Bedford Hours Summary

Produced in the early fifteenth century around the time when the Duke of Bedford married Anne of Burgundy in 1423, the Bedford Hours is offered as a tribute to this match that established the political alliance between England and France. Though the donor of the book is unsure (whom Janet Backhouse suspects to be Anne’s brother, Philip of Burgundy), what is certain is that the book was produced by the Bedford Master and his workshop in Paris. The Bedford Hours is filled with miniatures of different sizes, and each page of miniature has its own scenes(s) and elaborate decorations in the forms of border medallions, initials, and commentaries. Among them, the outstanding image of the Annunciation with scenes from the early life of the Virgin Mary is especially compelling. First of all, it marks the beginning of the Hours of the Virgin, and the Hours of the Virgin is the heart of every single Book of Hours. Second of all, it also possesses a lot of elements that are different from not only the

The Bedford Hours has a size of 260×180mm, which is slightly larger than a modern-day Penguin Books publication. The pages of the Bedford Hours no doubt conform to the same dimension, while the space between the image and the border of the physical page is left blank (probably for clarity’s sake as well as the flipping of pages). The size of the image is thus smaller than the page, yet there is no specific boarder that contains the image. The pages are parchment. On the Annunciation page, there is application of gold on particular areas, such as the halo of the figure and the space near the top of the niche-shaped area. There is also usage of all kinds of color: red, orange, yellow, gold, green, light blue, marine blue, white, etc. The lines are refined and detailed, and even the expression of each figure is