A rare fourteenth-century medieval casket for a book of hours or other devotional manuscript.

[Catalonia, c.1345-1420]. Wooden casket, 80 x 200 x 175 mm, covered with moulded and incised leather, metal mounts decorated with rosette details, three clasps, drop handles at either side, three hinges; lined with original tawed leather, stained pink; some portions of the leather now degraded with minor losses revealing the wooden structure beneath.

This is an excellent example of a distinct corpus of book boxes from Catalonia (northeastern Spain), usually associated with the later fourteenth century. Made of wood, the exterior has typical incised leather decoration in a whorl pattern. The rosette decorations on the wrought-iron reinforcements are found on virtually all the known extant examples. Above all, the tawed leather interior, with its gently curved angles and smooth surface, is indicative of the precious contents which the container was designed to protect.

These small and attractive caskets are a distinctive variant among the numerous types of surviving European medieval caskets (which are described with varying degrees of accuracy as book boxes). As the subject of several studies, they have been shown to have been made specifically to house devotional books. ‘Des récentes découvertes ont permis de situer non seulement la date et le lieu de production, d’un tout petit groupe d’objets similaires, dont ce coffre est représentatif, mais également de préciser leur usage: il s’agit d’étuis destinés à resserrer un livre d’heures’ (Lepape et al., Mystérieux coffrets, cat. 68).

Similar examples:

Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A 159-1894) https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O370883/casket/

Musée de Cluny (C.L. 20684), illustrated in Mystérieux coffrets, p.21.

References:

Lepape, Séverine; Huynh, Michel; Yvard, Catherine. Mystérieux coffrets. Estampes au temps de La Dame à la licorne. Musée de Cluny, 2019, cat. 68.

Andrés, Felix de la Fuente (Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid). Estuches de libro. Analisis funcional de pequenos contenedores, in Además de: revista de artes decorativas y diseño, no. 2, 2016, pp. 3-45, cat. 21.