My Book of Hours

In Spring 2008, I embarked on an ambitious project: to create a medieval Books of Hours, as authentic as I could make it. I did not want to make an exact replica of any one specific manuscript, but rather create one that might have existed.

I began by researching Books of Hours in general and then narrowed my quest: a Book of Hours, Sarum (Salisbury) Use, c. 1480, that my persona may have owned. My persona is a Welsh woman living in London, so my Book of Hours should contain a few Welsh influences, such as entries in the calendar. Otherwise, it should be typical of England in 1480, a time when Books of Hours were both produced in England and produced on the continent for sale to the English market (Duffy, 11, 25; de Hamel 1994, 194). They could be either specially commissioned for a patron, complete with the patron’s portrait incorporated into the miniatures (Smith, 20–22; Wieck, 34), or mass produced, particularly after the advent of the printing press (Duffy, 36).

Part of my reason for creating a Book of Hours that might have existed instead of copying an existing one verbatim was because I wanted to understand these books on as intimate a level as possible. I wanted to know how the calendar worked, what the columns of seemingly random numbers meant and how they related to the strings of repeated letters. I wanted to understand the relationship of images to text, to grasp why one scene might be appropriate for a particular passage—or appropriate for a book from a particular country—but not another. By forcing myself to make every decision at each step of the process, I would (in theory) emerge with a fuller understanding of how these books actually worked. Initially, I was hoping to be able to write the text in the vernacular, in this case, Middle English, so that I would be able to understand every sentence. Research showed that while calendars were frequently written in vernacular languages, Dutch was the only vernacular language commonly used for Books of Hours (in particular, a translation by Geert Grote [Hulsmann, 100; de Hamel 1994, 185]), although occasional Books of Hours appeared in other languages. Not until the early sixteenth-century was English commonly found throughout the main texts in Books of Hours (Duffy, 59, 126). However, I did find the Hypertext Books of Hours (Gunhouse), which included side-by-side English translations of Latin texts.

In addition to researching the appropriate texts, I wanted to use authentic materials as much as possible. Because of the amount of vellum that this book would entail, I initially wanted to use opaline vellum, which you might think of as vellum “paper”: it is made of vellum scraps that have been boiled down and pressed into frames. The cost of materials was a limiting factor; for example, I chose to include only the most essential texts in my Book of Hours because I had a limited amount of opaline. Opaline turned out to be unsuitable, however (see other sections), so I used 11 x 17" sheets of paper. In the final steps, I intend to bind the book appropriately, including a velvet chemise overcover.

Each stage of the book has a separate web page, to be added as the stage is completed. This is what I have done so far: