Books of Hours

Books of Hours were the bestsellers of the later Middle Ages, the one book every semi-literate and upwardly-mobile individual would have owned. This ubiquity makes them a valuable window into the religious and literary practices of everyday laypeople. However, these anthologies of prayer are also challenging to unpack: simultaneously highly standardized and infinitely personalizable, filled with common Latin offices and unexpected prayers, frequently illustrated in ways that have attracted art historians rather than textual scholars. Because Books of Hours are characterized by complex textual variety, analyzing them poses a seemingly intractable problem: how does one know whether a text, an image, or a sequence of prayers is standard and therefore broadly characteristic of late medieval piety, or whether its surprising presence signifies extraordinary personal investment? 

Answering such questions entails gathering data on hundreds of extant horae in order to identify standard texts, popular auxiliary prayers, regional variations, and less-common or unique inclusions. It also involves devising robust interdisciplinary methodologies to accomplish two distinct tasks. The first methodology is data-driven, one that helps the scholar derive significance from the patterns (or lack thereof) that appear within a geographically and temporally complex data set. The second methodology is interpretive, one that treats these prayers seriously as prayers that would have been vocalized with intent by a penitent individual within a larger devotional landscape. Working together, these methodologies can help the scholar analyze, with nuance and precision, individual performances of prayer within the wide-ranging use of these books. In other words, she can triangulate the common with the quirky and the textual with the performative to speak confidently and with nuance about how medieval individuals chose to talk with God. 

My current teaching with and research on Books of Hours is devising such methodologies by recourse to an always-growing data set of the prayers and images included in English and Parisian Books of Hours. To date I and my students have logged calendar data, suffrages, and prayers for over 100 English and 60 Parisian horae. We’re starting to use this data to understand what “normal” for a Book of Hours in a given place and time looks like, how medieval prayers circulated, and the kinds of individuals who collected certain prayers.

This growing dataset underpins three extended research projects. The first, pedagogical one is the Hargrett Hours project, in which I and my students study the prayers and provenance of a fifteenth-century Parisian Book of Hours owned by UGA. This project is a testing-ground for some of my data-drive methods. The second centers on the Middle English poem-prayers written by the poet John Lydgate that circulate in Books of Hours. This project asks how we might understand these poems’ attraction for English readers by analyzing them within these prayerful contexts. The third interrogates the Books of Hours owned by Henry V’s innermost circle of knights and retainers, those men who served with him in France and who continued the English occupation of Normandy after Henry’s death. These military men shared certain devotional priorities, expressing their piety in ways that index spiritual, martial, and administrative concerns. This study will ultimately demonstrate how these Books of Hours, as a way of structuring knowledge about the self, enabled England's most powerful men to integrate military might and religious piety, loyalty to saints and loyalty to kings, and professional and spiritual identities.
 

Current outputs:

Hargrett Hours Project, 2016-present. Principle investigator on a multi-year investigation of the contents, origins, history, and literary/cultural context of a Book of Hours owned by UGA’s Special Collections Libraries. Conducted within the undergraduate classroom with undergraduate students as co-investigators. Current outputs: 

"Prayer as Performance Art? The Case of Lydgate's Poetry in Books of Hours." New Chaucer Society Biennial Congress, Los Angeles, CA, July 2024. 

"The Prayer in the Poem: Lydgate's Poems in Books of Hours." Modern Language Association Annual Conference, Philadelphia, PA, January 2024. 

"Books of Hours as Miscellanies of Prayer? Nine Theses and a Question." Rereading the Medieval Miscellany: A Symposium, Indiana University, Bloomington IN, April 2022. 

“Lydgate's Little Library of Prayers.” 55rd International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 2021. 

"Books of Hours as Precanonical Texts; or, Why We Still Don’t Teach Lydgate," 53rd International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 2018. 

“Martial Piety, Occupier Identities Among Henry V’s Knights: William Porter’s Book of Hours.” Medieval Academy of America, Boston, MA, March 2025. 

“Praying to Northern Saints in English Books of Hours.” In Late Medieval Devotion to Saints from the North of England: New Directions, edited by Christiania Whitehead, Hazel J. Hunter Blair and Denis Renevey, Medieval Church Studies 48. Turnhout: Brepols, 2022. 99-125. 

“Praying to Northern Saints” (Invited keynote). Northern Lights: Late Medieval Devotion to Saints from the North of England, University of Lausanne, March 2019. 

"The 'Sarumization' of John of Beverley in Later Medieval England." 25th International Medieval Congress, Leeds, UK, July 2018. 

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