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  • Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers 1240-1570
  • Sybil M. Jack
Duffy, Eamon , Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers 1240-1570 (The Riddell Lectures), New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006; cloth; pp. x, 202; 115 colour illustrations; R.R.P. US$35.00; ISBN 0300117140.

In Act Four of St Joan, the Earl of Warwick muses: 'There is nothing on earth more exquisite than a bonny book, with well placed columns of rich black writing in beautiful borders and illuminated pictures cunningly inset. But nowadays [End Page 206] instead of looking at books, people read them'. Books of Hours have long been a delight of this kind for medieval historians, their images bringing to life the visual perceptions of those who used them and probably indeed read them. Most academics, however, use them at random, when a particular need arises. Professor Duffy has indeed read them, studied them systematically and teased out from his examination a great deal about one of the most private of activities, individual, personal prayer. The books cast light on the devotional regime followed by the devout laity – a combination of image, bead and book. The books were devotional accessories and eight hundred of them have survived from the thirteenth to the end of the fifteenth century. There were undoubtedly more, particularly as printing enabled the production of down-market versions, mass-produced, that were within the reach of quite humble people. Duffy calculates that there were something like 120 separate editions produced for the English market before 1530, a market dominated by the French publisher Francois Regault. Duffy provides an interesting analysis of the prayers included in these more standard versions and the ways in which alterations were introduced after the Reformation by their owners.

His approach is designed to investigate assertions about the nature of the books put forward by Colin Richmond and Jonathan Hughes, both of whom see them as a reflection of a growing individualism that was privatising the practice of religion, encouraging the elites to withdraw from participation in the ordinary public worship of the parish church. These arguments Duffy finds problematic, as they do not take into account the circumstances in which many of these prayers were offered.

He examines where these increasingly interior intercessions and devotions, what the preachers called the interior chamber of the soul, physically took place, whether in a private oratory, in a public room or in church. He points out that they were substantially in Latin, a language that relatively few of the laity understood, and that the majority of the prayers were ones used in the normal course of the liturgy. He also notes that some of the short prayers were designed to be said at the elevation in the Mass which suggests that the books were used on such occasions.

Modelled originally on books for the clergy, they ordinarily contained the little hours of the Virgin, penitential psalms, the office of the dead, seasonal variations, vernacular prayers and rhymes and sometimes, in the more expensive, the owner's personal choices. Many of them noted the indulgences or benefits to be obtained by the recitation of certain prayers.

The books were often passed down in families and were used to note personal [End Page 207] details. These, Duffy shows, were frequently crossed out, erased or changed by later owners, particularly when the Reformation made dangerous any relics of Catholic 'superstitions'.

In examining the life of prayer and the meditation to which it presumably gave rise, Duffy considers how far the individual felt personally the apparent sentiments of the prayers in the books, such as the psalms. He examines the additional materials that owners added to their copies to assess what their personal preoccupations might be, concentrating on one or two representative examples rather than producing statistics that would necessarily be of doubtful validity. Some of the additional prayers are effectively charms or sympathetic magic. As time passed, he shows, the books' contents became somewhat standardised with a heavy emphasis on the moral and didactic. They also included a greater percentage of vernacular material. He judges the English version to be particularly distinct in the amount of supernaturalism that...

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