Detective Story
“Fragments from a Book of Hours
Looking for their Identity”

[Posted on 25 July 2025]

Would you help us identify these fragments of a single leaf from a Book of Hours in a Private Collection? As if by the skin of their teeth, they survive together in a single collection. That collection has no other fragments from the same manuscript.

We wonder about these ‘foundlings’ and their former home in the medieval manuscript which contained them and their ‘relatives’ comprising the other leaves and the rest of this one leaf. Would you like to join the quest to find their identity?

Original Recto

Private Collection, Fragmentary Leaf from a Book of Hours. Recto, with two pieces aligned in their former original position. Photograph by Mildred Budny.

Original Verso

Private Collection, Fragmentary Leaf from a Book of Hours. Verso, with two pieces aligned in their former original position. Photograph by Mildred Budny.

Do you recognize their style, script, layout, and original manuscript? When and where do you think that it was made, and do you know, perchance, when and where it was dismembered for distribution?

We turn to the wider world to crowd-source the answers.

What do you think?

We plan to showcase these fragments and others looking for their identities in the series of

• RGME Workshops on “The Evidence of Manuscripts, Etc.”

Please join us for the joys of detective work and sharing discoveries.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Private Collection, Fragmentary Leaf from a Book of Hours. Recto bottom, with two pieces aligned in their former original position. Photograph by Mildred Budny.

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