‘An Hour before the Day’: the dismembered Book of Hours in Elizabeth Siddal’s Clerk Saunders

Abstract

In 1855, the Pre-Raphaelite artist–poet Elizabeth Siddal was invited to examine John Ruskin’s collection of medieval manuscripts. Two years later, a manuscript—a Book of Hours, the popular late medieval prayer-book—appeared in Siddal’s painting Clerk Saunders. Siddal’s decision to include a Book of Hours in a scene from a medieval ballad encourages us to explore the painting’s creative strategies in new ways. This article examines how Clerk Saunders reinterprets the art of such prayer-books, focusing on Siddal’s reworking of the Annunciation. I shall explore the collision between this visual iconography and the language of the ballads from which the subject is taken, and trace how this literary-inspired pictorial dismemberment unsettles the medievalism of other Pre-Raphaelite works. I will demonstrate how Siddal’s disruptive medievalism is illuminated by queer theory; there have been queer readings of ‘Siddal’ the mythologized figure, but I will show how Siddal takes a queering approach to ballads and iconography in her art and poetry. My article will affirm Siddal’s work with the Book of Hours as an important contribution to Pre-Raphaelite medievalism, which speaks to anxieties about the destabilizing power of nineteenth-century creativity, and the tempestuous relationship between words and images across historical periods.