Graduation Year
2023
Document Type
Thesis
Degree
M.A.
Degree Name
Master of Arts (M.A.)
Degree Granting Department
Art
Major Professor
Helene K. Szépe, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Esra Akin-Kivanç, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Pamela Brekka, Ph.D.
Keywords
book of hours, history of the book, early printed books
Abstract
As the most richly illustrated and widely-owned texts of the late medieval and early modern eras, books of hours are essential to the study of art, religion, and the history of the book. Fragmented and damaged books, while perhaps less coveted, are of particular value to researchers for what they may reveal about their owners as well as the changing meanings of devotional texts and images over more than five centuries of use. This thesis explores the compelling biography of a damaged book of hours preserved in the University of Florida Library. The book has undergone such extensive alteration prior to its acquisition in 1989 that cataloguers could not even identify its printer or edition. This ambiguity prevented the book from receiving the scholarly attention that it deserves, leaving its many removals and deletions unexplored. Informed by scholarship on the social history of books of hours, I identify this fragmented book as a possible copy of an edition produced by Thielman Kerver in Paris on April 5, 1511, and reconstruct its missing contents through comparison with relevant editions. This identification allows me to examine the layers of the book’s complex damage in the context of sixteenth-century religious reform before turning to the book’s dislocations and the spoliation of images in the context of nineteenth and twentieth-century collecting trends in the United States and Europe.
Scholar Commons Citation
Haas, Stephanie R., "Fragmented Hours: The biography of a devotional book printed by Thielman Kerver" (2023). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/9875
