminated and decorated with a white vine design.  Subsequent poems in the Canzoniere receive a simpler treatment: their smaller initials appear in alternating blue and red.  The manuscript book also includes poems by Jacopo Sanguinacci, Giusto de’ Conti, and others, as well as Latin sayings with Italian translations.

4. English Medicinal Recipe

Medicinal Recipe. England, ca. 1400s. (Phillipps 40717). Call #: MS P541  Click image to enlarge.

Feeling under the weather now that the temperature has dropped? This medicinal recipe dating form the 1400s provides directions for distilling a mixture of spices, herbs, and wine to treat a variety of illnesses and wounds. This single leaf, with its top three lines partly torn away, is notable in that it is one of the library’s comparatively few pre-1500 manuscripts in English (or Middle English, as the case may be). Though Spencer holds several thousand English estate documents (circa 1200-1900), including papers from the prominent North and Kaye families, those that date from before 1500 tend to be in Latin.  This recipe or “receipt” stands as an instructive example of unornamented, vernacular writing.  However, despite being in English, its script presents a challenge for modern eyes.  Try to read a line or two and you may soon find yourself yearning for the more familiar humanist letterforms of the Canzoniere above (MS C24). Finally, this modest leaf also boasts an interesting provenance: it was once a part of the library of Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792–1872), an obsessive nineteenth-century collector who built one of the largest private collections of manuscripts.

For those who may have caught a little of Phillipps’s manuscript-mania, Spencer has plenty more to explore. You will find records (and images) for many of our medieval and early modern manuscripts in the Digital Scriptorium, an online database with holdings from a variety of institutions. To browse Spencer’s contributions, simply click on “Advanced Search,” select Lawrence, University of Kansas, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, Special Collection from the “Current Location” field and hit “Search.” Or, for a another short narrative tour, take a peek at Lisa Fagin Davis’s great post on Kansas in her Manuscript Road Trip Blog.

Elspeth Healey
Special Collections Librarian

The world of written information is changing.  We are in the midst of a major shift from print to digital culture (you are, after all, reading this online).  It seems timely, then, to look back at an artifact from another major revolution in the technology of writing — the shift from manuscript to print culture.  The first hundred years of printing offer many fascinating examples of  the overlap between the conventions of manuscript culture and the emergence of a new print culture.  One such example is this book of hours, Hore intemerate Virginis Marie secundu[m] vsum Romanum cum pluribus orationibus tam in Gallico [et] in Latino, produced in Paris circa 1505.

Hore intemerate Virginis Marie secundu[m] vsum Romanum cum pluribus orationibus tam in Gallico
[et] in Latino [Printed Book of Hours]. [Paris: G. Anabat, 1505.] Call Number: Summerfield C65

Squint and it looks like an illuminated manuscript (at least in the top image), but it is actually a printed volume, with hand-colored  illustrations and metalcut borders.  During the late medieval period, books of hours were among the most common manuscript volumes owned by laypeople (whether nobility or wealthy merchants).  Accordingly, it is not surprising that with the advent of moveable type, printers soon tried their inky hands at producing these devotional texts.  This particular volume draws upon several features of manuscript books of hours.  It is printed on vellum (treated calf skin) and contains hand-colored initials and miniatures (the latter literally painted on top of the metalcut illustrations).

Printed books of hours flourished roughly between the 1480s and 1530s, co-existing alongside their manuscript counterparts.  This volume from the Spencer Library’s collections was printed in Paris, a center for printed books of hours, by Guillaume Anabat for the bookseller Germain Hardouin and likely hand-colored in the Hardouin workshop (see the colophon pictured below).

Encountering a book like this makes one wonder which present-day artifacts will someday be seen as the products of a writing culture in transition.   In 500 years, will we look at early e-readers as strange hybrids: objects that apply the conventions of the “print world” to the digital environment?

See more….click thumbnails to enlarge.

Elspeth Healey
Special Collections Librarian

How better to end November than with a manuscript leaf depicting swineherds knocking acorns off trees for pigs to eat, a typical November activity in late medieval France? The leaf is from a calendar of feast days that was formerly part of a book of hours (a volume of devotional readings). The Latin text was copied onto vellum (treated calfskin) by a scribe and then richly decorated with colored and gold pigments. This particular leaf dates from approximately 1520. It demonstrates the persistence of manuscript book production more than half a century after the Gutenberg Bible was printed using moveable type (circa 1455) in neighboring Germany.

Leaf from Calendar for November (likely from a Book of Hours). France, vellum, ca. 1520?
Call number: MS A28. Click image to enlarge!

Karen S. Cook
Special Collections Librarian