Art, Identity and Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England: Three Women and their Books of Hours by Kathryn A. Smith (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 305 Further fictions appear in David A. Wilson’s witty consideration of Mother Shipton, a Yorkshire prophetess and sage whose 1448 foretellings were published to great acclaim in 1862. Further research (and a deathbed confession) revealed that the collected writings of Mother Shipton arrived from the pen of a nineteenth-century confidence man. There is, however, evidence that the myth of Mother Shipton was prevalent much earlier, perhaps as early as the fourteenth or fifteenth century. Wilson argues that the reality of Shipton’s existence is insignificant when seen in relation to the importance of her legend. Even if she were merely a conglomeration of oral tales and half-baked predictions, her legacy is “part of a continuum of adjusting the product to suit the market and securing the best possible prophet” (322). Regardless of the result of ‘adjusting the product,’ whether it is a legal document, a prophecy, a marriage, a play, or a political role, each article in this volume pays particular attention to the ways in which human ingenuity sometimes runs amok. While some essays are heavy on exposition, perhaps that is unavoidable when addressing such a broad topic as general fraud. Each article essentially builds around a case study, and the specific details of each case are engagingly presented and expounded upon. That being said, further exploration of the ramifications of the fraud or scam would not be amiss in certain of the articles. Each piece in its own right is highly specific and particular, often addressing only one text. Read individually, each treatise is a concise research piece on a specific moment. Read together as a collection, “Shell Games” provides a fascinating overview of the beliefs, the tensions, and the politics of a world in transition and peoples in confusion. Ingenuity and courage are here, as are outright villainy, corrupt courts, and charlatans. In this book, truth is better than fiction, because the truth may be a fiction. KATHRYN B. FALZARENO, English, UCLA Kathryn A. Smith, Art, Identity and Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England : Three Women and their Books of Hours (London: British Library and University of Toronto Press 2003) xix + 364 pp., ill. Kathryn A. Smith’s new volume considering three important insular books of hours from the fourteenth century and their original patrons is an exhaustively researched and generously illustrated synthesis of diverse recent scholarship concerning books of hours, female art patronage of the late Middle Ages, and the construction of medieval identity and spirituality. Smith’s writing is a congenial and lucid vehicle for a prodigious amount of information. Particularly remarkable is the ease with which the author makes the minutiae of heraldic devices, genealogies, and ephemeral medieval alliances coexist on the page with post-modern theories of identity and contemporary literary criticism. The first chapter serves largely to introduce what is known through various sources (largely legal records and the horae themselves) about the production of the manuscripts and their original patrons. Smith underlines the importance of the Hours as biographical sources, stating that the books of hours in question “do more than supplement and enrich the sparse information available about their owners: they are the most tangible and substantial evidence of their owners ’ very existence” (11). This chapter is particularly dense with information regarding the various heraldic elements found throughout the manuscripts, as REVIEWS 306 well as conjecture as to the significance of the many familial and feudal relationship represented by them. Smith emphasizes the often-retrospective importance of these coats of arms, which might both proclaim the illustrious ancestry and/or alliances of the book’s patron and help him or her remember to include the relevant individuals or families in their prayers. Further questioning of the manuscripts reveals a number of clues which help to piece together a vision of the patrons’ lives at the time when each of the hours was commissioned: the ascendancy of Isabel de Byron (patron of the Neville of Hornby Hours) to a position of relative autonomy and power through her widowhood; Hawisia de Bois’s enduring attention to and identification with her natal family’s golden era; the seemingly-harmonious spiritual outlook of the de Lisles which led them to request...