You can order Book of Colours at Booktopia, Angus and Robertson Bookworld, Amazon, and Kobo. As the book of hours takes shape, my characters discover that the pictures go far beyond being simply conventional reminders of dogma or morality, and instead become stories that shift and change, meeting them where they are.įor the limners who paint the pictures, and for the woman who has commissioned the book, they evoke memories, speak to their hopes and worries, offer consolation and understanding, or even possibilities for the future. Each one of the pictures they paint tells a story, and as we all know, stories can affect us and our lives in ways we don’t always expect. My illuminators, commissioned to decorate a book of hours for a woman of the aspiring gentry, are dedicated to their craft. London: a living and breathing book of hours. Outside the door was Paternoster Row, centre of the fourteenth-century book trade, and steps away, St Paul’s Cathedral, the meat works of the Shambles, laundresses, brothels, goldsmiths and poultry markets -the life of London’s poor and wealthy crawling and bumping up against each other. I imagined the small atelier, probably only ten feet by twelve, lit only by lamps and thin daylight, where a few men (and a woman?) would grind and mix their colours, sketch and paint, gild and burnish, create light and shadow. The borders disturb that simple dichotomy, and that, for me, was fertile ground for a story. Just as the margins interrupted the ordered and holy centre of the page, it seemed to me that here was a fault line, a crack in the standard view of the medieval world as either uniformly devout or decadent and ignorant. For all the apparent inappropriateness of their images, these weren’t under-the-counter type books, but sumptuous productions made on commission for women of the nobility.Īlthough weird and wonderful to us, they were clearly considered suitable devotional fare in the Middle Ages. It was images like these in the margins of illuminated medieval prayer books that first sparked my thoughts of writing a novel about the people who drew them. Around the edges, a rabbit raises its axe over the head of a cowering bishop a fantastical beast, hybrid of cow, dragon, fish and man, bellows from one corner a knight on horseback charges at a giant snail and a monk and nun have sex on a grassy hillock. In the centre of the page are Latin prayers copied by hand in neat rows of black ink, and beneath, a beautiful illumination of Christ enthroned, gilded and painted in colour. As each struggles to see the book come into being, it will change everything they have understood about their place in the world. Even though the commission seems to answer the aspirations of each one of them, their secrets, desires and ambitions threaten its completion. London, 1321: In a small London shop, three people are drawn together around the creation of a magnificent illuminated prayer book.
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