Making Snares and Feeding Dogs

Gaston Phebus wrote the Livre de la chasse, the most important and influential medieval treatise on hunting, between 1387 and 1389. The treatise included a section on the nature and care of dogs, as they played an important role in the hunt. Forty-six manuscripts survive, of which the two finest are the present volume and a sister manuscript in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (fr. 616). Both have 87 large miniatures. The Morgan manuscript once belonged to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, who added a lavish full-page miniature of their coat-of-arms at the beginning of the book.