The Hours of Catherine of Cleves at the Morgan

Feast your eyes upon devils feasting on sinners:

Manuscripts like this are enough to make me want to take out another round of student loans and go back to graduate school. They come from The Hours of Catherine of Cleves, a circa 1440AD manuscript that gave readers a matins-to-compline set of prayers in accordance with the “Hours of the Virgin.” The sample images above, which reflect my love of artwork depicting sinners being chewed, don’t quite do justice to the manuscript’s themes, but in terms of the medieval grotesque, they can’t be beat, IMO. But you can see a few more of the images at Monster Brains, one of my go-to blogs (go to the post on January 20), or, better still, see the entire collection at the Morgan Library web site, which has an online exhibit of this and other manuscripts going on right now.

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