The Murthly Hours is a little-known and, until recently, little-studied manuscript of the late thirteenth century. Probably produced in Paris, it had found its way to Scotland by the early fourteenth century. The manuscript appears in a number of nineteenth-century inventories of Scottish collections, but its whereabouts were unknown to modern scholars until its rediscovery by John Higgitt in 1980. It was acquired by the National Library of Scotland in 1986 (MS 21000).

Higgitt’s recent study of the Murthly Hours is, first of all, an extended catalogue record of the manuscript. The author describes every aspect of the book in minute detail, from the initial ruling patterns to the final binding. Appendices record the quire structure, the ruling patterns, the calendar entries, the textual contents (by incipits), the litany, the full texts of later additions to the manuscript (including an excursus by Ronald Black on the Gaelic texts), and the subjects of every bas-de-page. A companion CD-ROM, included with the book, provides a complete facsimile of the manuscript in the form of high-quality digital images of every page. (An online version of this reproduction—duplicating the contents of the disc but with low-resolution pictures—can be found at www.nls.uk/digitallibrary/murthly).

Higgitt’s careful analysis of the codicological evidence demonstrates that the Murthly Hours was produced for use in England. The text of the hours conforms closely to the Use of Sarum, and the calendar is clearly English. St. Edmund, king of England, appears prominently in the suffrages, and the Litany includes a number of characteristically English saints.

The examination of the style of illumination and of the iconography of certain scenes confirms the English connections of the manuscript. The preface miniatures depicting Old and New Testament subjects are shown to be related closely to the thirteenth-century sculptures in the Chapter House of Salisbury Cathedral, and their style is associated with English manuscripts of the “William of Devon group.” The decoration of the book-of-hours section, however, is not English but French, and, more specifically, Parisian. Higgitt’s analysis of the style of the historiated initials and marginal decoration convincingly demonstrates their Parisian affinities. Although Higgitt is unable to identify any of the individual hands responsible for the Murthly Hours, he is able to associate it with manuscripts of Branner’s “Cholet Group.” In addition, he notes that some of the backgrounds in the historiated initials of the hours are decorated with an unusual pattern of gold scrolls painted on a burnished gold ground, a technique found in manuscripts produced in France for royal patrons.

Higgitt suggests a number of circumstances that might account for the mixture of English and French elements in the Murthly Hours and opts for what he believes to be the simplest explanation: the manuscript was produced in Paris for an English patron, it was based in part on English models, and it was in part executed by English artists who may have been working in Paris.

Despite having been decorated by artists associated with a number of important—even royal—manuscripts, the Murthly Hours emerges from Higgitt’s analysis as a rather conventional product. Its script “lacks individuality” (48), its selection of texts is “practical, but rather conventional” and indicates that “neither the owner, nor her spiritual adviser were great connoisseurs of private devotions” (170). The images that fill the historiated initials are described as “far from unusual” (184) and “more perfunctory than profound” (185). Their lack of any unusual features suggests to Higgitt that “we should not look for any great sophistication of symbolism” (150) in the main illuminations of the Murthly Hours.

Higgitt finds little of interest in the marginal decoration either. While noting that marginal imagery has drawn a lot of attention recently, he reveals himself to be generally unsympathetic to the parodic or sexual interpretations offered by other scholars, most of which, in his view, are “the product of wishful thinking, and often demonstrably wrong” (158). Higgitt notes that the kind of hunting scenes that predominate in the margins of the Murthly Hours have been interpreted in other contexts as metaphors for the pursuit of women by men, but the author finds no reason to attach such significance to the hunting scenes here. He points out that hunting was a favorite pastime of the aristocratic class and was practiced by women as well as men. For Higgitt, there is no need to look any further for an explanation of hunting scenes in a private aristocratic manuscript.

In denying the existence of any coherent symbolic meaning in the historiated initials or any intentional religious, parodic, or sexual meaning in the marginal imagery, Higgitt does not intend to suggest that the decoration of the Murthly Hours has no meaning whatsoever. He argues, however, that its meaning is to be found on the surface, rather than beneath it. In support of this view, he notes that late-medieval critics often satirized the craze for elaborately decorated books of hours, suggesting that they were more like fashion accessories than aids for devotion. The beautiful surface decoration of the Murthly Hours, according to Higgitt, served the “secular” purpose of being pleasing to the eye of its owner and the social purpose of signifying to others, through its French style and technique and its general aristocratic tone, that the owner was a person of high social status.

It is, in fact, people and social relationships that matter most to Higgitt, not the relationships between texts and images. Whereas the author comes across as rather unenthusiastic in his pursuit of the possible meaning of text/image relationships within the manuscript, he brims with enthusiasm when discussing the various people associated with the book and the social and cultural uses to which they put it over the years. The first substantive chapter of Higgitt’s book is devoted entirely to tracing the complex “web of relationships” that connects the various people associated with the Murthly Hours, from its presumed first owner to its present custodians at the National Library of Scotland.

Unfortunately for Higgitt, the original owner of the book is a bit of a mystery. All that can be said for certain is that the manuscript was made for an aristocratic woman. The various prayers in the manuscript have been modified for a female speaker, and the initial for the Gradual Psalms depicts the female owner at prayer, with her book of hours before her. However, there is nothing extant in the manuscript that clearly identifies the owner as a particular woman. Higgitt therefore builds his case on the basis of indirect and circumstantial evidence. The selection of saints in the calendar, for example, suggests a family link to Worcester, and two obits inserted in the early fifteenth century show that it was at that time in the possession of the family of John Stewart of Innermeath, Lord of Lorne. Higgitt therefore searches for an aristocratic woman with early family connections to Worcester, later family ties to the Stewarts of Lorne, and cultural contacts with Paris. In the end, he identifies one woman—Joan de Valence—as the most likely candidate. The identification of her as the original owner is certainly a good possibility, though Higgitt himself acknowledges that it is by no means certain. In the end, he concludes only that, if the original owner was not Joan de Valence, it would have been a contemporary noblewoman of very similar background.

Higgitt finds himself on firmer ground when he passes to the various additions and modifications made to the manuscript after its completion, noting that “it is only through [them] that we come into contact with some of the users and owners of the Murthly Hours, and can glimpse something of their devotional interests, and of their literacy” (171). The text of the manuscript has been corrected at several points, indicating that, although the original owner seems not to have been very interested in the details of the liturgy of the hours, subsequent owners were concerned enough to make sure that the text was correct. The Office of the Dead, for example, has been modified to conform more accurately to the Use of Sarum. The suffrages have been supplemented with prayers to the Scottish saints Duthac and Boniface. Insertions of additional prayers—for example, a prayer to the Virgin opposite the preface miniature of the Annunciation—seem to indicate that later owners actually used the book for private devotions, and not just for show. Most interestingly, in a Scottish context, is the addition of a number of folk charms written in Gaelic—perhaps the second oldest example of the language written in Scotland.

If the Murthly Hours had remained in France, it would likely never have been selected for a monographic study such as this. It is only because it found its way to Scotland and then survived the wholesale destruction of “popish” books during the Scottish Reformation that it attracts so much attention today. Though the book is indeed rather conventional in terms of its texts and illustrations, it has a unique history of ownership that Higgitt successfully exploits to illustrate how artistic tastes and devotional practices might be transmitted from place to place, and generation to generation, through personal contacts between members of the lay aristocracy.