The Yale Missal (Beinecke MS 425): Mendicant spirituality and a vernacular mass book for the Fouquet circle

The Yale Missal is the most lavishly illustrated example among surviving French translations of the medieval mass book. One of Jean Fouquet's closest followers, now called the Master of the Yale Missal, executed the overwhelming majority of the manuscript's illumination in the 1460s. This comprehensive study of the Yale Missal Master's work, which contains more secular than sacred manuscripts, enables a new characterization of the artist, demonstrating his ability to invent and refashion models intelligently. The Yale Missal Master's style and commissions reveal that he probably trained with Fouquet and worked in Tours. The Yale Missal's high quality and atypical contents merit monographic treatment and this dissertation aims to rectify the manuscript's current marginal place within in the scholarship.;A number of fundamental paradoxes have obscured past discussions of the Yale Missal---clerical/lay, Latin/vernacular, Dominican/Franciscan---and dialectical methods are applied to address these issues. Codicological analysis shows that the Yale Missal reuses a common pictorial format for laymen's Books of Hours, resisting the impulse to simulate a priest's missal. The presence of heraldry belonging to more than one person necessitates a complex hypothesis regarding the patron's identity. An analogy between homiletic sermons and art explains the manuscript's text/image relationship and recognizes its visual rhetoric, which was designed to educate the laity.;Six other French-language missals written before 1500, which have never been discussed together before, represent the immediate liturgical context for the Yale Missal. Comparison of these manuscripts' texts and decoration has enabled a level of detailed analysis that highlights the exceptional qualities of each copy and recognizes similarities between a subgroup of vernacular missals in the Dominican use. The Yale Missal contained an archaic form of the Dominican rite that would have been unacceptable to the Order of Preachers in the Fifteenth Century; nonetheless, this fact underscores its connection to Dominican spirituality. Close observation shows that the Yale Missal's illustration promoted veneration of Franciscan saints and marginalized the importance of Dominican saints. Resolution of this paradox requires a new approach to the definition of Mendicant spirituality in art that recognizes the common goals and methods of Dominicans and Franciscans.