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Elite and Popular Religion: The Book of Hours and Lay Piety in the Later Middle Ages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Eamon Duffy
Eamon Duffy*
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Extract

The very phrase ‘elite and popular religion’ is laden with potentially misleading polarities. In talking about elite religion or popular religion, are we contrasting notions of orthodoxy with heterodoxy or superstition, or the religion of the clergy with the religion of the laity, or the religion of the rich with the religion of the poor, or the religion of the polite and educated with the religion of the unwashed and unlettered, or the religion of the thinking individual over against the religion of the undifferentiated multitude, or the disciplined and liturgically-based official religion of the institutional Church with something more charismatic, less structured – or some permutation of any of the above?

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 42: Elite and Popular Religion , 2006 , pp. 140 - 161
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2006

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References

1 In the preface to the 1996 re-issue of Mary Douglas’s anthropological classic, Natural Symbols, she similarly describes how as a student she came to question the prevailing academic orthodoxies of Durkheimian analysis of the place of fear, emotion and ecstasy in religious ritual, by reflecting on the banal practicalities of her own experience of ritual as a Catholic schoolgirl participant in the Corpus Christi processions of 1940s Highgate and Hampstead. Here were none of the spontaneous outbursts, the ecstatic chanting, the dancing, which her University textbooks told her were intrinsic aspects of ritual behaviour. Instead, she recalled ritual occasions dominated by concern about order and precedence, whether the Embroidery Gild walked ahead of the Boy Scouts and behind the friends of St Vincent De Paul, where the tea would be served, who had the box of matches? The catholic rituals she knew had no ‘rolling in the aisles or spontaneous witnessing in the Spirit’, and were deci sively ‘not conducive to the arousing of emotion which Durkheim seemed to think was the function of ritual: something was wrong, either with Durkheim or the religion’: Douglas, Mary, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (London, 1996), xv.Google Scholar

2 General introductions to the medieval Book of Hours, mostly however focusing on the more lavish examples, in Hamel, Christopher de, A History of Illuminated Manuscripts (2nd edn, London, 1994), 168–99 Google Scholar; Wieck, Roger S., The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life (London, 1988)Google Scholar; idem, , Painted Prayers: the Book of Hours in Medieval and Renaissance Art (New York, 1997)Google Scholar; Backhouse, Janet, Books of Hours (London, 1985)Google Scholar; Harthan, John, Books of Hours and their Owners (London, 1977).Google Scholar

3 For this dimension of the contents of Books of Hours, cf. Duffy, , Stripping of the Altars, 266–98.Google Scholar

4 Donovan, Claire, The de Brailes Hours: Shaping the Book of Hours in Thirteenth-Century Oxford (London, 1991).Google Scholar

5 The prayers are reproduced in Donovan, , The de Brailes Hours, 126.Google Scholar

6 Reproduced in facsimile in The Hours of Mary of Burgundy: Codex Vindobonensis 1857 Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, ed. Inglis, Eric (London, 1995)Google Scholar, fol. 14v: this illustration of Mary of Burgundy at prayer was one of the points of departure for the important essay on prayer and the Book of Hours by Bossy, John, ‘Prayers’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 1 (1991), 137–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Smith, Katheryn A., An, Identity and Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England: Three Women and their Books of Hours (London and Toronto, 2003), 1–2.Google Scholar

8 See discussions of thirteenth-century Books of Hours for women in Donovan, The de Brailes Hours, 183–200; Smith, , Art, Identity and Devotion, 11–47.Google Scholar

9 Smith, , Art, Identity and Devotion, 152–248.Google Scholar

10 Ibid., 20–8.

11 Rogers, Nicholas, ‘Patrons and Purchasers: Evidence for the Original Owners of Books Produced in the Low Countries for the English Market’, in Cardon, Bert, Stock, Jan Van der and Vanwijnsberghe, Dominique, eds, ‘Ah Ich Can’: Liber Amicorum in Memory of Professor Dr Maurits Smeyers, 2 vols (Leuven, 2002), 2: 1165–81 Google Scholar, summarizing part of Rogers’s invaluable unpublished M. Litt thesis, ‘Books of Hours Produced in the Low Countries for the English Market’, University of Cambridge, 1984.

12 I paraphrase Deschamps’s lines, quoted more literally in The Hours of Mary of Burgundy, ed. Inglis, 60–1.

13 Reproduced in Marks, Richard and Williamson, Paul, eds, Gothic: Art for England 1400–1547 (London, 2003)Google Scholar, catalogue no. 213; Campbell, Lome, ed., The Fifteenth-Century Netherlandish Schools, National Gallery Catalogues (London and New Haven, CT, 1998), 377 Google Scholar. Similar (later) examples from the reign of Henry VIII reproduced as Marks and Williamson, eds, Gothic, catalogue no. 276 and pl. 49 (Knyvett altarpiece); catalogue no. 135 (Withypool altarpiece).

14 Furnivall, Frederick J., ed., The Fifty Earliest English Wills in the Court of Probate, London, AD. 1387–1439: with a Priest’s of 1454, EETS 78 (London, 1882) 5, 102.Google Scholar

15 New York, Pierpoint Morgan Library, PML 1034 (STC 15959), final flyleaf, recto.

16 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Don.d.206, passim: information from Professor John Barron, who is preparing a study of the book for the Bodleian Record.

17 Sidney Sussex MS 37, fols 154v-156.

18 Ushaw College MS 43, fol. 136.

19 Rogers, , ‘Books of Hours Produced in the Low Countries’, 48.Google Scholar

20 This is the case with one of the two CUL copies, Inc.5 J.1.2, a copy owned both by the earl of Surrey and Sir William Parr.

21 Examples of cheap, mass-produced manuscript illustrations from fifteenth-century books for the English market in Arnould, Alain and Massing, jean-Michel, eds, Splendours of Flanders (Cambridge, 1993)Google Scholar, catalogue nos 32, 33, 39. Representative pages from mass- produced printed Books of Hours in Marks and Williamson, eds, Gothic, catalogue nos 224–6, and in Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, pl. 88–97.

22 Cf. STC 15973, a small octavo Latin Book of Hours printed by Regnault in 1531, with STC 15970, half the size, containing identical text, and the same sequence of illustrations, but simpler and cruder in execution.

23 STC 15926.

24 STC 15922, fol. lxi (illustration).

25 Ibid., fol. cxxiii. The blockprint of St Brigid, used also in the Bridgetine treatise, The Dietary of Ghostly Helth in the following year, 1520, is reproduced in Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, pl. 61.

26 Richmond, Colin, ‘Religion and the Fifteenth-Century Gentleman’, in Dobson, Barrie, ed., The Church, Politics and Patronage in the Fifteenth Century (Gloucester, 1984), 199.Google Scholar

27 ‘But thou, when thou shalt pray, enter into thy chamber and, having shut the door, pray to thy Father in secret.’

28 St Anselm’s Proslogion: with a Reply on behalf of the Fool, ed. Charlesworth, M. J. (Oxford, 1965)Google Scholar, no.

29 The case for the divisive nature of lay interiority is argued for most insistently by Hughes, Jonathan, The Religious Life of Richard III: Piety and Prayer in the North of England (Stroud, 1997), 104–53.Google Scholar

30 Williams, Neville, The Cardinal and the Secretary (London, 1975), 152.Google Scholar

31 See, for example, the title-page of STC 15973, published by Francis Regnault in 1531 (reproduced in Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, pl. 93).

32 Reproduced in Batschmann, Oskar and Griener, Pascal, Hans Holbein (London, 1997), 160 Google Scholar (illustration).

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36 Examples include the Counter monument at Racton, the Ernley Monument at West Wittering, and the Sackville monument at Westhampnett, all in Sussex: the Sackville monuent is illustrated in Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, pl. 9.

37 Lambeth Palace Library MS 459, fol. 1r.

38 Hughes, , Religious Life of Richard III, 123.Google Scholar

39 Bossy, , ‘Prayers’, 137–48.Google Scholar

40 Richmond, Colin, ‘Margins and Marginality: English Devotion in the Later Middle Ages’, in Rogers, Nicholas, ed., England in the Fifteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1992 Harlaxton Symposium (Stamford, 1994), 242–52 Google Scholar. The quoted prayer is from Bodleian Library, Gough Liturgical MS 7, fol. 81v, a prayer-book (not a Book of Hours) compiled for George, earl of Shrewsbury, c.i 500.

41 Routine contents analysed in Wieck, Painted Prayers, passim.

42 Duffy, , Stripping of the Altars, 266–98.Google Scholar

43 On the Roberts family, see Bolton, D. K. in The Victoria County History of Middlesex, ed. Baker, T. F. T., 12 vols (Oxford, 1911–1982), 7: 216–17, 238.Google Scholar

44 CUL Ii.6.2, fol. 1 recto-verso.

45 Ibid., fol. 3.

46 Ibid., fol. 33.

47 Ibid., fol. 23v: Fitzwilliam Museum MS 40–1950, fols 132–135.