Praying the Hours
By Timothy J. Cullen
Among
the greatest treasures of medieval European art are the "Books of Hours," the illuminated manuscripts that served as devotional aids for laymen praying the Canonical Hours. In essence, the books could be thought of as "mini-breviaries," the liturgical books used in monasteries. As a nearly general rule, the books cover the entire liturgical year and are based on The Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a method of praying the hours now sadly set aside by the post-Conciliar Church. Even the simplest books, those without major illustration and illumination, also contain the fifteen Psalms of Degrees (Psalms 120-134) and the Seven Penitential Psalms (Psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, and 143), as well as a Litany for the Saints, the Hours of the Cross and an Office for the Dead.
There is a web site—http://www.
medievalbooksofhours.com/index.
html—devoted to Books of Hours that is likely to be of great interest to anyone wishing to learn more about these wonderful works of art inspired by the Faith. It includes two tutorials, basic and advanced, both richly illustrated. This writer—who came upon the web site while researching the material for this essay—has taken advantage of the two tutorials to improve his knowledge of the subject. Books of Hours first came to this writer’s attention at age eleven during a visit to the Morgan Library and Museum (then the Pierpont Morgan Library) on East 36th Street in Manhattan. As the years went by this marvelous resource, along with the Cloisters in northern Manhattan’s Fort Tryon Park, would become a favorite for late afternoon meditative visits; the Medieval was truly the meditative age in Christendom and both these museums impart a strong sense of the Medieval. The sheer visual magnificence of these medieval manuscripts is—in a very literal sense of the word— breathtaking, particularly when one looks upon them for the first time.
Their popularity during the Middle Ages comes as no surprise. "For three hundred years the Book of Hours was the bestseller of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. From the mid-thirteenth to the mid-sixteenth century, more Books of Hours were commissioned and produced, bought and sold, bequeathed and inherited, printed and reprinted than any other text, including the Bible."
1
Facsimile copies—often high quality—of these magnificent achievements are a favorite collectible for many of those who are first inspired when seeing the originals on display; this writer has a number of them, the first having been acquired as a Christmas gift in 1971 and carried from one country to another as its owner awaited finding what he hopes will be his last dwelling on this earth. The facsimiles are carefully arranged on the
1 http://www.medievalbooksofhours.com/ advancedtutorial/
bookshelves that line one wall. Many is the afternoon when one or another is taken down and carefully perused, a silent and solitary activity that has deepened in intensity with the passage of the years.
Take for example the Très Riches Heures of Jean, Duke of Berry,
published in 1969 by George Braziller, Inc. The reproductions of the miniatures by the Limbourg brothers and Jean Colombe are of exceptional quality, as the work deserves. The book has been reissued as of 2008, but has received negative reviews with respect to its quality, particularly when compared with the edition which this writer was fortunate enough to have received as a gift forty-plus years ago. The 1969 edition, however, was worked with actual metallic gold as well as high resolution color, creating an effect that, as the saying goes, must be seen to be believed.
The art of the Limbourg brothers can be described only with superlatives. Without exaggeration, one can spend half an hour or more gazing at one single page of the book, a page upon which is reproduced an absolutely exquisite miniature representing a Biblical vignette. Well before one attempts to read the text on the facing page or on one of the illuminated pages, well before one begins to use the book as a devotional tool, one simply allows oneself to delight in the genius of the artists, delight in the astonishing visual representation achieved by the artists.
And while the art of the Limbourg brothers gives the impression of being finer than that which was created by Jean Colombe, there are plates of his work that also merit the highest praise.
Perhaps one of the most moving of all the miniatures is that entitled "Christ in Gethsemane," painted by the Limbourgs. It is a full page plate, numbered 107 in the Braziller edition, and "is not only one of the three brothers’ most extraordinary works, but the most beautiful night scene ever painted by a miniaturist."
2
( artificially brightened for illustration purposes)
Very different in style but also of great impact is the representation of
2 Lognon and Cazelles, Très Riches Heures of Jean, Duke of Berry, George Braziller, Inc., NY, 1969, plate 107, facing page (unnumbered).
the "Garden of Eden," plate 20 in the Braziller edition. The use of gold in the creation of that airy almost ethereal tower, the richness of color in the blue of God’s robe, the demure aspects of Adam and Eve as they pass through the fiery gate on their way east of Eden, Paradise lost to them and their posterity, all this makes for a composition as satisfying thematically as it is visually.
Although Books of Hours were greatly appreciated for their artistic content, "[o]ne of the reasons for this popularity lies in the book’s contents.
The Book of Hours is a prayer book that contains, at its heart, the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary, that is, the Hours of the Virgin. For this reason the Latin term for the book is Horae (Hours). The Hours of the Virgin are a sequence of prayers to the Mother of God that, ideally, were recited throughout the course of the entire day, sanctifying it through her to God, Hour by Hour."
3
Indeed, "[t]he Book of Hours played a key role in the late medieval and Renaissance cult of the Virgin.
Marian devotion placed the Mother of God in the pivotal role as intercessor between man and God. As our spiritual mother, Mary would hear our petitions, take mercy on our plight. She would plead our case to her Son who, surely, could not deny his own mother anything for which she asked. In a Europe dominated by cathedrals dedicated to Notre Dame, the Hours of the Virgin were deemed Our Lady’s favorite prayers, the quickest way to her heart."
4
The heart of the Book of Hours is the Little Office, the most widely used and popular of the short breviaries.
"Until the Second Vatican Council, it was the liturgical prayer of hundreds of religious communities, mostly active, (and a few contemplative orders, as well), several Third Orders (lay members of the Carmelite, Dominican, Augustinian and other Orders and Congregations, for example), Oblates attached to Benedictine abbeys and convents, and thousands of other lay people, not affiliated with any Order,
3 http://www.medievalbooksofhours.com/ advancedtutorial/ 4 Ibid.
made use of it century after century.
From its inclusion in the earliest hand written and illuminated Book of Hours in the early and high Middle Ages, to the printed Primers of the Reformation period and beyond, it was seen in every century. Prior to the Second Vatican Council (1963), every printed edition of the Roman, Monastic, Carmelite, Dominican breviaries (before the Council) included a version of the Little Office."
5
Like so many other venerable Catholic traditions, however, the Second Vatican Council would see to it that the Little Office would be relegated to the ash heap of history. "The Constitution on the Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council added a new dimension to the Little Office(s). The Little Office(s), whether prayed out of obligation or out of devotion, were now to be classified as liturgical prayer, and those who prayed them would be participating in the official liturgy of the hours of the church. By 1966, however, religious and lay people were encouraged to adopt at least the Morning and Evening Prayer from the Divine Office. This was the beginning of the end of the Little Offices. Interest in, and use of, the Little Office(s) virtually died. When the Liturgy of the Hours was published, beginning in 1973, it did not include a version of the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary."
6
A hypertext copy of the Little Office is now available on the web— http://medievalist.net/hourstxt/home.
htm—for those who do not have the printed version, now no longer as easily obtained as once it was. More information about Books of Hours in general can be obtained at http:// www.dmoz.org/Society/History/By_ Time_Period/Middle_Ages/Religion/ Christianity/Books_of_Hours/, a web site providing a number of useful links to varied information and illustration focused on these devotional and artistic treasures. A print copy (preferably the 1969 hardback edition) of the Très Riches Heures of Jean, Duke of Berry, while not a trifling expense, is well worth its cost for its value to a Catholic family.
Catholic culture, like the liturgy and so much else, is much the poorer for the modernist takeover of the Church and Her position as the keystone of the structure of western civilization and the culture that defined it. Young people of the post-Conciliar era have little or no familiarity with the artistic wonders of the Middle Ages or even the Renaissance and later cultural developments within Christendom.
History for many of these unfortunates begins with the second half of the twentieth century, a period in which Catholicism and its culture have been steadily marginalized even within the Catholic "community," now diluted into a "sub-sect" of the emerging "One World Church" from which all believers
5 http://www.kellerbook.com/PARVUM~1.HTM 6 Ibid (emphasis added).
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