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Images of Ladies with Prayer Books: What do they Signify?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Michael Clanchy
Michael Clanchy*
Affiliation:
Institute of Historical Research, University of London
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Extract

Monastic illumination of manuscripts gave to writings a force and prestige which was unprecedented. Throughout the millennium of western monasticism (500-1500 A.D.), the rich founded monasteries so that monks might pray and worship on their behalf. The monks displayed the fruit of their labours to their patrons in their churches and other works of art, particularly in their books. When with growing prosperity from about 1250 onwards the demand for individual prayer reached down to the middle class of knights and burgesses, they began to want wonderworking books of their own. They could not afford to buy a chantry chapel or a jewelled reliquary, but a small illuminated manuscript came within their means as the first step towards the purchase of paradise. Ladies in particular took to reciting the Latin Psalter and treasuring illuminated Books of Hours. In fifteenth-century depictions of the Annunciation, Mary is often shown seated in a sunlit bower with an open Book of Hours on her lap or displayed on a lectern. Likewise she is sometimes depicted with the Child Jesus on her knee, showing him a Book of Hours. The habit of possessing books might never have reached the laity if writing had not been so luxurious and so covetable. Illumination introduced the laity to script through images which could not fail to attract the eye. The children of the prosperous were introduced to the Psalter by their mothers or a priest for the purpose both of learning to read and of beginning formal prayer. To own a Psalter was therefore an act of familial as well as public piety.

These words were written twenty years ago, for a conference at the Library of Congress in 1980 on ‘Literacy in historical perspective’. Since then, these themes have been addressed in several lectures and research papers at conferences, and I would stand by the main ideas expressed in that passage. Monks had indeed given extraordinary prestige to books and in particular to the illuminated liturgical book, which is a medieval invention. By the thirteenth century such books were being adapted for lay use and ownership, typically in Books of Hours. However, it is mistaken to say that lay use ‘began’ then, as the aristocracy – particularly in Germany – had been familiar with prayer books for centuries. In the twelfth century, Hildegard of Bingen was said to have learned only the Psalter ‘as is the custom of noble girls’. A Psalter for lay use dating from c.1150, which belonged to Clementia von Zähringen, has been preserved. It contains a full-page portrait of a lady – presumably Clementia herself – at folio 6v between the end of the Calendar and the Beatus page beginning the Psalms. This book has 126 folios in its present state (possibly one folio is missing at the end) and it measures 11 cm X 7 cm, no larger than a woman’s hand. The biography of Marianus Scotus, the eleventh-century Irish hermit who settled at Regensburg, describes how he wrote for poor widows and clerics ‘many little books and many Psalter manuals’ (‘multos libellos multaque manualia psalteria’). The diminutive form ‘libellos’ and the adjective ‘manualia’ emphasise that these manuscripts were small enough to hold in the hand, like Clementia von Zähringen’s book.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 38: The Church and the Book , 2004 , pp. 106 - 122
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2004

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References

1 Clanchy, M.T., ‘Looking back from the invention of printing’, in Daniel Resnick, P., ed., Literacy in Historical Perspective (Washington DC, 1983), 14 Google Scholar.

2 In general see Alexander, Jonathan J.G., Medieval Illuminators and Their Methods of Work (New Haven, CT, 1992) and Christopher de Hamel, A History of Illuminated Manuscripts, 2nd edn (1994 Google Scholar).

3 The difference between Psalters and Books of Hours, and the evolution for lay use of the latter from the former, is succinetly explained by Harthan, John, Books of Hours and their Owners (1977), 12–19 Google Scholar.

4 ‘More nobilium puellarum’: Thompson, James Westfall, The Literacy of the Laity in the Middle Ages (Berkeley, CA, 1939), 100, 115, n. 154 Google Scholar. Michelle P. Brown, ‘Female book ownership and production in Anglo-Saxon England: the evidence of ninth-century prayer books’, in Christian J. Kay and Louise M. Sylvester, eds, Lexis and Texts in Early English: Studies Presented to Jane M. Roberts, Costerus, ns 133 (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA, 2001), 45-67, appeared after this paper had been completed.

5 Baltimore MD, Walters Art Gallery, MS W.Io. There is no published description of this book.

6 Thompson, Literacy of the Laity, 92–3.

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9 Bell’s article was first published in Signs, 7 (1982), 742–68. It has been reprinted twice: in Erler, Mary and Kowaleski, Mariane, eds, Women and Power in the Middle Ages (Athens, GA, 1988), 149–87 Google Scholar, and in Judith M. Bennett, ed., Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages (Chicago, 1988), 135–61. See also Adelaide Bennett, ‘A thirteenth-century French Book of Hours for Marie’, The Journal of the Walters Art Gallery, 54 (1996), 21–50.

10 The de Brailes Hours: Shaping the Book of Hours in Thirteenth-Century Oxford (1991), 152. ‘Susanna’ is shown at colour plates 2, 15 and 16a.

11 Ibid., 24.

12 Ibid., 156. On the closeness of male and female lay piety, cutting across gender lines, see Coss, The Lady, 169–73.

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19 Clanchy, Abelard, 62; PL 178, col. 328a.

20 Orme, From Childhood, 161 (my modernization).

21 ‘A thirteenth-century French Book of Hours’, 29. See also Marjoric Curry Woods, ‘Shared books: Primers, Psalters and the adult acquisition of literacy among devout laywomen and women in orders in late medieval England’, in Juliette Dor, Johnson, Lesley, and Wogan-Browne, Joeelyn, eds, New Trends in Feminine Spirituality: the Holy Women of Liege and their Impact (Turnhout, 1909), 181–8 Google Scholar.

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23 Clanchy, M.T., From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1993), 192 Google Scholar. In general see Schreiner, K., ‘Maricnvcrchrung, Lesekultur, Schriftlichkcit’, Friihmittelalterliche Studien, 24 (1990), 314–68 Google Scholar.

24 See n.1 above.

25 The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life (1988), 44 and fig. 12, see also colour place 14.

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27 See n. 1 above.

28 From Memory, 2nd edn, 13, 19, 111–12, 135, 188–96, 251–2, 290.

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30 Ibid., 366.

31 Religion and Devotion in Europe, C.1215-C.1513 (Cambridge, 1995), 79.

32 Penketh, ‘Women and Books of Hours’, 280.

33 Aston, Lollards and Reformers, 116.

34 This passage is cited and discussed by Celia Chazelle, M., ‘Pictures, books and the illiterate: Pope Gregory I’s letters to Serenus of Marseilles’, Word and image, 6 (1990), 139 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 ‘Pictura namque plus videtur movere animimi quam scriptum’: Guillelmi Duranti Rationale divinorum officionim, ed. Davril, A. and Thibodcau, T.M., CChr.CM, 140 (1995)Google Scholar, I.iii.4 (36). The translation of this passage cited by Holt, Elizabeth G., A Documentary History of Art: The Middle Ages and Renaissance (Princeton, NJ, 1947), 123 Google Scholar, is misleading.

36 Davril and Thibodcau, Guillelmi Duranti Rationale, 36; Aston, Lollards and Reformers, 116.

37 See nn.35 and 30 above.

38 Illustrated in Wheeler, Bonnie and Parsons, John Carmi, eds, Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady (New York and Basingstoke, 2002), 379–83 Google Scholar.

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40 Owen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, 102.

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42 See n.6 above.

43 Illustrated in Gillingham, John, Richard I (1999), pl. 8, 9.Google Scholar

44 Simson, Otto von, ed., Propylaen – Kuntsgeschichte: Das hohe Mittelalter, 6 (Berlin, 1972), pl. 81 Google Scholar, comment at 120 (effigy of St Osanna).

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47 Clanchy, Abelard, 43; PL 178, col. 208b.

48 Ibid., col. 208c (my translation). Cf. The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, tr. B. Radice (Harmondsworth, 1974), 150.

49 Ibid.

50 In general see Jonathan Alexander and Paul Binski, eds, Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England, 1200–1400 (1987), 26–179.

51 See n.1 above.

52 New York, Morgan Library, MS M. 729, fol. 232V, illustrated in Wicek, Roger S., Painted Prayers: the Book of Hours in Medieval and Renaissance Art (New York, 1997), pl. 1 Google Scholar (colour), and in Karen Gould, The Psalter and Hours of Yolande of Soissons (Cambridge MA, 1978), pl. 19 (black and white).

53 Suzanne Lewis, The English Gothic illuminated Apocalypse, lectio divina, and the art of memory’, Word and Image, 7 (1991), 8 and fig. 5.

54 Ibid., 7–8.

55 Colour illustrations in Coss, The Lady, pl. 10; Harthan, Books of Hours, 127; and Janet Backhouse, The Bedford Hours (1990), pi. 47.

56 Colour illustration in Harthan, Books of Hours, 110. Facsimile, with commentary and bibliography by Eric Inglis, The Hours of Mary of Burgundy (1995).

57 Wicek, Books of Hours, 44. See also Penketh, ‘Women and Books of Hours’, 266–8.

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59 Lucy Freeman Sandler, The study of marginal imagery: past, present and future’, Studies in Iconography, 18 (1997), 1–49.

60 Fsrom Memory, 2nd edn, 252.

61 Independently of each other, Wendy Scase and Pamela Sheingom published articles on this in 1993: Scase, ‘St Anne and the education of the Virgin’, in Rogers, Nicholas, ed., England in the Fourteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1991 Harlaxton Symposium (Stamford, 1993), 81–96 Google Scholar; Sheingom, ‘The wise mother: the image of St Anne teaching the Virgin Mary’, Gesta, 32 (1993), 69–80. See also Slocock, Gilia, ed., St Anne in History and Art (Oxford, 1999)Google Scholar.

62 Colour illustrations in Harthan, Books of Hours, 134–5. See also Shcingorn, ‘The wise mother’, 76–7.