Books of Hours and
the Transition to Print Culture
• Printed
hours: menu page and digital facsimiles of the three
Gordon books of hours
• Common
elements: more about the books of hours, in both manuscript
and print
• Life of St. Margaret:
digital facsimiles of the manuscript and the print version.
About Books of Hours
Containing a standard set of prayers to
the Virgin Mary, gospel lessons, and a liturgical calendar,
books of hours became bestsellers of the late Middle Ages
and the Renaissance. The Little Office (or horae,
hours) of the Blessed Virgin Mary was originally appended
to the Divine Office, the complex Latin sequence of daily
devotional prayers used by priests, monks and nuns, as
well as to the Psalter, the anthology of Latin translations
of all 150 Hebrew psalms and other related prayers. Well
before the beginning of the print era, however, in response
to the desires of the laity for guidance in private devotion,
the Hours of the Virgin began
to be copied and circulated separately, together with
the Office of the Dead, the seven penitential psalms and
often other prayer cycles. Illuminated manuscript
books of hours were costly volumes, owned and often commissioned
by nobility and royalty. Early printers quickly realized
the commercial value in producing a much larger quantity
of profusely illustrated books of hours at a much lower
cost, and realized tremendous success in the venture.
 Much is often made of the impact of printing
on the development and spread of Renaissance philosophy
and science as well as of Reformation debate and polemic.
While the invention of printing was undeniably a powerful
agent of change, the case of books of hours shows us to
what degree the printer’s commercial venture could
also ensure continuity, particularly in matters of faith.
The printing of books of hours made these devotional books
accessible to a much larger public – by speeding
up production and lowering costs – sustaining a
medieval devotional tradition well into the sixteenth
century.
The Gordon Collection includes
three
printed books of hours that represent
major stylistic changes in the genre over the course of
the sixteenth century. Along with digital facsimiles of
those printed volumes, representative images from manuscript
hours housed in Special Collections have been included
for purposes of comparison. These include a recently acquired
fragment of the Life
of St. Margaret from a 14th-century
French book of hours.
FURTHER READING
Wieck, Roger S. Painted Prayers: The Book of Hours in Medieval and Renaissance Art. NY: Pierpont Mogan Library, 1997.
---. Time Sanctified: The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life. (Includes essays by Lawrence R. Poos, Virginia Reinburg, and John Plummer. New York: George Braziller, 1988.
INTERNET RESOURCES
Hypertext Book of Hours. This site by Glenn Gunhouse includes an introduction to the book of hours in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and a hypertext version of the Hours according to the Use of Rome as recorded in The Primer, or Office of the Bleesed Virgin Marie, printed in Latin and English (Antwerp: Arnold conings, 1599). http://www.medievalist.net/hourstxt/home.htm
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