Marking The Hours, by Eamon Duffy, Yale University Press, £19.99

Eamon Duffy, professor of the history of Christianity at Cambridge, is both passionate and knowledgeable about the faith of ordinary English people before the Reformation. In this book, a study of the Book of Hours and its readership between the years 1240-1570 he provides a fascinating insight into the devotions of the period.

For those who think the Book of Hours was largely an artistic enterprise, designed to feast the eyes of the rich with its bejewelled, illuminated pictures and decorative borders rather than engage with the written word, there is much to learn from these sumptuously illustrated pages.

Duffy is interested not so much in the gorgeous art-work as in the marginalia: the family notes, extra ejaculatory prayers, charms, cures, recipes, petitions and financial transactions that found their way into the fly-leaves and margins of these books. As he says, the Book of Hours was “beyond all question the most intimate and important book of the late Middle Ages”. As such, its marginalia provides much source material for the “odd but revealing things” that our Catholic forbears thought about and jotted down in private moments; if prayers were on their lips and heart, the rents and the bed-linen often crept into their thoughts.

The Hours, or “Horae” (until the Reformation they were written in Latin) was a kind of breviary for lay people; arranged around the liturgical ‘hours’ of worship they contained the Gradual and penitential psalms, the Litany of the saints, the Office of the dead and the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin. Thus they brought the devotions of the laity closer to those of the cloister. Their illustrations, sometimes elaborately beautiful like the Antwerp Hours of the 1490s, sometimes more crudely executed like the Bolton Hours, usually concerned the joyful and sorrowful mysteries of the rosary, familiar images which their owners would have incorporated into their prayer-lives

That they were popular is testified by the numbers of Books of Hours that survive: almost 800 manuscript copies and thousands more printed ones. Caxton brought these within the purchasing power of ordinary people; Duffy states that by the sixteenth century every prosperous shop owner might have their own copy. Some were personalised, with portraits of their owners kneeling in pious, supplicating attitudes; others had their names woven into the text. He argues convincingly that Holbein’s marvellous drawing of Saint Thomas More’s family is not just a portrait of a scholarly Renaissance household: it is a gathering of the family for a recitation of the Hours, copies of which are almost certainly being held by five members of the family. Indeed, More took his own cheap copy of the Hours into the Tower with him, writing his own poignant commentaries in the margins.

What happened to the Book of Hours at the Reformation, crammed as it is with the evidence of a very Catholic piety? Duffy reproduces several instances where the word ‘Papa’ (Pope) has been crossed out, as well as the name of Saint Thomas Becket. One court lady, whose Book of Hours included royal autographs, later deleted the names of Katherine of Aragon and Mary Tudor when they fell out of favour. After 1535 the Book became illegal and new printed versions removed all references to the saints, Our Lady, purgatory and prayers for the dead, replacing them with prayers addressed to Christ alone.

Duffy has yet again opened for the reader a stained-glass window into the medieval world of faith and fervour. And where we moderns can no longer decipher the intricate Latin calligraphy of the Book of Hours we can at least take delight in the natural world, the foliage, the peacocks and rose petals that often embellished its borders.

The Gospel for Little Children and The Bible for Little Children, by Maite Roche. The Rosary and The Way of the Cross, by Juliette Levivier. CTS Children’s Books. £4. 95 each.

This series, yet another exciting initiative from the CTS, could be described as modern Books of Hours for young readers. They contain vibrant and colourful pictures with a simple yet meaningful text, comprehensible for 5-8 year-olds; younger children will be kept happily absorbed by the illustrations alone.

Parents, anxious to keep their offspring from falling off pews, defacing hymn sheets and eating candles, will find these sturdy books a delight and a tool – a jumping-off point for the exploration of faith.

They will also stimulate all those solemn and pressing questions such as “Who made God?” and “If God is invisible and germs are invisible, is God a germ?” which my own children once fired at me. Ideal as Christmas presents from godparents, they will fit into stockings of the larger sort.

© 2006 Francis Phillips

Theotokos Catholic Books - Book Reviews Section - www.theotokos.org.uk