The sale of Western manuscripts and miniatures on 6 December 2011 includes a number of remarkable items, including a lost miniature from a lavishly illuminated Book of Hours by the Master of Claude de France, produced in Tours in the early sixteenth-century.

It also features a monumental twelfth-century English copy of Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies; and a previously unrecorded English devotional compendium in Latin and Middle English from the mid-fifteenth century, with a large illustration of a soul being plucked from its body by two hairy devils.

To the best of our knowledge, these three items have never been offered in public auction before, and the latter two have almost certainly passed by descent since the Reformation.