In the first known Book of Hours, designed and illuminated by the Oxford Dominican William de Brailes sometime around 1240, illustrations of the ‘Legend of Theophilus’ complement the Hours of the Little Office of the Virgin. William ‘writes’ the story in ten historiated initials that run across half of the devotional day, adorning psalms and prayers for prime and terce. The written narrative of the legend is not present, but short Anglo-Norman notations accompany the images. Below an illustration of Theophilus's contractual agreement with the Devil, de Brailes writes, ‘Theofle fet humage au deable e lui escrit chartre de sen propre sanc’ (Theophilus does homage to the Devil and writes for him a charter in his own blood); a tonsured Theophilus kneels before the hook-nosed Devil, and they grasp between them a charter that bears a cartoonishly large seal and an inscription, in clear capitals, ‘CARTA TEOFOLI’ (see Plate 1). Claire Donovan has emphasized in her discussion of the de Brailes images that ‘[t]he importance of the written charter in this transaction, the necessity of the written word to establish the unbreakable nature of this contract, shows how literate and legalistic the world of the thirteenth century was becoming’. It shows also how literate and legalistic the English cult of the Virgin Mary was becoming.

William de Brailes illustrated the Theophilus story twice. He also used it as part of an illustration of fortune and the ‘Ages of Man’ (in Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum MS 330), perhaps because of the story's emphasis on wealth and poverty and associated contractual disputes. William himself was very much a part of the burgeoning thirteenth-century world of profes- sional book culture and written law. His many contributions (direct and indirect) to Oxford illuminated manuscripts are well known, and he appears in surviving documents as a witness to several property transfers, as the owner of an Oxford tenement, and as a considerable influence in at least one land dispute.