Until quite recently, one of the first texts that many children would have learned to read was the Lord's Prayer. A child learning to read in eighteenth-century England might have encountered the Lord's Prayer in a hornbook, a durable primer containing a single sheet of text backed with wood and covered with a thin, transparent sheet of animal horn or mica. This hornbook from our collection devotes nearly half its page to the text of the Lord's Prayer.In the second quarter of the sixteenth century, a young girl in the French royal family also owned a pocket-sized copy of the Lord's Prayer. Her delicately illuminated book of hours has some unusual additions - the Lord's Prayer, Hail Mary, and Credo are all copied out in a large, legible hand on the first three pages of the volume. Every adult would have memorized these fundamental texts long ago, but a young girl just learning to read and write would certainly have appreciated this (admittedly lavish) cheat-sheet.
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