Leaf from a Book of Hours: Text with Illustrated Border (verso)

From the Cleveland Museum of Art record

This leaf came from a highly customized and lavish book of hours made in Rouen, a major center for book production. Intended for a female patron, the original book, to which the museum owns three leaves, contained numerous illuminations and marginalia. The book was whole until the 1980s, when it was dismembered and the leaves sold separately. Other leaves from the same book are now in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, and the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England. This leaf precedes the opening of the Hours of the Virgin and the traditional first scene of the Annunciation. The heart of every book of hours is the Hours of the Virgin, a set of prayers in which the reader asked the Virgin Mary to intercede on their behalf.