New Popish Book

(I haven’t posted in a bit, but there are computer issues I’m dealing with.  Check back in a week or so and I’ll have a longer post ready, a rundown of some recent comics I read.)

 So, I’m one of those people who love to recommend books, and I just read something great. It’s Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers, by Eamon Duffy of Stripping the Altars fame.  Duffy is one of the world’s foremost scholars on English religion in the late Medieval and Reformation period, and a great defender of the vibrancy of late Medieval Catholicism, which is often (and wrongly) derided as a largely shallow entity in steep decline before the Reformation.  Here he explores the interior lives of Medieval English people of all classes through an oft-ignored source: Books of Hours.  

Books of Hours, or primers, which were often kept within the same family for generations, were portable collections of psalms and pseudo-liturgical prayers (like the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Office of the Dead) for daily use, and they were nearly ubiquitous for two centuries in England.  Traditionally their proliferation has been seen as a sign of the privatization of the Englishman’s religious life, a turn away from the communal focus of Catholicism to the individualist piety of soon-to-come Protestantism.

Duffy effectively lays that stereotype to rest. He points out that the Books of Hours found their point of reference in the church liturgy (indeed, their prayers were essentially shortened forms of the prayers of religious orders); and rather than being emblems of isolated spirituality, they were focused on the shared and deeply Catholic faith of their owners.

I especially liked his examination of the “customizations” and “additions” that are so common in the surviving Books.  People would routinely write in new prayers in the margins or on blank pages, some of them so blatantly heterodox and quasi-magical that–in addition to being fun to read–they point to a severe disconnect between the elevated theology of the Catholic clergy and the folk spirituality of the everyday layman.  Which essentially supports my own theory that the Reformation was more the result of reactionary responses to widespread ignorance about Catholic theology than anything else (well, except maybe politics).  

Other points of interest were the rather poignant additions made in the Book of Hours owned by St. Thomas More (and used by him during his imprisonment) and the section on the edits and then re-edits enforced on the people’s primers during the rise of Henry VIII and then Catholic Queen Mary. I never thought of it this way, but the private prayer life of the common people was the real battleground of the Reformation.

On a personal level, though, this book was also incredibly spiritually edifying.  I recite the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin as part of my daily prayer life, and I have in the past felt… well, lost by it.  Its form is unfamiliar to me, and I’ve had a hard time trying to integrate it in a meaningful and fruitful way; the fact that no one around me (not even other Catholics) seem interested in it hasn’t helped much. But seeing how this tradition was used by previous generations of Catholics instilled in me such a sense of the proper context to view the Little Office, and in some small way has even more deepened my bond with the Communion of Saints.

 (Oh, and for all the comic fans out there, this book is good for you too.  To paraphrase Amy Sedaris, this book is so visual a monkey would love it.)