The first one’s easy – because Shawn Tribe already reviewed it over at TLM – the marvelous, instructive, revelatory book by Eamon Duffy, Marking the Hours.

Duffy is the historian whose The Stripping of the Altars has provided such an invaluable corrective to the mainstream view of the English Reformation as the answer to the 16th century Englishman’s prayers. Not quite, Duffy, points out, as he continues to do in his monograph on the reception of Henry’s "reformation" by one community in The Voices of Morebath. The essays in Faith of our Fathers provided a fresh look at the importance and meaning of tradition, as well.

Marking the Hours is a bit different than Duffy’s other books because it is almost what you’d call a coffee-table book. There is plenty of text, but there is also a wealth of illustration  – color plates illuminating Duffy’s exploration of the prayer books of the laity of pre-Reformation England (as well as a bit beyond), most of which were some form of the Liturgy of the Hours. I’ll let the publisher’s blurb do some work for me here:

In this richly illustrated book, religious historian Eamon Duffy discusses the Book of Hours, unquestionably the most intimate and most widely used book of the later Middle Ages. He examines surviving copies of the personal prayer books which were used for private, domestic devotions, and in which people commonly left traces of their lives.  Manuscript prayers, biographical jottings, affectionate messages, autographs, and pious paste-ins often crowd the margins, flyleaves, and blank spaces of such books. From these sometimes clumsy jottings, viewed by generations of librarians and art historians as blemishes at best, vandalism at worst, Duffy teases out precious clues to the private thoughts and public contexts of their owners, and insights into the times in which they lived and prayed. His analysis has a special relevance for the history of women, since women feature very prominently among the identifiable owners and users of the medieval Book of Hours.

Books of Hours range from lavish illuminated manuscripts worth a king’s ransom to mass-produced and sparsely illustrated volumes costing a few shillings or pence. Some include customized prayers and pictures requested by the purchaser, and others, handed down from one family member to another, bear the often poignant traces of a family’s history over several generations. Duffy places these volumes in the context of religious and social change, above all the Reformation, discusses their significance to Catholics and Protestants, and describes the controversy they inspired under successive Tudor regimes. He looks closely at several special volumes, including the cherished Book of Hours that Sir Thomas More kept with him in the Tower of London as he awaited execution.

Of course, Duffy wants to do far more than simply collect quaint examples of how medieval women and, to a lesser extent, men customised their most valued religious texts. What he wants to know is what it all means. Specifically, do all these doodles represent the beginning of a proto-Protestantism in which an individual’s relationship with God, mediated through a text, becomes more important than any amount of clerically led liturgy? Certainly earlier scholars have seen it like this, but Duffy is not so sure. For one thing, he says, the bits and pieces which people added to their Book of Hours tended to be standard issue. Far from writing their own heart-felt prayers, the late-medieval laity tended to pick up things they liked the sound of and squeeze them into the inter-linings of their printed text. Even as the Reformation loomed, one person’s prayer life tended to sound an awful lot like her neighbour’s.

This is a glorious feast of a book. Yale University Press has, as always, devoted extraordinary resources to making it both beautiful and good. Duffy only has to mention a document for it to appear, clearly reproduced, adjacent to the text for easy reference. The late-medieval illustrations, with their odd mix of elaborate abstract patterning and stiffly jointed figures, are drenched in the kind of colour that could so easily have become muddy in the hands of another publisher. The text, too, is innocent of the obscurity that sometimes makes it so difficult for a general reader to get to grips with the medieval worldview. With Duffy as our guide, the apparently random scribbles of often nameless men and women start to sound like a clear message from the distant past.

I’ve spoken often here of the necessity – and I mean that – necessity  – of being (at the very least) acquainted with our religious history. There a thousand reasons for it, too many to enumerate here. But one that comes to mind quite strongly, once again, in the reading of this book, is the value of understanding how deep the roots of praying this Prayer of the Church – in some form – go. It is not a new, trendy, thing for laity to join their own prayer to the Liturgy of the Hours, to pray it themselves in whatever way they can manage in their lives outside of religious communities. For as long as religious have prayed it – the Office, the Hours  – in their monasteries, convents, in their Cathedral chapters, at Matins and Vespers – the laity have been there, as well, doing something to pray along. Perhaps  joining in as full a form of the prayer as they can, perhaps adapting the praying of the Psalms into a more manageable form, one that involves beads and Paters and Ave Marias, and perhaps in their own abridged versions of the Hours, peppered with other devotions, prayed from beautiful, treasured and well-worn books.

It’s important, too, to divest ourselves of the fantasy that a fully-informed and engaged laity emerged about 1965 for the first time in Roman Catholic history. Not so. Not so at all. It’s a point made by Duffy in his work, one made quite powerfully by Fr. Augustine Thompson, O.P. in his Cities of God: The Religion of the Italian Communes, 1125-1325.

Marking the Hours is a beautiful book – it’s not very expensive at all, either. Well worth a purchase or even a library check-out, most certainly. May this type of book flourish – illuminating our past and giving us food for thought in our present.