What makes an English book English in the fifteenth century? In our Index of Images catalogue, Michael Orr and I include a section called ‘Continental Manuscripts Made for the English Market’. These manuscripts, containing often extensive illumination and made in France or Flanders, have English features or English texts and, when provenance is known, were made for English owners. Three of these are Books of Hours now in the Pierpont Morgan Library & Museum, New York. In one Sarum Hours (Morgan M. 46), possibly copied in Ghent, English miniatures have been added to supplement already plentiful Flemish illustration, painted on versos with blank rectos; these are mainly of English saints, lending further appeal for an English reader or owner. Another Book of Hours in the Morgan (M. 314) shows evidence of similar interventions on a less grand scale, while a third, Morgan M. 105, was made for an English patron and painted by a French artist known to have worked for both French and English patrons. This essay examines these three manuscripts as examples of a larger impulse to adopt, adapt or claim books made in France and Flanders by fifteenth-century English readers and patrons, with a special focus on the hybridity or transnational character of such texts. Questions to be raised (if not entirely answered) are: Where were these books made? How were they made? For whom were they made?

Morgan M. 314, the first manuscript under consideration, has been little studied. This is an Hours of the Virgin for the use of Rome made in the late fourteenth century, probably in Tournai in Belgium (Flanders). This is unusual in itself, as the majority of Books of Hours made or intended for English readers are for Sarum or Salisbury use, and it is perhaps no coincidence that this little manuscript with its Rome Hours was later bound in seventeenth-century Italian calf and turned up in Naples by the eighteenth century. The prayers are preceded by a calendar for northern England that was appended later, likely in the fifteenth century. All are copied on vellum. The calendar script mimics that in the main text.