The Vernacular Book of Hours

The Vernacular Book of Hours

Jessica Brantley (English, Yale University)
Monday, February 7 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

More devotional books of hours remain in modern libraries than any other kind of book from late medieval England:  almost eight hundred manuscript volumes, and many thousands of printed ones.  And yet this fact has failed to affect the reading and interpretation of late-medieval literature.  This talk will explore the importance of the book of hours for literary history, investigating the evidence for connections both broad and specific between books of hours and vernacular reading in late medieval England.  Jessica Brantley is the author of Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England, as well as numerous other articles on reading and the history of the book in the medieval period.

Sponsored the IHC’s History of Books and Material Texts RFG and the Medieval Studies Program.