24 - Devotional literature

Summary

In examining the books which both manifested popular devotion and guided it, two elements are particularly intriguing. Investigation of the audience for such books, their readers and owners, furnishes some notion of the climate in which the reading took place, and hence gives a sense of what we may call the culture of religious reading. This understanding can be enlarged as well by consideration of how devotional books were employed, since the range of cultural uses which attached themselves to these texts and to their accompanying pictures is remarkably wide.

To a substantial extent, devotional reading was everyone’s reading. Because this is so, ownership of devotional texts does not correlate so neatly as we might wish with extraordinary piety. Certain texts, in fact, are found very widely and somewhat indiscriminately in male and female, lay and clerical hands. The predominance of religious literature among the books that we know to have been owned by Margaret of York, for instance, may be an indication that she was genuinely very devout, but it may also have caused her piety to be over-emphasized by modern writers. The libraries of many fifteenth-century lay people show a similar preponderance of spiritual books. Possession of these volumes signals membership in a common religious culture, an affirmation which is sometimes more powerful than individual interests. The most important such book, because the most widely owned, is the book of hours or primer, which assumed an extraordinary centrality in popular culture.