paradise' (paradisium mundi) for the bibliophile. The artists who illuminated these volumes--bibles, psalters, breviaries, Books of Hours, and secular romances--were generally laymen, not monks or clerks, and it is this laicization of book production which in large part determined its character. Books of Hours, for example, in which the canonical hours of the day (Mattins, Lauds, Vespers, and so on) were recorded, accompanied by prayers and liturgical rites according to various 'uses' (of Paris, Rouen, Sarum, or Utrecht, for example), largely escaped the surveillance and control of ecclesiastical authorities. They were composed and illustrated for lay people by lay people. Other liturgical books, of course, might be intended for the use of the clergy and conformed to certain prescribed rules, but there was also a market for highly decorated Bibles and psalters among the chaplains and confessors of the secular nobility. The Luttrell psalter (c. 1340) is a good example of such a volume, with chivalric depiction of its patron and scenes of rural life at the base of each page. But the primacy of Paris as a great European storehouse of books and other works of religious art, such as altar-pieces or retables, began to wane by the later fourteenth century. There were political reasons for this, as well as causes more closely related to the history of art.
The rifts opened up within the higher French nobility by the Armagnac-Burgundian feud were to have an impact upon artistic patronage. With the death of Jean, duke of Berry, in 1416, the greatest Maecenas of the age was removed from the Parisian scene and the French capital was also adversely affected by the subsequent murder in 1419 of John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy. Philip the Good, unlike his father, very rarely resided in the city and Burgundian patronage of the visual arts turned increasingly towards sources within their Netherlandish dominions. 'French' art became distinct from 'Burgundian'--the Master of John, duke of Bedford, continued to work in Paris, but other towns, such as Rouen in Lancastrian France, and Tours or Bourges in Valois France, began to eclipse the capital as centres of illumination and book production. The Burgundian lands saw the growth of Bruges, Lille, Mons, and Utrecht as producers and exporters of illuminated books. It was
-316-