Colouring in the Lines of Early Tudor Printed Parchment

While scholars have mined English printed books of hours for decades as sources for important research, a small proportion remain almost without study. Neither manuscript nor standard print, the present article examines books of hours that were printed on parchment and decorated for the English market. This study uncovers a small but persistent early Tudor parchment-printing industry that furnishes evidence for two arguments. First, Henry VII’s collection of Parisian publisher Antoine Vérard’s illuminated, printed-parchment books encouraged importation of these rarities, and also spurred Wynkyn de Worde’s successful entry into parchment-printing. Secondly, examination of the decoration of England’s printed-parchment books of hours shows that the English customer base may have been encouraged by their king’s interest, but they did not fully adopt his French aesthetic taste. Instead, English printed-parchment buyers preferred a different, characteristic decoration pattern that derived from a longstanding English tradition of tinted pen-drawing.