It had been the University Archivist's plan to compare the images in the Music Box Book of Hours with larger images of similar scenes -- St. John with an eagle, St Mark with a lion, shepherds keeping watch at night -- in Les Grandes Heures d'Anne de Bretagne, created between 1502 and 1508, now held by the Bibliotheque nationale de France, and solidly attributed to Jean Bourdichon, for whom Charles VIII had set up an atelier in the Château de Plessis-lèz-Tours, about 28 kilometers along the Loire River from the Chateau D'Amboise.
Although the attribution of the Music Box Book of Hours to Bourdichon's workshop was not definitive, Sido did not at this point want to bring more experts into the discussion, and with all the attempted thefts, it was likely that this manuscript would soon be moved to a bank-located archival storage box. The University Archivist was well aware that she was not among the foremost experts in French Books of Hours, but the moment she first held it in her hands, she felt a connection to this manuscript. How much time she had left to spend with it, she did not know.
In medieval manuscripts, the expressions and posture of eagles are surprising. Even in the Book of Kells, the eagle is stern and land-born. Seldom, in Book of Hours images of St John, was his iconographic symbol, the eagle, air-born. While images of plants in Jean Bourdichon's Les Grandes Heures d'Anne de Bretagne, were generally accurate, a feathered eagle flying majestically in the air above St John or descending from the heavens to catch fish in the waters surrounding the island of Patmos was absent, replaced by a rigidly grounded featherless eagle -- as if the word "bald" -- as in "bald eagle" -- had been badly translated. Not so, in the Music Box Book of Hours.