Keeping it in the Family: The Hachette Hours of Claude of France
This tiny book of hours, measuring just over ten by six centimetres, is one of four diminutive devotional manuscripts, made for or commissioned by Queen Claude of France. Claude was born in 1499, the eldest daughter of Anne, Duchess of Brittany, and her second royal husband, Louis XII of France.
Until recently, Claude’s short life (she died in 1524 at the age of just 24), multiple pregnancies (she had seven children), her larger-than-life husband and formidable mother-in-law, meant she had been somewhat forgotten by historians. However, her contribution to French courtly culture and politics is now being fully appreciated. The place of her books in this reassessment, and the influence of her mother Anne of Brittany, is crucial.[1]
Under Salic Law, as a girl, the young Claude could not inherit the French crown. Although Anne and Louis no doubt continued to hope for a son to ensure a direct succession, the question of Claude’s marriage and its political value was of paramount importance. Her mother favoured a union outside of France in order to maintain the independence of her own territory, the duchy of Brittany. Louis, wanting to keep things within his family, sought an alliance with the heir apparent, Claude’s cousin, Francis. In 1514, just after Anne’s death, the king and Francis’s most staunch supporter, his mother Louise of Savoy, got their way: Claude and Francis were married and a year later they became king and queen of France.
Claude inherited her mother’s love of books as well as her piety and political acumen. Anne had offered her a primer, now in Cambridge, designed to teach the young princess her prayers and her alphabet.[2] She must have known her mother’s impressive Grandes Heures, painted by Jean Bourdichon c. 1508.[3]
The so-called Master of Claude of France, who had learnt his trade in Bourdichon’s workshop in Tours, produced two books of hours for Claude – including this one – as well as two prayer books, one of which was destined for her younger sister, Renée.[4]
The artist’s work is characterised by Italianate architectural frames, a delicate pastel palette, and detailed compositions on a minute scale. The Italianising motifs, as well as the humanistic script employed by the scribe, point to the broader influence of Italian art spreading through France from the end of the fifteenth century as a result of continuous French campaigns on the peninsula.
ff. 50v-51r Annunciation to the Shepherds
The Hachette Hours is the first of the three manuscripts made for Claude, and dates from between 1508 and 1512. Claude would have been about 10 at the time, so perhaps this was a precocious commission from the young princess, or perhaps the book was commissioned for her by her book-loving mother, Anne.
Certainly, this little book paved the way for Claude’s later commissions from the same artist, and it foregrounds many of the themes and motifs that appear in those later books. For instance, the Hachette Hours are decorated with armillary spheres on nearly every page. This motif, representing Claude, also recurs in the later book of hours, now in a private collection. Also common to both books is the motto, non mudera, a Spanish phrase meaning “she will not change” which Claude inherited from her mother, Anne, who had in turn inherited it from her own mother, Marguerite de Foix. The motto is inscribed on banderols that loop around the borders, intertwined with another of Anne of Brittany’s motifs, the knotted cordeliere, a symbol of Franciscan piety. We find the cordeliere on Anne’s tomb commissions for her parents (in Nantes) and for the children she lost during her marriage to Charles VIII (in Tours); it recurs in Claude’s later book of hours and in the prayer book now in the Morgan Library in New York.
Detail from Les Grandes Heures d’Anne de Bretagne showing the inital A combined with the cordeliere, BNF, Paris, BnF, ms français 9474, c. 1503-1508, f. 1v.
The saints found in the suffrages of the Hachette Hours are almost exactly the same as those in the Morgan prayer book. Some of these saints are not unusual and could be found in many devotional books made in France. However, several of them are related to Claude’s specific devotional interests. St Louis IX – dressed in the fleur de lys of France – along with St Anne and St Claude were the patron saints of Claude and her parents. Also included is St René, patron saint of Claude’s younger sister who was born in 1510. The inclusion of this bishop saint in the Hachette Hours suggests that little Renée may already have been born when the manuscript was made, thus narrowing down its date of production.
The two girls were Anne’s only surviving children from multiple pregnancies during both her marriages and Claude herself would come to know the importance of producing healthy heirs – preferably boys – in her role as queen. St Anne, venerated across the social classes for having been blessed with the birth of the Virgin after a long period of infertility, was therefore of particular importance to both Anne and Claude. As we see in the Hachette Hours, St Anne was also often depicted teaching her daughters to read. This image perhaps reminded Claude of learning at her own mother’s knee from her primer, where St Anne also appears in the guise of a teacher.
ff. 117v-118r St Ursula with a palm leaf and an arrow; St Susanna and the two elders
Also included in the suffrages is St Ursula, patron saint of Brittany. Dressed like a queen, she holds an arrow referencing her martyrdom along with 11,000 virgins in the city of Cologne. Claude would inherit her mother’s independent duchy on Anne’s death in 1514, and like her mother she would strive to keep it from bring subsumed into French territories. St Helena, also wearing a crown, holds the True Cross which she discovered in Jerusalem.
As an empress and mother of an illustrious son, Constantine, the first Christian Roman emperor, Helena provided another model of queenship and motherhood. Along with St Anne, both Ursula and Helena play a prominent role in Anne of Brittany’s Grandes Heures and well as in Claude’s prayer book. Their inclusion in the Hachette Hours thus points to the devotional and political interests that the mother shared with her daughter and that she encouraged her to pursue.
Finally, there are the unusual violet wings which appear amongst the armillary spheres in several of the margins. These do not appear in the same disguise in Claude’s other books, but they must be a reference to her father, Louis, since the French word for wing, ‘aile’, is a homophone for the letter ‘L’.[5]
Turning the pages of this exquisite manuscript, we find the young Claude, not yet married, metaphorically nestled between the symbols of her parents – though primarily between those of her mother. Both Anne and Louis had high hopes for their daughter, but it was Anne who oversaw her education and whose books Claude inherited, along with her duchy and all her symbolic motifs. Books of hours, however tiny, were not only for personal prayer. They functioned as conveyors of status and expectation: armed with reminders of her family and full of personal references – especially to her mother – the Hachette Hours were surely designed to help set Claude on a path of piety, patronage, and political power.
Notes
[1] Studies of Claude and her books include Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier, ‘Claude de France: In Her Mother’s Likeness, a Queen with Symbolic Clout?’, and Cynthia Brown, ‘Like Mother, Like Daughter: The Blurring of Royal Imagery in Books for Anne de Bretagne and Claude de France’, both in The Cultural and Political Legacy of Anne de Bretagne: Negotiating Convention in Books and Documents, ed. by Cynthia J. Brown (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer 2010), pp. 101–21 and pp. 123–44 respectively; and Elizabeth L’Estrange, Anne de Graville and Women’s Literary Networks in Early Modern France (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2023).
[2] The Primer of Claude of France, Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 159, c. 1509.
[3] Grandes Heures d’Anne de Bretagne, Paris, BnF, ms français 9474, c. 1503-1508.
[4] Hours of Claude of France, private collection, c. 1520-23; see The Prayer Book of Claude of France, c. 1517, New York, Morgan Library and Museum, MS 1166; Petites Prière de Renée de France, c. 1517, formely Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, α.U.2.28=lat. 614 (stolen 1994).
[5] In the later Book of Hours a pair of golden wings appear (symmetrically) on folios 56r-v, and (in mirror image) on 60v.