Fifty-two discoveries from the BiblioPhilly project, No. 44/52
South Netherlands Book of Hours (The Hawley Hours), Lancaster, Franklin & Marshall College, Shadek-Fackenthal Library, Misc. Ms. 146, fol. 13r (with detail)
Part of the joy of the BiblioPhilly project is that it encompasses institutions of all kinds and sizes, from large and well-known repositories of Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts like the Free Library of Philadelphia, right down to smaller institutions that have just a single such codex in their collections. This is case for Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The College’s Shadek-Fackenthal Library houses this North Netherlandish Book of Hours of circa 1470, which I assumed was effectively unknown in the scholarship on Dutch manuscript illumination, since it only came to the College in 1988 as a gift of Elaine Hawley (widow of the novelist Cameron Hawley) and is therefore absent from the Seymour de Ricci census of Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in the United States and its Supplement.1 There is also no mention of the Franklin & Marshall book in the catalogue of the landmark exhibition of Dutch manuscripts held at the Morgan Library & Museum in 1990, which did however include many examples of the genre held in other North American libraries.2 The manuscript is also not present (as of yet) in the otherwise amazingly comprehensive Luxury Bound corpus of manuscripts illustrated in the Netherlands (1400-1550).