Book of hours

• 1. Introduction

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  The book of hours, a Christian prayer book of the Middle Ages, could belong to servants as well as to nobles. In a court case from 1500, a pauper woman was accused of stealing a domestic servant's prayerbook. Other copies were made for very wealthy patrons and filled with full-page miniatures. How did one type of book reach both ends of society? What did its owners actually do with it each day? And what happened to the craft of making it once printing arrived?

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• 2. The Daily Round

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  Eight times a day, devout Christians were expected to stop for prayer, and the book of hours was organized around those eight canonical hours. They ran from Matins to Compline, and every copy included the Hours of the Virgin Mary. The book was an abbreviated form of the breviary, which holds the Divine Office recited in monasteries. It was developed for lay people who wanted to bring some monastic habits into their own devotional lives. A session typically centered on reading psalms and other prayers.

  The standard texts began with a Calendar of Church feasts, extracts from the Four Gospels, and the Mass readings for major feasts. Next came the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the fifteen Psalms of Degrees, and the seven Penitential Psalms. A Litany of Saints, an Office for the Dead and the Hours of the Cross rounded out the set. Most 15th-century examples follow this basic plan. Owners often added extras, such as the Marian prayers Obsecro te, meaning "I beseech thee", and O Intemerata, meaning "O undefiled one". Devotions for use at Mass and meditations on the Passion of Christ were also common additions.

  Latin was the usual language, and these books were largely called horae until the English phrase "book of hours" was applied to them relatively recently. Many copies are written wholly or partly in vernacular European languages, especially Dutch. A related book, the primer, is sometimes treated as the same thing, and a medieval horae was called a primer in Middle English. Yet primers could differ greatly in purpose and went well beyond the simple recitation of the hours.

  Books of this kind are still in use. Many Christians turn to the Catholic Key of Heaven prayer books, the Agpeya of Coptic Christianity, or The Brotherhood Prayer Book of Lutheranism.

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• 3. From Psalter To Workshop

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  Monks and nuns were required to recite the Psalter, and that duty is the ultimate origin of the book of hours. By the 12th century, the Psalter had developed into the breviary. The breviary carried weekly cycles of psalms, prayers, hymns, antiphons and readings that changed with the liturgical season. Eventually a selection of these texts was gathered into much shorter volumes, which came to be called books of hours. In the latter part of the 13th century, they became popular as personal prayer books for men and women living secular lives.

  Around the middle of the 13th century, the style and layout settled into a standard pattern. The Oxford illuminator William de Brailes shows this clearly. He ran a commercial workshop even though he was in minor orders. His books bundled a perpetual calendar, the Gospels, prayers to the Virgin Mary, the Stations of the Cross, and prayers to the Holy Spirit. They also carried penitential psalms, litanies, prayers for the dead, and suffrages to the saints. The aim was to help a devout patroness structure her spiritual life from morning to night. Gilding, miniatures and rubrication were meant to inspire meditation on the sacrifice of Christ and the horrors of hell. They also highlighted devotion to Mary, whose popularity was at a peak in the 13th century. Aristocrats kept commissioning books on this model for years.

  The earliest surviving English example was apparently written for a laywoman living in or near Oxford in about 1240. It is smaller than a modern paperback. It has heavily illuminated major initials but no full-page miniatures.

  By at least the 15th century, workshops in the Netherlands and Paris were making books of hours for stock instead of waiting for individual commissions. Some were made with blank spaces so that buyers could add local feasts or heraldry later.

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• 4. Who Owned Them

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  A bride might receive a book of hours as a wedding present from her husband, and there is some evidence that this happened. Many books of hours were made for women. Wills record copies passing down through the family from one generation to the next.

  Cost shaped who could own one. Until about the 15th century, paper was rare, so most books of hours consisted of parchment sheets made from animal skins. The most heavily illuminated examples were enormously expensive. A small book with little or no illumination cost far less and was affordable to many more people, increasingly so during the 15th century.

  For many households, a book of hours was the only book they owned. It was commonly used to teach children to read, and some copies include a page with the alphabet to help with the lessons.

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• 5. Marks Of Ownership

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  Eamon Duffy explains that books of hours reflected the people who commissioned them. In his words, the "personal character of these books was often signaled by the inclusion of prayers specially composed or adapted for their owners." Prayers written from scratch for one owner were very rare. More often the existing texts were adapted to the owner's tastes or gender, and names were worked into the prayers. Some books include images of their owners, and some show their coats of arms. The choice of saints in the calendar and the suffrages is the main clue to the identity of the first owner.

  Duffy also points out that "as many as half the surviving manuscript Books of Hours have annotations, marginalia or additions of some sort." The smallest change might be a regional or personal patron saint inserted into the standard calendar. Owners also wrote in dates that mattered to them and noted the months in which events they wished to remember had happened.

  After Henry VII defeated Richard III, he gave Richard's book of hours to his mother. She altered it to include her own name. Even royal copies were passed on and reworked in this way. Heraldry was usually erased or painted over by the next owner.

  Sir Thomas Lewkenor of Trotton hired an illustrator to add details to the book now known as the Lewkenor Hours. Flyleaves of some surviving books carry notes of household accounting or records of births and deaths, much like later family bibles. Some owners also collected the autographs of notable visitors to their house.

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• 6. Pictures And Borders

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  In expensive books, eight scenes often decorated the eight Hours of the Virgin, showing either the Life of the Virgin or the Passion of Christ. The calendar received its own cycles, with the Labours of the Months and the signs of the zodiac. These everyday scenes include many of the best-known images from books of hours. They combine picturesque views of country life with sacred images, and they played an important role in the early history of landscape painting. Richly illuminated copies therefore record daily life in the 15th and 16th centuries as well as the iconography of medieval Christianity.

  The Talbot Hours of John Talbot, 1st Earl of Shrewsbury, shows how a luxury book could honor its owner. It includes a donor portrait in which he and his wife kneel in adoration of the Virgin and Child. Some books received jewelled covers, portraits and heraldic emblems. Others were bound as girdle books for easy carrying, though few of these or other medieval bindings survive.

  From the 14th century, decorated borders around the edges of at least the important pages were common in heavily illuminated books. At the start of the 15th century, they were still usually based on foliage designs painted on a plain background. By the second half of that century, luxury books used colored or patterned backgrounds filled with images of all sorts of objects.

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• 7. Princes And Collectors

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  In the 14th century, the book of hours overtook the psalter as the most common vehicle for lavish illumination. This partly reflected a shift toward illumination that was commissioned and executed by laymen rather than monastic clergy. From the late 14th century, a number of royal bibliophiles began collecting luxury illuminated manuscripts for their decorations. The fashion spread across Europe from the Valois courts of France and Burgundy, and from Prague under Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor, and later Wenceslaus. A generation later, Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy became the most important collector of manuscripts, and several people in his circle collected too. During this period the Flemish cities overtook Paris as the leading force in illumination. They kept that position until the illuminated manuscript went into terminal decline in the early 16th century.

  The most famous collector of all was the French prince John, Duke of Berry (1340-1416). He owned several books of hours, and some of them survive. The most celebrated is the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, begun around 1410 by the Limbourg brothers. They left it incomplete, and other artists and owners continued the decoration over several decades. The Turin-Milan Hours, which also passed through Berry's ownership, had a similar history.

  By the middle of the 15th century, a much wider group of nobility and rich businesspeople could commission highly decorated books of hours, which were often small.

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• 8. Printing And Survival

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  By the end of the 15th century, printing had made books more affordable, and much of the emerging middle class could buy a printed book of hours. New manuscripts were commissioned only by the very wealthy. Printers produced books of hours with woodcut illustrations, and the book of hours was one of the main works decorated in the related metalcut technique. The market for handmade copies contracted sharply, and by 1500 the finest books were again made only for royal or very grand collectors.

  The form also crossed into new languages. The Kitab salat al-sawai, printed in 1514, is widely considered the first book in Arabic printed with moveable type. It is a book of hours meant for Arabic-speaking Christians, and it was presumably commissioned by Pope Julius II.

  One of the last major illuminated books of hours was the Farnese Hours. Giulio Clovio completed it in 1546 for the Roman Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. Clovio was also the last major manuscript illuminator, and the book now belongs to the Morgan Library in New York.

  Tens of thousands of books of hours have survived to the present day, in libraries and private collections throughout the world. Their popularity is why they are the most common surviving medieval illuminated manuscript. The Morgan Library also holds a Black Hours from 1460-1475, an example of a codex copied on black pages.

  The Rothschild Prayerbook, dated about 1500-1520, is on display at the National Library of Australia in Canberra. It is owned by the Australian businessman Kerry Stokes.

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