Anonymous English artist
CHRIST WITH APOSTLES, initial ‘S’ on a leaf from the Hungerford Hours [?Lincoln or Ely, c. 1330]
A leaf from the Hungerford Hours, one of a small surviving group of splendid early English Books of Hours: few such manuscripts exist with a production date before the mid-14th century, and the group includes such fine examples as the De Brailes Hours, the Harley Hours, the Egerton Hours, and the Taymouth Hours. The Hungerford Hours is now dismembered and its leaves scattered: the present leaf has sisters in important private collections and institutions such as the British Library (Add. MSS. 62106, 61887 (six leaves) and 72707), Stanford University Libraries (Acc. 2010-159), and the Lilly Library, Indiana University.

Michael A. Michael has identified the artist with that of the Schloss Herdringen Psalter (Schloss Herdringen, Fürstenburgische Bibliothek MS 8), see 'Destruction, reconstruction and invention: the Hungerford Hours and English Manuscript Illumination of the early fourteenth century', English Manuscript Studies: 1100-1700, vol. 2, 1990, pp. 33-108 for further discussion.

Provenance:
•ROBERT HUNGERFORD, 2nd Baron Hungerford (c. 1400-1459) owned these Hours in the 15th century; his obit was added to the Calendar. It seems likely that the manuscript came to Hungerford by descent from its original noble commissioner. An eastern English origin for the manucript seems most probable, given the inclusion of Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln and St Guthlac of Croyland in the Calendar: Lincoln and Ely are the two feasible centres of manuscript production of this calibre at the time.

164 x 102mm. The initial ‘S’ opening the text ‘Sire eyez merci de nous, Ih[es]u crist’, a very rare example of the Litany in Anglo-Norman.

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