Dr. Greg Clark's Notes and Presentation
The Book of Hours, the Best Seller of the Middle Ages: Two Southern Netherlandish Manuscript Exemplars at the University of Southern California (1)
An Invited Lecture by Dr. Greg Clark
Dr. Clark generously provided his slides, which can be found at this link. The slide numbers correspond to the bracketed numbers seen here.[Clark]
Thanks to: Jay Rubenstein, Director of the Center for the Premodern World;
Danielle Mihram [USC Libraries], Faculty Liaison for the Dornsife College of Arts & Letters;
Melissa Miller [USC Libraries], Humanities Faculty Librarian; and
Isabella Rose Carr, for help with the logistics of my visit.
(2) In 2014 the Doheny Memorial Library was able to acquire two fifteenth-century southern Netherlandish manuscript Books of Hours for teaching and research purposes. The earlier, on the left, was purchased from John Windle Antiquarian Booksellers of San Francisco; the later, on the right, was acquired from Lynge and Son of Copenhagen. In my presentation today, I would like, first, to speak about the Book of Hours as a text, and then to consider each of the Doheny manuscripts individually as works of late medieval art and craft.
(3) The texts for the liturgy, or public worship, of the Christian church fall into two groups. The first group comprises texts for the celebration of the Mass, or Eucharist, the central sacrament of the church. The second group of texts is those for the Divine Office, that is, the daily round of public devotional prayer. The principal text for the Mass is the Missal; the principal text for the Divine Office is the Breviary.
While the Mass is fundamentally a single sacrificial rite instituted by Christ at the Last Supper, the Divine Office has no necessary ritual and no fixed design. The origins of the texts of the Divine Office can be traced back to the Apostolic period and to services in the Jewish synagogue. (4) Those texts had evolved by the Middle Ages into a cycle of eight separate devotions, or Hours, for each day. I project here the names of the Hours and their approximate times; please note that the times of the first two and last two Hours can vary considerably according to the time of year.
(5) Books of Hours are often classified with books of the Divine Office, since the Book of Hours’ distinguishing text, the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary, is usually included in the Breviary and is modeled after the Breviary’s eight Hours for each day.
The Book of Hours differs from the normal offices in several important ways, however. (6) First, the Book of Hours was used for private devotions, not for the public liturgy recorded in Breviaries. The Book of Hours, therefore, is not, strictly speaking, a liturgical text at all, but rather a quasi-liturgical text. Second, unlike the Breviary, which was read primarily by those in religious orders, the Book of Hours was intended first and foremost for the laity.
A window, both literally and figuratively, into the character and purpose of the Book of Hours in late medieval art and life is presented by this celebrated miniature. In the foreground, Mary, duchess of Burgundy, reads her Book of Hours. In the background, seen through an opened window, Mary of Burgundy appears to be rewarded for her pious reading by either being admitted in her mind's eye into the Virgin Mary's celestial throne room, or by being granted a vision of the Virgin and Child in the choir of an earthly church in the Brabantine Gothic style, the style practiced in her northern dominions in her own lifetime.
Because the worldly lives of most of the laity allowed insufficient time to recite the copious texts recorded in the Breviary, the texts in Books of Hours were made short enough to allow laypeople to read some or most of them every day. Four of the standard texts in a Book of Hours were extracted from the Breviary; these I illustrate here with openings from the two Doheny Hours. (7) These are the calendar, which records the feasts, or celebrations, of the Christian liturgical year; (8) the Hours of the Virgin itself; (9) the Seven Penitential Psalms of King David of Israel, taken from the Old Testament Book of Psalms, followed directly by a litany, that is, a sequence of petitions and prayers, to the deity, the Virgin, and the saints; (10) and the Office of the Dead, the text recited in the Middle Ages over the body of the deceased the night and morning before the funeral Mass itself.
To those four texts the Book of Hours adds a series of set passages from the Four Gospels of the New Testament known as Gospel readings, unillustrated in the two Doheny Books of Hours; (11) the relatively brief Hours of the Cross and Hours of the Holy Spirit, absent from the earlier Doheny Hours but present in the later one; two Latin prayers to the Virgin known from their opening words as the Obsecro te (that is, “I beseech you”) and the O intemerata (that is, “O immaculate virgin”), absent from the two Doheny Books of Hours; and lastly suffrages, or extended petitions, to the saints, also absent from both Doheny Books of Hours. Ancillary texts are also found in many Books of Hours, but the aforementioned ten texts are foundational and most often present.
The Hours of the Virgin first appeared in Breviaries in the eleventh century, thus at the beginning of the High Middle Ages. (12) In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Hours of the Virgin were often joined with the Psalter, that is, the Book of Psalms divided into seven discrete units for the seven days of the week, and divided again within each unit into psalms for each of the eight liturgical Hours of the day. The resulting text was called a Psalter-Hours. I show here two openings from the Psalter-Hours of Isabelle of France, daughter of king Louis VIII of France and sister of the celebrated saint-king Louis IX of France.
By the end of the thirteenth century, however, the Hours of the Virgin was being detached from the Psalter to become a devotional book in its own right. (13) On the screen is the early fourteenth-century Book of Hours of Jeanne de Navarre, daughter of king Louis X of France. To judge from the many thousands of surviving examples, both decorated and undecorated, the popularity of the Book of Hours accelerated in the fourteenth century, exploded in the fifteenth century, and began to taper off only towards the middle of the sixteenth century.
(14) All Books of Hours were manuscripts, that is, books written by hand, up until the advent of moveable-type printing in the third quarter of the fifteenth century, at which point manuscript Book of Hours were joined by scores of printed editions. Given all of this, Roger Wieck, curator of manuscripts at the Morgan Library in New York, has rightly called the Book of Hours the “best seller of the Middle Ages,” although “best seller of the late Middle Ages” might be closer to the mark. (15) I should add that the Book of Hours did not disappear altogether after the sixteenth century: my own, bilingual copy was printed in 1915.
The preferred support for manuscript Books of Hours was vellum, that is, stretched animal skin; paper joined vellum as a support with the rise of printed Books of Hours. With respect to decoration, manuscript Books of Hours run the gamut from a handful of colored initials at the incipits, or openings, of key texts to tens, scores, even hundreds of decorated initials and miniatures, that is, pictorial images, with both miniatures and text blocks often surrounded by sumptuously decorated borders. All such decoration is called illumination, from the Latin verb illuminare, to give light.
France was the epicenter of production for manuscript Books of Hours, with the southern Netherlands, roughly modern-day Belgium, following close behind. The two Doheny Books of Hours were both made in the southern Netherlands, and relatively close together in time, in the second third of the fifteenth century. Let us turn to them now.
(16) For the sake of brevity, I will call the later manuscript the 1450 Hours after its Doheny OCLC number. Its texts comprise, in order, a calendar; the Hours of the Cross; the Hours of the Holy Spirit; an ancillary text called the Mass of the Virgin, shown here; the Gospel Sequences, the Hours of the Virgin, the Seven Penitential Psalms and litany, and finally the Office of the Dead. All of the texts in the 1450 Hours are in Latin.
All eight texts save the calendar and Gospel Sequences in the 1450 Hours begin on rectos, that is, the right-hand sides of their respective openings. As we can see here, the six texts that begin on rectos are faced with inserted single leaves with full-page miniatures enclosed by stylized floral decoration on their versos, and matching floral decoration enclosing the text blocks on the facing seven text rectos. (17) Although only the first Hour of the Virgin, at Matins, is faced with a full-page miniature, the incipits for the remaining seven Hours all begin on rectos as well. This makes clear that all eight Hours of the Virgin were carefully copied out to accommodate facing miniatures on inserted leaves. Whether such miniatures were never provided for the 1450 Hours, or provided but later removed, is unclear.
While most of the texts in a typical Book of Hours are not peculiar to one center or region, the texts of the Hours of the Virgin and Office of the Dead and the saints chosen for inclusion in calendars and litanies often are peculiar to one center or region. We use the term localization to describe the identification of readings in the Hours of the Virgin or Office of the Dead and of strictly local saints and feasts in calendars that enable us to determine where liturgical and quasi-liturgical texts were written to be used.
Unfortunately, the Hours of the Virgin in the 1450 Hours conform to the universal use of Rome, that is, the use of the clergy in the Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran, the episcopal seat of the bishop of Rome. As a consequence, the use of Rome is of no help for pinpointing where the 1450 Hours or any other manuscript for the use of Rome was actually written to be used. The Office of the Dead is also of no help in this respect, as it contains only three of the usual nine lessons that, together with petitions for each lesson known as versicles and responses, are needed to determine where an individual Office of the Dead was written to be used.
The calendar and litany of the 1450 Hours, by contrast, do contain strictly local saints and feasts. (18) To orient my listeners, I project here a diocesan map of the southern Netherlands before the redrawing of the diocesan lines throughout Europe in 1559. Two dotted black lines indicate the modern borders between France and Belgium and Belgium and the Netherlands; the centers that will concern us today, all of them in Belgium, are Tournai, Ghent, and Bruges.
(19) In the 1450 Hours calendar, feasts of high grading are written in red and feasts of low grading are written in black. The two key red-letter feasts are Amelberge on the tenth of July (20) and Bavo on the first of October. While Bavo is a red-letter saint in Bruges and the Dutch city of Utrecht as well as Ghent, Amelberge is red-letter only in Ghent.
(21) That the manuscript was in Ghent in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century is confirmed by the inscription on the last paper flyleaf, which was added when the book was rebound. It identifies the owner as one Grietken Baeckx, who lived in the Groot Begijnhof, or Great Beguinage, of Ghent. A beguinage is an architectural complex created to house beguines, that is, lay religious women who lived in community without taking vows or retiring from the world. The beguinage in Ghent in question is the Old Saint Elizabeth Beguinage, begun in 1234 under the patronage of Countess Johanna of Constantinople, daughter of Count Baldwin the Ninth of Flanders, the county that included Ghent in the Middle Ages.
(22) But while the 1450 Hours appears to have been written for use in Ghent and was there by the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, it may not have been made in Ghent. The inclusion of Bavo among the martyrs in the litany, rather than among the confessors where he belongs, suggests that the texts of the 1450 Hours were not written in Ghent, as it is very hard to imagine any scribe based in Ghent making this mistake. Also surprising is the fact that Amelberge of Ghent is not among the virgins in the litany.
(23) That the 1450 Hours may have been confected elsewhere than in Ghent is supported by the style of its miniatures and borders. These are in the style of the Mildmay Master, one of the many illuminators working in Bruges in the third quarter of the fifteenth century in styles that derived from the Gold Scrolls style, the dominant style in Bruges in the second quarter of the fifteenth century. I compare here two miniatures in the 1450 Hours with the same subjects in in a Book of Hours in the Mildmay Master style sold in London at Christie's in 2008: the Virgin and Child with one or more angels
(24) and the Annunciation.
The borders in the 1450 Hours present a mixture of broad, brightly colored stylized acanthus leaves together with rinceaux, that is, fine vines in black pen and ink studded with ivy leaves and small leaves and blossoms, all of them in burnished gold.
Those borders are also typical of Bruges production in the third quarter of the fifteenth century, as the two images on the screen illustrate. The fine red rules around the border foliage in the 1450 Hours point to a date in the third quarter of the fifteenth century as well. Given all of this, a date between about 1460 and 1470 and an origin in Bruges rather than in Ghent for the 1450 Hours seems most likely.
(25) We are on much firmer ground origin-wise with the second Doheny Hours, which I shall call after its OCLC number the 1460 Hours; here I show its two full-page miniatures. Its texts comprise a calendar; the Hours of the Virgin followed by alternative readings for those Hours from the First Sunday in Advent up until the Purification of the Virgin on the second of February as well as antiphons to be read at certain times of the year; then the Penitential Psalms and litany; and lastly the Office of the Dead. (26) The calendar and many rubrics, that is, text headers written entirely in red, blue, or gold rather than black, are in French; all other texts are in Latin.
The Hours of the Virgin and Office of the Dead in the 1460 Hours are for the universal use of Rome and the litanies contain no strictly local saints. The calendar, by contrast, was clearly written for use in the diocese of Tournai. As in the 1450 Hours, feasts of high grading are written in red and feasts of low grading in black. (27) In the 1460 Hours the Tournai feasts include Eleutherius on 20 February, in red; (28) the dedication of the cathedral of Notre Dame de Tournai, also in red, on 9 May; (29) the translation of the relics, or body parts, of Eleutherius to Tournai cathedral on 25 August; (30) and Piaton, in red, on 1 October.
(31) There are also two black-letter feasts for Cambrai, those of Vincent Madelgarus on 14 July (32) and of Gislenus on 9 October. (33) The presence in the 1460 Hours calendar of those two Cambrai saints should not surprise: the city of Tournai straddled the dioceses of Tournai and Cambrai before the redrawing of the diocesan lines in 1559. The episcopal seat for the diocese of Tournai was located in the larger, western part of the city; the smaller, eastern part of the city of Tournai fell into the diocese of Cambrai. (34) That the 1460 Hours was indeed made in Tournai is confirmed by its original panel-stamped binding. As the signatures on the back cover reveal, the binder was Jacques Gontier, who is documented in Tournai between 1414 and 1448.
(35) All eight Hours of the Virgin, the Penitential Psalms, and Office of the Dead in the 1460 Hours are illustrated with two full-page and eight half-page miniatures, thus ten miniatures altogether. A Provençal or Italian miniature portrait of a bishop-saint is also pasted in at the front of the book.
(36) The ten full- and half-page miniatures in the 1460 Hours are in a style that I have not encountered in any other fifteenth-century southern Netherlandish manuscript. That the book's fifteenth-century painter was based in Tournai, however, is suggested by the stylistic resemblances between the 1460 Hours Coronation of the Virgin and the same subject in a Book of Hours offered in London by Sotheby’s in 1980. Although the Hours of the Virgin in the Sotheby's manuscript are for Rome use, Piaton of Tournai appears in red on 1 October in the calendar, just as he does in the 1460 Hours. Piaton also appears in the litanies of the Sotheby's manuscript.
As the Sotheby's Book of Hours also contains a suffrage to Bernardinus of Siena, canonized in 1450, the Sotheby's manuscript must have been made in or after that year. To judge from the absence of an enclosing rule around the floral border surrounding the Coronation of the Virgin, the Sotheby's Book of Hours was probably made before about 1460, by which time such enclosing rules had become the norm in southern Netherlandish manuscripts.
(37) Save the two pages moved to the far right here, red enclosing rules are absent from the upper margins of the miniature pages of the 1460 Hours as well. As originally conceived, the borders on the pages with miniatures and large colored initials were filled with a mixture of broad, brightly colored stylized acanthus leaves and fine rinceaux. The acanthus leaves dominate on the two pages with large miniatures, here at the upper left and lower right, while the rinceaux dominate on the pages with half-page miniatures and large colored initials.
Today the borders on the pages with miniatures and large colored initials throughout the 1460 Hours are enclosed on three or four sides by baguettes, that is, broad burnished-gold bands with decorative patterning. (38) That these were added after the acanthus and rinceaux had been executed is made clear by the way that those baguettes clip the rinceaux on the page on the right and on many others in the 1460 Hours. The overextension of the rules in pen and black ink on the page on the left and elsewhere in the manuscript also suggest haste, inattentiveness, a lack of expertise, or a combination of these. Given the absence of Bernardinus of Siena, canonized in 1450, from both the calendar and the litanies of the 1460 Hours and the absence of rules enclosing the original borders in that manuscript, a date of around 1450 for the 1460 Hours seems reasonable. An origin in Tournai for the book seems to me to be beyond reasonable doubt.
What I have presented to you this afternoon with respect to the 1450 and 1460 Doheny Books of Hours leaves many questions unanswered and many other avenues of research unexplored. Here let me cite just three. (39) First, might an exhaustive search for detached leaves in the Mildmay Master style make it possible to establish that all eight Hours of the Virgin there were provided with full-page miniatures that were later removed? I should warn any eager souls among you that any such effort will be daunting: literally scores, if not hundreds, of manuscripts in and close to the Mildmay Master style have survived to this day.
(40) Second, while the Groot Begijnhof no longer stands in Ghent, its records may well survive in the city's archives. Might a search of those records make it possible to identify the Grietken Baeckx who owned the 1450 Hours?
(41) Third and finally, when were the baguettes in the 1460 Hours added? Was it very soon after the book’s making, perhaps even at the original owner’s request before the manuscript was delivered? Was it done later in the fifteenth century? Much later than that? A scientific examination of the 1460 Hours in its entirety would surely help answer these and other questions.
(42) One of the rewards of studying Western medieval manuscripts is that no two are ever exactly alike. Each one is a handcrafted unicum that deserves to be considered and valued on its own terms as well as within the larger contexts of the historic, cultural, and artistic currents that shaped its creation. At the very least, I hope that this presentation has conveyed to you the great joy that studying these objects has brought to me over the last 40 years. Thank you.