The Books of Hours of the Pigeon collection to discover in Avranches

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Friday December 13, the Avranches Museums and Heritage service is organizing its third and final Friday meeting which invites, each autumn month, to discover an element of heritage and an event of thehistory of the city.

This meeting will have the theme “Books of Hours” from the Pigeon collection, or richly illustrated collections of prayers intended for lay Catholics.

They will be presented by Madeline Hubert who studied them in Avranches during his internship.

The Books of Hours, a hidden treasure

Madeline Hubert, graduate in art history at the University of Lille, is currently completing a master’s degree in medieval research at the Louvre School. Last spring, during her internship at the Avranches Heritage Library, she studied books of hours from municipal collections. These collections of prayers linked to the times of the day, intended for the lay Catholic faithful, had been the subject of little study until then. She took the opportunity to highlight these hidden treasures of the Heritage Library, often considered inaccessible to the public or outside of current art issues.

Through her intervention, Madeline will present the local heritage and its riches. His method? Starting from the object, six books of hours preserved in the Heritage Library, to address cultural, historical or stylistic points: calendar, borders and cutouts, workshop, Norman style and illumination in the 15th century, traces of the owners and book market of hours, the transmission of manuscripts or even their apprehension.

“I would like the public to be able to leave with knowledge, but above all with the curiosity to come again to this beautiful Scriptorial museum, to examine the manuscripts, to look for clues or to appreciate even more its century-old works” confides- She.

After a quick historical presentation of the library, as well as that of the Pigeon collection, Madeline will show how to conduct research around manuscripts, then present each manuscript.

The Pigeon fund

Purchased by the City in 1985 from the family of Canon Émile-Aubert Pigeon, the Pigeon collection is made up of works of art and 2,023 works, printed or handwritten, from the personal library that the keen scholar art had constituted throughout his life. The works joined the collections of the Avranches museum, while the books joined those of the Heritage Library. Among these works, remarkable Venetian printed editions, the famous books of hours, the canon’s study notebooks, drawings…

Friday December 13 at 6:30 p.m. at Scriptorial, Place d’Estouteville in Avranches. All audiences, duration: 1 hour. Free access, subject to availability.

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