Book of Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux (France)

• An exquisitely miniature Gothic devotional book created by Jean Pucelle for Queen Jeanne d’Evreux. It contains delicate grisaille images, marginalia, and a deeply personal cycle of prayers and meditations on the Passion.

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

The Book of Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux is more than a devotional object; it is a microcosm of ethical introspection, sovereign femininity, and spiritual stylization. Under Foucault’s conceptual matrix—particularly his notion of epimeleia heautou, the care of the self—this codex becomes an artifact of spiritual self-cultivation, one shaped by ritualized temporality, private reflection, and affective governance.

Unlike grand illuminated tomes for public display, this Book of Hours is intimate in scale—designed to fit into the queen’s hands, to be held close, contemplated in silence, and activated through touch, recitation, and gaze. This intimacy is key. For Foucault, the care of the self is not confession (the excavation of inner truth through verbal avowal) but a practical regime of ethical becoming, exercised through disciplines of the body and spirit. This manuscript enabled Jeanne d’Evreux not to confess but to ritualize her interiority.

The grisaille images by Jean Pucelle depict not only sacred scenes but also intricate marginalia of grotesques, animals, and hybrids—these are not distractions but echoes of the unconscious, the playful and dark registers of the queen’s internal life. Here we see Foucault’s idea that self-stylization is not a closing-off but a cultivation of multiplicity—where the sacred and profane coexist in visual whispers across the page.

Moreover, the queen’s devotional journey is ordered through the canonical hours—a temporal regime that offers not moral commandments but a rhythm for self-discipline. Like the Stoics that Foucault studied, Jeanne’s ethical practice is formed by repetition, alignment with cosmic order, and the constant return to meditation on mortality and divine love.

This book, then, is not a map of sin and salvation, but a manual for graceful becoming—a sovereign’s path toward technē tou biou, the art of living well, under the gaze of divinity, yet authored by her own affective agency.