ABSTRACT
On June 22, 1478, Philip the Fair, the only son of Maximilian I and Mary of Burgundy and heir to the Valois Burgundian-Hapsburgian empire, was baptized in Bruges. Moments after the ceremony, Margaret of York, dowager duchess of Burgundy and step-grandmother to Philip, strode toward a teeming crowd of curious onlookers gathered in the marketplace. Books of hours were liberally churned out for lay worshippers from their inception around 1300 through their gradual decline in the sixteenth century. Art historians have nearly consistently described both types of works as 'private' objects made solely for use in the sitters' personal devotional practices, a view that necessarily renders them socially irrelevant. Ringbom's reading of the miniature at first seems to have merit, for the solitude afforded by the oratory reaches to the very heart of privacy as the modern mind knows it.
