ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a richly illustrated Book of Hours made around the year 1440 for the Duchess of Guelders, Catherine of Cleves. It This focuses on just a portion of the reconstituted manuscript: the Office of the Dead and the Monday Hours of the Dead. The chapter divides twofold: The first will be a consideration of the ways in which the Hours of Catherine of Cleves, as both religious and aesthetic object, facilitated thinking about a disembodied state by engaging with the reader/viewer's own experience of embodiment. Second will be a consideration of how the repeated use of devotional texts and images of the Office of the Dead and Monday Hours of the Dead in the Hours of Catherine of Cleves sustained the concept of Purgatory. Most art historical studies of the Hours of Catherine of Cleves have focused on the place of its illuminations in the history of mimetic painting in northern Europe.
