Leaf from a Book of Hours: Sts. Geneviève, Catherine of Alexandria, and Margaret (recto) and Text (verso) (c. 1415): Art, History and Details

Leaf from a Book of Hours: Sts. Geneviève, Catherine of Alexandria, and Margaret (recto) and Text (verso) (c. 1415) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Boucicaut Master (French, Paris, active about 1410–25).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This leaf’s illumination includes Saints Geneviève, Catherine of Alexandria, and Margaret, all early church saints, virgins, and martyrs. During the 1400s and 1500s, the popularity of female saints increased, as did the literacy rate among women, thanks to books of hours. Saint Genevieve is shown with a candle the devil is trying to extinguish while an angel relights it. Saint Catherine, in the center, holds a palm branch and a sword, with which she was executed. Saint Margaret stands on the dragon from whom she emerged clean and unharmed when the cross she carried irritated the dragon’s innards.

Object facts

• Title: Leaf from a Book of Hours: Sts. Geneviève, Catherine of Alexandria, and Margaret (recto) and Text (verso)
• Date: c. 1415
• Creator attribution: Boucicaut Master (French, Paris, active about 1410–25)
• Culture: France, Paris
• Type: Manuscript
• Technique: ink, tempera, silver, and gold on vellum
• Dimensions: Leaf: 16 x 11.2 cm (6 5/16 x 4 7/16 in.)
• Collection: MED - Manuscript Illuminations
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 2014.21

A detail from the museum

A typical book of hours contains around a dozen suffrages or individualized prayers to specific saints.

Collection credit

The Jeanne Miles Blackburn Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Fliegel, Stephen N. The Jeanne Miles Blackburn Collection of Manuscript Illuminations. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1999.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.