Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers, 1240-1570 (review)

In his History of Illuminated Manuscripts, after discussing books designed for emperors, for missionaries, for aristocrats, for monks, and for students, Christopher de Hamel comes to books of hours, which he calls "books for everybody." Because of their abundance and their prettiness, as de Hamel observes, these books have always been loved by collectors and slightly sniffed at by scholars. In the twenty years since de Hamel published his magisterial work, books of hours have become, if possible, even more strongly a focus of interest—now, as tokens of cultural history from which we hope to recover the emotional and personal realities that the past is usually so successful in concealing from us.

This is of course the approach of Eamon Duffy's new work, which is intended for an educated general readership, and its lavish production values and elegant layout are splendidly attractive. It is most unusual to have so many color photographs (120) for such a modest price ($35). Duffy's interest is summed up in his description of books of hours: "unexpected windows into the hearts and souls of the men and women who long ago had used these books to pray" (preface).

Recently this humane focus has been complemented by a general realization that books of hours are economically interesting as well, since they give evidence of the development of a luxury-goods market considerably earlier than the seventeenth- or eighteenth-century date most historians would think likely. Duffy summarizes the work of others, including this reviewer, in order to provide some economic context, relying, for instance, on a market-based analysis of Francois Regnault's printed primers that distinguishes two primer lines—smaller, with more English, vs. larger, with more Latin. But it should be noted that because we have little information about the actual price for which these primers sold, the frequent use of terms like "mid-price" or "cheap" is an extrapolation from size and gives a rather misleading impression of certainty.

Case histories provide the opportunity to analyze the character of these inscriptions. In a chapter on the Roberts family's book, Duffy's thesis is that its added prayers are "in no sense otherworldly…done properly, they are guaranteed to work" (p. 96). Here he is aiming at the view of Colin Richmond, that books of hours may be connected to a "reclusive frame of mind" and perhaps were part of a trend toward privatization of religion. Both here and in the following chapter, whose title, "Sanctified Whingeing," [complaining] will be opaque to most American readers, Duffy engages with surprising energy the views of other scholars which are neither recent nor widely accepted. In "Whingeing," Jonathan Hughes's provocative description of medieval prayers as speaking in a vindictive voice comes under attack. For Duffy, the prayers in books of hours are pragmatic and often evidence of a communal connection. Thus he reads Holbein's famous drawing of Thomas More's family, for instance, as illustrating their recitation together of the book of hours.

The complexity of religious belief after the Dissolution is strikingly illustrated in the author's work on primers of the 1540's, 1550's, and 1560's, whose annotations show that Catholics used Protestant books, Protestants used Catholic ones—and that well beyond the middle of the sixteenth century, everyone found in this form a satisfying vehicle for personal prayers and hopes.

Despite this volume's sophisticated visual appeal, the text itself is not delivered at such a high level of polish, or indeed of correctness. On pages 24-25 we read about the Wegge family, then subsequently "an Egge daughter…Egge obits." Capitalization practice is idiosyncratic: "the Monastic round. . ." (p. 5), "a Humanist household" (p. 58). Traditional copyediting is not much in evidence: "the principle Catholic prayer" (p. 9) and "the principle focus" (p. 104), while on page 157 we have "the shark pool of Henry's court" and four lines later, "the shark pool...