Images of Ladies with Prayer Books: What do they Signify?

Abstract

Monastic illumination of manuscripts gave to writings a force and prestige which was unprecedented. Throughout the millennium of western monasticism (500-1500 A.D.), the rich founded monasteries so that monks might pray and worship on their behalf. The monks displayed the fruit of their labours to their patrons in their churches and other works of art, particularly in their books. When with growing prosperity from about 1250 onwards the demand for individual prayer reached down to the middle class of knights and burgesses, they began to want wonderworking books of their own. They could not afford to buy a chantry chapel or a jewelled reliquary, but a small illuminated manuscript came within their means as the first step towards the purchase of paradise. Ladies in particular took to reciting the Latin Psalter and treasuring illuminated Books of Hours. In fifteenth-century depictions of the Annunciation, Mary is often shown seated in a sunlit bower with an open Book of Hours on her lap or displayed on a lectern. Likewise she is sometimes depicted with the Child Jesus on her knee, showing him a Book of Hours. The habit of possessing books might never have reached the laity if writing had not been so luxurious and so covetable. Illumination introduced the laity to script through images which could not fail to attract the eye. The children of the prosperous were introduced to the Psalter by their mothers or a priest for the purpose both of learning to read and of beginning formal prayer. To own a Psalter was therefore an act of familial as well as public piety.These words were written twenty years ago, for a conference at the Library of Congress in 1980 on ‘Literacy in historical perspective’. Since then, these themes have been addressed in several lectures and research papers at conferences, and I would stand by the main ideas expressed in that passage. Monks had indeed given extraordinary prestige to books and in particular to the illuminated liturgical book, which is a medieval invention. By the thirteenth century such books were being adapted for lay use and ownership, typically in Books of Hours. However, it is mistaken to say that lay use ‘began’ then, as the aristocracy – particularly in Germany – had been familiar with prayer books for centuries. In the twelfth century, Hildegard of Bingen was said to have learned only the Psalter ‘as is the custom of noble girls’. A Psalter for lay use dating from c.1150, which belonged to Clementia von Zähringen, has been preserved. It contains a full-page portrait of a lady – presumably Clementia herself – at folio 6v between the end of the Calendar and the Beatus page beginning the Psalms. This book has 126 folios in its present state (possibly one folio is missing at the end) and it measures 11 cm X 7 cm, no larger than a woman’s hand. The biography of Marianus Scotus, the eleventh-century Irish hermit who settled at Regensburg, describes how he wrote for poor widows and clerics ‘many little books and many Psalter manuals’ (‘multos libellos multaque manualia psalteria’). The diminutive form ‘libellos’ and the adjective ‘manualia’ emphasise that these manuscripts were small enough to hold in the hand, like Clementia von Zähringen’s book.