Mary and the Art of Prayer

The Hours of the Virgin in Medieval Christian Life and Thought

Rachel Fulton Brown

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231543712
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Rituels et pratiques chrétiens

Would you like to learn to pray like a medieval Christian? In Mary and the Art of Prayer, Rachel Fulton Brown traces the history of the medieval practice of praising Mary through the complex of prayers known as the Hours of the Virgin. More than just a work of comprehensive historical scholarship, the book asks readers to immerse themselves in the experience of believing in and praying to Mary. Mary and the Art of Prayer crosses the boundaries that modern scholars typically place between observation and experience, between the world of provable facts and the world of imagination, suggesting what it would have been like for medieval Christians to encounter Mary in prayer.

Mary and the Art of Prayer opens with a history of the devotion of the Hours or "Little Office" of the Virgin. It then guides readers in the practice of saying this Office, including its invitatory ( Ave Maria ), antiphons, psalms, lessons, and prayers. The book works on several levels at once. It provides a new methodology for thinking about devotion and prayer; a new appreciation of the scope of and audience for the Hours of the Virgin; a new understanding of how Mary functions theologically and devotionally; and a new reading of sources not previously taken into account. A courageous and moving work, it will transform our ideas of what scholarship is and what it can accomplish.

If you have ever seen a medieval manuscript or a picture from a medieval manuscript on a Christmas card, you most likely have seen a Book of Hours. You would not be alone. Oft-remarked then as now for the beauty of their illuminations, Books of Hours were literally the best sellers of their day. Thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of manuscript Books of Hours survive, particularly from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.¹ With the advent of printing, Books of Hours became available in hundreds of editions, some as luxurious as the manuscripts on which they were modeled, others affordable even to the average artisan.² As various as their makers and patrons, Books of Hours typically contain a wide variety of scriptural, liturgical, and devotional texts, including calendars, excerpts from the Gospels, prayers to the Virgin Mary and other saints, various cycles of psalms (Penitential and Gradual), litanies, and the Office of the Dead.³ It is fair to say that, even in their printed editions, no two Books of Hours are necessarily alike, their contents typically personalized and annotated by their owners for private devotional use.⁴ But the reason that they are called Books of Hours and not books of prayer is that every Book of Hours contained some version of the Horae beatae Mariae virginis or “Hours of the Blessed Virgin Mary,” now better known as the Officium parvum beatae Mariae virginis or “Little Office of the Virgin Mary.”⁵ So popular would this daily liturgical cursus of hymns, chants, psalms, lessons, and prayers become (thus the great popularity of the books, which English readers would come to call “prymers”), that by the later Middle Ages, every European Christian—man, woman, or child; monk, nun, cleric, or layperson—who could read would have been able to recite at least some of these hours by heart, and even those who could not would have been able to say the invitatory antiphon (Ave Maria) in lieu of the full Office.⁶ In the mid-fifteenth century, the scholars at the newly founded Eton College said their Matins of the Virgin while making their beds.⁷

And yet, even in its popularity, there was a paradox: prior to the promulgation in 1571 of the Officium beatae Mariae Virginis as revised in accordance with the recommendations of the Council of Trent, strictly speaking there was no such thing as the Office of the Virgin Mary.⁸ To be sure, some Uses⁹ were more widespread than others—those of Sarum (Salisbury) and York in England; that of Rome in Italy, Flanders, and in the later fifteenth century, France; that of Geert Grote’s Dutch translation in the Low Countries—but for centuries, variety remained the norm. Hundreds of different Uses have thus far been identified, and there is little to suggest that even current lists are exhaustive.¹⁰ To a certain extent, this variation should come as no surprise to those familiar with the complexities of the medieval liturgy. Even for the principal feasts of the Virgin, the texts of the liturgy varied from monastery to monastery, cathedral to cathedral.¹¹ At least with respect to their lessons and chants, however, the latter tended to draw from a recognizable repertoire, itself heavily dependent upon the Franko-Gregorian appropriation of the Song of Songs for the Marian feasts.¹² With the Office of the Virgin, the only real core was the choice of hymns and psalms and even here, particularly for Prime, the Little Hours, Vespers, and Compline there was significant variation. Only at Matins, where the psalms were the same as those for the Feasts of the Purification, Assumption, and Nativity of the Virgin, and at Lauds, where the psalms were taken from the regular secular cursus for Sunday, was there anything like a standard observance (see Table 2).¹³

TABLE 2 The Hours of the Virgin (for the most part)

MATINS (night Office)

• Invitatory (Ave Maria), with Psalm 94

• Hymn (“Quem terra pontus sidera”)

• One of three nocturns according to the day of the week. Each nocturn consists of three psalms, each having its own antiphon.

○ I: Psalms 8, 18, and 23 (Sunday, Monday, and Thursday)

○ II: Psalms 44, 45, and 86 (Tuesday and Friday)

○ III: Psalms 95, 96, and 97 (Wednesday and Saturday)

• Versicle and response

• Three lessons, each preceded by a blessing and followed by a responsory, with versicle and response. The Te Deum follows the third lesson.

LAUDS (daybreak)

• Five psalms, each with its own antiphon

○ Psalms 92, 99, 62, and 66

○ Canticle of the Three Children (“Benedicite opera omnia,” Daniel 3:57–88, 56)

○ Psalms 148–150

• Capitulum or “little chapter” with or without responsory

• Hymn (“O gloriosa Domina”), with versicle and response

• Canticle of Zacharias (Benedictus, Luke 1:68–79), with antiphon

• Prayer, followed by Suffrages of the Saints, with versicle and response

THE LITTLE HOURS (Prime: 6 a.m.; Terce: 9 a.m.; Sext: 12 p.m.; and None: 3 p.m.)

• Hymn

• Three psalms, with one antiphon

○ Prime: highly variable

○ Typical cycles starting with Terce:

■ a) Psalms 119, 120, 121; 122, 123, 124; 125, 126, 127

■ b) Psalms 122, 123, 124; 125, 126, 127; 128, 129, 130

■ c) Psalm 118 divided into parts vv. 33–80; 81–128; 129–176

• Capitulum with responsory

• Prayer, with versicle and response

VESPERS (sunset)

• Five psalms, each with its own antiphon

○ Typical cycles:

■ a) Psalms 109, 112, 121, 126, and 147

■ b) Psalms 121, 122, 123, 124, and 125

■ c) Psalms 128, 129, 130, 131, and 132

• Capitulum, with or without responsory

• Hymn (“Ave maris stella”), with versicle and response

• Canticle of Mary (Magnificat, Luke 1:46–55), with antiphon

• Prayer, with versicle and response

COMPLINE (bedtime)

• Three (monastic cursus) or four (secular cursus) psalms, with or without antiphons

○ Typical cycles:

■ a) Psalms 12, 42, 128, and 130

■ b) Psalms 128, 129, and 130

■ c) Psalms 131, 132, and 133

■ d) Psalms 30, 86, and 116

• Hymn

• Capitulum, with versicle and response

• Canticle of Simeon (Nunc Dimittis, Luke 2:29–32), with antiphon

• Prayer, with versicle and response

Post-Tridentine expectations of liturgical conformity might lead us to suspect that contemporaries found this diversity somewhat troubling, but such does not seem to have been the case. Every devout Christian man or woman—from the queen and her ladies to the abbess of the local convent, the bourgeois wife anxious to impress her neighbors, and the child just learning her ABCs; from the master general of the Dominicans to the duke and duchess of Burgundy, the brothers and sisters of the Common Life, and the married daughters of the knight Geoffrey de la Tour-Landry—might be saying the Matins of the Blessed Virgin first thing in the morning, “reverently,” as one spiritual director advised a certain English gentleman, “and not too fast,” but there is nothing to suggest that anything other than custom, local observance, and/or personal preference dictated which version of the Marian Office he or she might use.¹⁴ Skeptics might wonder whether for the majority of Mary’s devotees it made any difference. Surely, or so it has often been suggested, medieval Christians who owned such beautifully illuminated prayer books were only looking at the pictures (or showing them off to their friends), not reading the texts. And, to be sure, it is the pictures that have tended to attract most recent collectors and scholars, particularly those less versed (or less interested) in the intricacies of the medieval liturgy.¹⁵ Nevertheless, for all their beauty, images in fact make up only a small part of the contents of most Books of Hours. Unless you were saying, for example, Matins from memory (which is possible, given its repetition, day after day for most of one’s life), you would very rapidly finish reading the opening versicle (“Domine, labia mea aperies”—Lord, open my lips) accompanying the image of the Annunciation and need to turn the page. What you would then find would be not more images (except perhaps marginally, and these often far from devotional), but page after page of text, most—albeit not all—of it taken from the Psalms.¹⁶

Various and however much supplemented by additional devotions as they might be, the texts of the Hours of the Virgin mattered. Indeed, it is arguably their very variety that is the most telling witness to the significance of the Hours in high and late medieval Christian devotion. This was not an Office enjoined upon the laity by an authoritarian clergy; nor, despite the fact that it had come, by the later fourteenth century, to be considered obligatory upon all cathedral and collegiate clergy “by virtue of the general custom of all nations,” was it in its origins anything other than voluntary.¹⁷ Rather, just as the laity seems to have requested resources for participating in the liturgical observances of the regular clergy and the friars, so the friars and secular clergy themselves looked to the innovations of the monasteries.¹⁸ Neither, although the ever-vigilant Peter Damian (d. 1072/1073) did his utmost to promote it, can the composition of the Marian Office be accredited to any one community, never mind any one author.¹⁹ To date (to the best of my knowledge), some ten different Offices copied in the eleventh and twelfth centuries have been published; another seven have been identified in manuscript.²⁰ The two oldest of these, although both from mid–eleventh century England and from communities as closely associated as Canterbury and Winchester, differ in almost every particular, other than their selection of psalms.²¹

How did this optional Office, so obscure in its origins, come to be on the lips of so many in Christendom? One is almost tempted to say, with the Bostonian historian and belle-lettrist Henry Adams (d. 1918), because the Virgin herself wished it so. But this is to anticipate.²² What we can see as historians is a growth of interest in keeping this Office or something like it beginning from the later tenth century among certain monastic individuals and spreading rapidly over the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries to monastic and cathedral communities from as far south as Monte Cassino to as far north as the diocese of York. From the second quarter of the thirteenth century, we have evidence for its observance among certain ladies of the English West Midlands who had removed themselves from secular society to live as recluses or “ancresses.”²³ At about the same time, laypeople, especially women, seem to have begun to make special requests of professional (that is, nonmonastic) bookmakers for books containing the Hours of the Virgin as observed by their clerical, particularly mendicant, spiritual advisers. This, at least, seems to have been the case with the oldest known extant Book of Hours to be produced in England (London, British Library, Add. 49999), itself the work from around the year 1240 of the Oxford-based illuminator and scribe William de Brailes.²⁴ We have already noted the general self-imposition of the observance on cathedral colleges and the monastic orders by the fourteenth century. Whether copied into psalters, as remained the custom particularly in England well into the fifteenth century, or as the centerpiece of the increasingly popular Books of Hours, the Hours of the Virgin underpinned the prayer life of communities (convents, cathedral colleges, hospitals, houses of the Common Life, confraternities) and individuals (Peter Damian, Matilda of Tuscany, Gundulf of Bec, Manegold of Lautenbach, Humbert of Romans, Louis IX of France, Gertrude of Helfta, Geert Grote, Margery Kempe, Thomas More) for some five hundred or more years.

A full history of the development of the Hours of the Virgin is beyond the scope of our present exercise, involved as such a history would be with not only the monastic reforms of the eleventh and twelfth centuries and the new emphasis on lay education stimulated by the Fourth Lateran Council and the rise of the friars in the thirteenth, but also the great burgeoning of devotion to the Virgin that these centuries witnessed more generally.²⁵ There is likewise much work still to be done with the manuscripts and with tracing the distribution of textual variants and Uses. Our concern being with the role of the Marian Office in the practice and experience of prayer to the Virgin, it is not so much the details as the fact of this development that requires our attention here.

To this end, the first part of this chapter offers a review of the evidence that we have to date for the origins and adoption of the Marian Office. Although much of this story has been available, at least in parts, for the better part of a century, there remains a tendency in much recent scholarship on Books of Hours to imply, if unintentionally, that the Marian Office, while clearly monastic in its origins, was somehow specifically designed with the laity in mind, as an “abbreviated breviary” or substitute for the full monastic cursus of prayer.²⁶ As we shall see, as much in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries as in the eleventh and twelfth, the Marian Office was an observance kept by clergy and regular religious who, it should be noted, could both read and understand its texts and who still found it added something significant to their day, above and beyond the Hours of the Divine Office they were canonically obliged to observe. Nor were the laity (anchoresses, beguines, hospital worke...