Marginalia without Highlighters: The Book List

Welcome to the second-to-last book list of 2007. I continue the tradition of not posting the final list until a week or more into the New Year. Yay me! However, given that I finished my last book of the year on December 30 on my way back from New York (I didn’t quite mention the trip to New York, did I?), it’s not like I could have posted on December 31 (IP and I were too busy being industrious with our to-do lists and cleaning up for guests later that evening). However, I did want to dedicate a post (or two) to these two books because I feel that they’re both reads that deserve recognition.

The two books rounding out the 2007 book list are Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers, 1240-1570 by Eamon Duffy and A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. They were both exquisite books in their own ways. I will have to divide this post in two as Marking the Hours has ballooned into quite a post, but I can’t help myself—I truly enjoyed this body of research and the opulent images that Duffy has put together.

Marking the Hours is a rich detailing of the medieval Book of Hours (also known as horae), a primer of liturgical texts, prayers and psalms collected into one volume for individual use. Manuscript or printed, the Book of Hours is one of the most common surviving texts from the time period that Duffy covers. They could be luxuriously illuminated with elaborate drawings or standard plates that made it into mass-produced printed horae. Liturgical and secular calendars could also be a part of the book, with notes added by various owners over time (these books passed hands in the form of bequests or purchases). Duffy’s focus is more on the personal nature of the books as opposed to their illuminations or standard prayers; he pays careful attention to notations added, prayers and references erased, and (of particular interest to me) omissions deliberately made after various decrees by Henry VIII. The notes and actions give a peek into the lives of the owners and their times, if only for a brief moment.

As a recovering medievalist who still drools with anticipation at the mere mention of Catholicism in the Middle Ages or the Tudors and religious change in sixteenth century England, I found Duffy’s book irresistible: I’ve always been interested in the private lives of medieval persons, especially women, who were the main audience for the Book of Hours (though Thomas More’s Book of Hours, used while he was in the Tower, is examined here). It’s also an interesting angle that he discusses: how do these writings reveal the nascent Protestants in England? The Book of Hours doesn’t survive past Elizabeth I’s reign, and in fact the Book of Christian Prayer attempts to take the horae’s place as the English primer of faith by emulating the horae’s style (while including images of true religion destroying images of recusant idolatry); of course, Elizabeth’s reign brings a deafening end to Catholicism’s Counter Reformation efforts in England. How does the personal interiority of a Book of Hours reflect the social change in religious beliefs in England?

An example: I found it fascinating that so many books complied with Henry VIII’s decrees that made the pope simply a bishop and obliterated St. Thomas Becket’s place as a saint of England (he challenged Henry II when it came to Church versus kingly authority—a lesson that Henry VIII did not want repeated or respected and elevated in his lifetime). Was the threat of inspection so great that even a book as personal as the Book of Hours needed to be modified? Considering how many survive with these modifications, and how many survive overall, would it have been possible to be found out had one not modified one’s personal copy? This speaks to the censorship of both print and mind, to be sure, but also to the power of kingly authority over the church patriarchy; when physical harm was such an immediate threat, was it that simple to forget the state of your immortal soul?

The trappings of Catholic doctrine—such as Marian devotion and references to purgatory—are also crossed out, but these erasures are almost certainly Protestant in nature as opposed to simple adherence to any kind of royal decree. More interesting are notes left by, for example, Henry VIII’s first queen Catherine of Aragón and their daughter, later Mary I, in a court lady’s Book of Hours—these are crossed out in order to recognize the rejection of Catherine and her princess as Henry’s desire to remarry ascends in importance. That Henry’s need for an heir coincided with religious reform in this time has always been the fascinating question for me: how fast would Protestant thought have made inroads in an England that kept Catherine as its Catholic queen? How quickly did the pace of reform pick up speed when Catherine was brought low? These are only the beginnings of the changes seen in the Book of Hours left to us by time, which Duffy covers until Elizabeth’s reign, when the marginalia of the Book of Hours reflect the marginalization of the books themselves along with Catholicism.

I found Duffy’s examination to be quite thorough and relatively fair, but where I did question him was in the chapter “Sanctified Whingeing?”. Here, Duffy first discusses what he calls “elaborate penitential deference” in prayer, wherein there is a perceived “cringing tone” associated with the prayer in a nobleman’s Book of Hours—adjectives that elevate Jesus while denigrating the penitent in a roundabout, whining, insistent yet pleading tone. Duffy challenges Professor Colin Richmond’s assertion that the tone might have been a “particularly upper class one: the English nobility behaving towards their Lord as they wished others to behave towards them”. Duffy answers that, no, this doesn’t reveal any classist desires but simply emulates “Latin devotions which lay people routinely found in their books”; how could the entire “tradition of the Latin Middle Ages” be classist if it was clerically generated? Well, I ask Duffy to take this one step forward—the clerics were elders, religious elders, who expected and in fact demanded respect from the laity. Could these Latin devotionals not be seen as the laity having to behave a certain way for the clerics (words which, more often than not, the laity did not understand), a behavior nobles hoped to see in their inferiors? Duffy chooses to ignore this question, which naturally follows if we’re discussing the hierarchical ranks of the Middle Ages—rank matters, be it in the Church or the laity. Questioning of authority is a necessity when it comes to these topics, I believe, and I was surprised that Duffy did not pose the query. He need not answer it, but recognition of it would have given his argument more weight.

Not only an enlightening book, Marking the Hours is also beautiful—the plates that Duffy includes are excellent reproductions and are easy to scan and read. The book would almost be a coffee table book were it less academic in nature. Reading it was a return to the good old days when you would find me ensconced in a papasan chair, giggling at the Wakefield Master’s Second Shepherd’s Play or doing research on the conflicts between Catholic Spain and Protestant England.

I could say more, but I believe I will save some geeky gushing for the next medieval/Renaissance/Early Modern research that I read.

Onto the book list.

Finished:

1) Love Is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield
2) Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love by Dava Sobel
3) Helen of Troy by Margaret George
4) Writing Ann Arbor: A Literary Anthology Edited by Laurence Goldstein
5) You Suck: A Love Story by Christopher Moore
6) Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story by Christopher Moore
7) The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror, Version 2.0 by Christopher Moore
8) Radio On: A Listener’s Diary by Sarah Vowell
9) Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion by Barbara J. King
10) The Secret History by Donna Tartt
11) Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson
12) One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding by Rebecca Mead
13) College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Co-Eds, Then and Now by Lynn Peril
14) Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
15) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
16) House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende (Translated by Magda Bogin)
17) A Woman Unknown: Voices from a Spanish Life by Lucia Graves
18) Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
19) The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett
20 The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke
21) I, Claudius by Robert Graves
22) The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
23) The Underdogs (Los de abajo) by Mariano Azeula (Translation by E. Munguia)
24) Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
25) The Memory House by Lucia Graves
26) The Witch’s Trinity by Erika Mailman
27) Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers, 1240-1570 by Eamon Duffy
28) A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

Re-read:

1) Vertical Run by Joseph R. Garber
2) Beach Music by Pat Conroy

Currently Reading:

1) The Aeneid by Virgil (Translation by Robert Fagles)

Waiting To Be Read (Already Purchased, Got as Gifts, Borrowed from My Boyfriend, or Otherwise Accessible without the Use of Funds, But Not an Assurance That I Will Read These Before I Buy More Books):

1) Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro by Zachary M. Schrag