For years, Bel Mooney longed for an illuminated manuscript – and then a dazzling example came up at auction
My golden book of hours
The Magi and the Annunciation – from Bel Mooney’s book of hours
I
t is impossible to know where obsessions start. Was it as I first practised my own teenage signature in curly script, exaggerating the swoop of the ‘y’? Or first turned the pages of a book on Giotto in my local library? Or carefully calligraphed and illustrated all the poems in Yeats’s early volume The Rose as a gift for my new husband? By then, I was 22 and fatally mesmerised by the glitter of ornate initials, rich blue and red pigments, and the hypnotic swirls of acanthus in wide, riotous margins. 32 The Oldie June 2022
My English degree required the study of Anglo-Saxon, Early Middle English and Later Middle English and I became entranced by reproductions of manuscripts in my textbooks. What hand made those marks on animal skin? Who read the words aloud to bestow life? But there was also a deeper edge to this interest. Even through my years of professed atheism, I was drawn to altarpieces in Italian churches – not the mighty Baroque, but the gravity of the Quattrocento, followed by that extraordinary explosion of skill and
narrative detail as the early-15th century heralded the Renaissance. The glow of candlelight on flat planes of gold leaf beckoned me across centuries, as unavoidable as the dread swoosh of Gabriel’s wings, confirming Mary’s fate. Mine, too. The glory of Christian culture intoxicated me, so that in my own late middle age I began to collect sacred art, gradually acquiring some preReformation objects. But one item eluded me. For years, I longed to possess a book of hours. I’d bought two separate illuminated leaves
