Creating Family Identity in Books of Hours

During the sixteenth century, the lay devotional texts known as Books of Hours took on an entirely new function as a site of family record keeping. This unexpected--and largely unremarked--historical development raises the complex issues involved in the phenomenon of "cultural appropriation," and my examination of appropriated Books of Hours will draw on, and I hope contribute to, the current theoretical discussion. Traditional scholarship in many fields has regarded appropriation of an extant text or object as implying respect for the meaning or the prestige of the adopted source. According to the traditional interpretation, in the act of appropriation some aspect of the original is enlisted to support a purpose in the present, but the original remains in the privileged or authoritative position. ¹ Contemporary theory has challenged this view of how new values or objects are constructed, arguing instead for the complex creation of meaning in the process of reception. Reception theorists from Stanley Fish and Wolfgang Iser to Mieke Bal emphasize in various ways how the reader or viewer makes any text signify through interpretation in the present, ² while cultural historians like Roger Chartier, Michel de Certeau, and Peter Burke stress the changes that occur during cultural transmission and adaptation. ³

What is called "cultural memory" has become an important topic in contemporary cultural studies, where, as Mieke Bal explains, "it has displaced and subsumed the discourses of individual, psychological memory and of social memory." ⁴ "Memory work," a collective cultural construction, is seen as activity for a purpose significant to the present. The past is "adopted" and invested with present needs and desires. One of the most influential theorists, Pierre Nora, talks of lieux de mémoire (or memory sites), which are otherwise inert or material sites associated with the past that become actively invested symbolically for a present purpose. ⁵

This theoretical debate is relevant to the question of why Books of Hours appear to be the texts of choice for family record keeping during the sixteenth century in France and England. Those who emphasize the meanings inherent in sources would certainly ask what it was about the Book of Hours as a genre that made it so popular as a place to record family history. Reception or cultural theorists would downplay intrinsic qualities, preferring instead to emphasize the new historical work such textual sites were performing. The debate has been framed as a binary (either/or), whereas the present exploration of annotated Books of Hours may suggest that as liminal sites they are more accurately figured as drawing on and combining references to past and present significances (being, in other words, both/and). ⁶

My essay is also part of a broader examination of the ways that during the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries European societies were changing and evolving new ideologies to validate those changes. ⁷ Books play an important role in this process that I will explore chiefly through the example of Books of Hours, although other kinds of texts in the period also reveal the characteristic linking of family and bourgeois socioeconomic identities.

The Florentine ricordanze (or personal record books), for example, are well-known markers in the late medieval development of an urban mercantile class. Among the economic documents kept by businessmen, often one book--called a libro segreto or "secret book"--would preserve information of special interest to them and their heirs. More elaborated memoirs were also common in Italy, especially in Florence, from which over one hundred private diaries of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries survive. ⁸ Giovanni Ciapelli has argued that "one of the main concerns" of Florentine texts "was to demonstrate the family's degree of participation in the political life of the city," because--unlike Venice with its fixed noble class--in Florence social mobility was always a possibility for the dedicated aspirant. ⁹ As Gene Brucker comments:

The rationale...