Illumination from Books of Hours

Apollo, March, 2005 by Martin Harrison

Illumination from Books of Hours Janet Backhouse British Library, 9.95 [pounds sterling] ISBN 0 7123 4849 2

This is a small, beautiful but rather sad book. It is beautiful because it reproduces in colour no fewer than 140 leaves from the British Library's finest books of hours (including this Nativity, right, from the Tilliot Hours, illuminated in France in about 1490); sad because it is the last book by an outstanding scholar. Janet Backhouse, who died in December last year, joined the Department of Manuscripts, then part of the British Museum, in 1962, and worked there until her retirement in 1998. A calligrapher, a fine horsewoman and, to begin with, an Anglo-Saxon specialist, she took over special responsibility for the department's illuminated manuscripts in 1985, following the early death of the curator D.H. Turner, with whom she had worked on the museum's 1984 exhibition 'The golden age of Anglo-Saxon art'. She will perhaps be best remembered for her popular studies of the department's great treasures, notably the Lindisfarne Gospels (1981) and the Luttrell Psalter (1989), but this book is a worthy memorial, for both its characteristically crisp and lucid introduction to these books of private devotion and its reproduction of many unpublished images. They have only the briefest of identificatory captions, but that it is perhaps simply an additional incentive to look as closely as possible.