The Provocations of Orthodoxy: Lydgate and Late-Medieval Books of Hours in Literary Culture

Abstract

Theologically conventional, books of hours nonetheless participate in cultures of formal and aesthetic experimentation that we would, under other circumstances, call literary. This article explores those provocations by examining the intersections of devotional and literary reading cultures visible in John Lydgate’s “Fifteen Joys of Our Lady,” a small poem that appears in a variety of manuscript contexts. One of these is a book of hours, British Library MS Egerton 3088. But the poem’s other manuscript contexts, ranging from a psalter (Oxford, Bodleian MS Lat. Liturgy. e 47) to an anthology of vernacular poetry (Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.21) reveal how malleable it is. Finally, another poem of Lydgate, “The Fifteen Joys and Sorrows of Our Lady,” provides a vision not only of how devotional reading works, but also of devotional literary production itself.

Keywords:

• Book of hours
• Lydgate
• devotional literature
• idea of the literary
• manuscript studies
• Fifteen Joys of the Virgin
• Fifteen Joys and Sorrows of the Virgin

Acknowledgment

For their helpful editorial suggestions, I’d like to thank Andrea Denny-Brown and Thomas Fulton. I’m grateful, also, for the inspiration provided by audiences who heard early versions of these ideas at the Huntington Library, Western Michigan University, and Northwestern University.

Notes

1. For interesting examples of English books of hours including vernacular texts, see, e.g. Smith 2003, 2012. For consideration of the role of the vernacular per se, see Brantley 2015.

2. The instructions Sandler mentions occur often in fourteenth-century books — in early examples such as the de Reydon Hours, the Taymouth Hours, and the Bohun Psalter-Hours. The individualized liturgical participation that these books offered perhaps became less possible in England after 1409, though wider study would be necessary to be conclusive.

3. Cf. Bruce Holsinger’s complementary argument that surprising literary effects can be traced in Lollard materials long thought “artless” (2005, 68). “Lollard aesthetics” serve aims quite different from those of the orthodox hours, but both can be seen to disrupt expectations in productive ways.

4. The bibliography on secularism and post-secularism is vast, but see, e.g. Taylor 2007, and responses to it, including Warner, VanAntwerpen, and Calhoun, eds. 2010. See also discussions on the Social Science Research Council blog The Immanent Frame http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/secular_age/ (accessed 22 March 2017).

5. Lydgate’s monastic and poetic careers have not often been explicitly linked, but Fiona Somerset (2006) identifies hagiography as the best place to see the connection.

6. See DIMEV 867; IMEV 533; NIMEV 533. The manuscripts are: Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.21; London, British Library MS Cotton Titus A.XXVI; London, British Library MS Egerton 3088; New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Library MS Takamiya 4; New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Library MS Takamiya 17; Oxford, Bodleian MS Lat. liturg. e.47. For an edition, see MacCracken 1911; repr. 1961).

7. BL MS Egerton 3883 (olim London, Law Society MS 2 [107e]). The manuscript was owned by Joseph Mendham, Anglican clergyman and bibliophile (1769–1856); passed by his descendants to the Law Society (as Law Society MS 2); loaned to Canterbury Cathedral Library (as Canterbury, Cathedral Library, Law Society, Mendham Collection, 6); and bought by the British Library in the Mendham Collection sale, Sotheby’s, London, June 5, 2013, lot 36. See Ker 1969, 116–118; Hingley and Shaw, eds., p. cxliv; Sotheby's sale catalogue, June 5, 2013, online at http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2013/the-mendham-collection-l13409/lot.36.html. For a mention of the manuscript, see Boffey 1995, 146.

8. MED s.v. tretise n. “formal discourse or written work expounding on a topic.”

9. The collation of this manuscript is unfortunately quite jumbled, due to misbinding; the Lydgate poem appears on folios 211, 203, 212, 216, 215, 214, 213, 218, and 217.

10. This manuscript is made up of two fragments, now joined, containing Richard de Caistre’s popular hymn “Jesu, Lord, that madest me,” as well as Lydgate’s poem. The Beinecke’s catalogue surmises that the manuscript as it stands was “apparently extracted from a longer liturgical manuscript,” seemingly on the basis of its script: “the first text written in a calligraphic gothic liturgical script, the second written in an English bookhand.” If the first piece once formed part of a “liturgical” book, it is not unlikely that that book was a book of hours, as Richard de Caistre’s hymn is frequently found in that context.

11. IMEV 447; NIMEV 447; DIMEV 834. MacCracken, ed., 1911; repr. 1961, 268–279.

12. MED s.v. balade n. 2.

13. Thus, according to Schirmer, “The gaudia are therefore in fact invocations, like those in the litany, and the whole work can be described as a rosary poem” (1961, 194).

14. See also Douglas Gray’s observation that “The verse prayers addressed to various saints are hardly ever of much literary value” (1972, 156), with further discussion in Driver (2013), Gray, like Woolf (1968), connects these kinds of texts to images, assuming that illustrated poems rely on pictures to compensate for their deficiencies.