Making the Calendar Quires

Most Books of Hours were written by hand on vellum or parchment. I cannot afford vellum in quantities necessary to make a book, so initially I chose to use opaline, a manufactured product made from scraps of vellum mixed with size. However, the opaline was stiff and pages in my test quire did not bend when handled. In addition, the sizing used in the manufacturing process left a slick surface on the vellum, which meant that the lead stylus I used for ruling the guidelines did not have enough tooth to make marks consistently.

Because of these problems, I chose to use paper instead. I had 11 × 17" sheets of paper, which I folded in half three times to make an octavo-sized quire (see Shailor, 13–19). After folding, I used an awl to prick holes for ruling guides through all sheets of the quire. There were many techniques used for ruling, and many small differences in technique within each general method. I chose to place my pricks along the edges of the text space rather than on the far edges of the sheet because I felt this would give me better accuracy. (See Gumbert for a fuller discussion of ruling techniques. For future quires, I will place my pricks on the outer edges of the pages, because ink will seep through the pricks if they are placed near the text block.) After the pricks were made, I unfolded the sheet and used ruler and stylus to mark out the text block on both sides of the sheet.

With the ruling completed, I refolded the quire, cut apart the bifolia (sheets with two attached leaves), poked a hole through the centerfolds, and tacketed the quire together with a piece of linen thread. (Szirmai describes evidence of tacketing with twists of parchment or thread on p. 142; cf. Gumbert, 42–43.) The tacket holds the quire together temporarily until all the quires are bound together. There is some debate on whether many scribes did calligraphy on unfolded sheets before they were cut apart into bifolia (which would be a complicated procedure prone to error; again see Gumbert) or after quires were tacketed with leaves slit apart. I did my calligraphy on tacketed quires, which meant writing on several thicknesses of paper, but this did not pose much of a problem.

Design Elements

Some of the design choices are modeled on the Hours of Philip the Good (the miniatures are viewable online: http://www.kb.nl/manuscripts/search/index.html, enter “Jean le Tavernier” as the miniaturist), c. 1450, Burgundy. This manuscript used grisaille miniatures and “puzzlework” initials and penwork flourishing in blue and red. My manuscript is intended to be for a Welsh woman living in London, as you may recall, but this is not a conflict: at this point in time, the book trade was flourishing, and Books of Hours were routinely made on the continent for sale to the English market (Duffy, 11, 25; de Hamel 1994, 194). See Hülsmann for an excellent article about penwork decoration in fifteenth-century Dutch Books of Hours.

The script is a loose version of gothic littera basturda (Droggin is my main calligraphy source, but this script—particularly the shape of the letter “a”—is informed by the script used by Jean Mielot, scribe to Duke Philip the Good, as written in the Hours of Philip the Good).

In the calendar section, I gilded the “KL” letters instead of using puzzlework initials, in part because I was curious to try using hide glue as a gilding size. I had some difficulty with this, because the glue I used at first was too thin and tended to bleed into the paper. This made the penwork bleed also, resulting in more bleed-through than I would have liked. The gold leaf is 23.5K leaf. Not all of the calendar months are completed yet.

Next Steps

I will add grisaille miniatures at the base of the pages: the verso leaves will have images of the traditional cycle of monthly labors as described by Wieck and the recto pages will have the corresponding zodiac signs. (See Wieck, chapter 4, pp. 45–54, for a discussion of calendar illuminations.)