The Vernacular Hours: Literary Culture and Private Prayer

We will meet at 5:15 in the Martin and Margy Meyerson Conference room, which is located on the second floor of Van Pelt Library, diagonally across from the elevator bank.

Brantley writes:
More books of hours remain in modern libraries than any other kind of book from late medieval England:  almost eight hundred manuscript volumes, and many thousands of printed ones.  Their survival rate suggests that these books were very widely read; a recent exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Center describes the book of hours as a “medieval bestseller.”  And yet this truism has failed to affect the reading and interpretation of late-medieval literature. In this talk, I will begin to explore the evidence for connections both broad and specific between books of hours and vernacular reading in late medieval England, in order to argue for the relevance of the book of hours to vernacular literary history.  As compendia of multiple systems of texts and images, these prayerbooks reveal a rich hybridity of representation as a central feature of late-medieval reading.