Abstract
In 1545, Henry VIII issued the first national primer: a book, in English, to be “taught, learned, and read” by all his majesty’s subjects.1 The new book was intended to impose uniformity in reading and praying “for the avoiding of strife and contention,” and instituted an authorized national text replacing the “pernicious” and “superstitious” contents of the Books of Hours that were currently so popular among the laity. Insofar as the traditional Books of Hours had also been commonly used as a first reader, introducing the letters of the alphabet and simple prayers on which to practice, the new primer was also meant to serve as the official “first book,” laying a firm ideological foundation upon which to build an education appropriate to an enlightened society.
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Notes
King Henry’s Primer, or, The Primer Set Forth by the King’s Majesty, and His Clergy, to be Taught, Learned, and Read: and None Other to be Used Throughout All His Dominions. For an edition of the text see Three Primers Put Forth in the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. E. Burton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1834).
See Paul Saenger, “Books of Hours and the Reading Habits of the Later Middle Ages,” in The Culture of Print, ed. Roger Chartier, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 141–73. On the inclusion of indulgences and the like in the horae, see also V. Leroquais, Les livres d’heures: manuscrits de la Biliothèque Nationale (Paris: Protat Frères, 1927), p. xxxi.
Robert G. Calkins, Illuminated Books of the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 243.
Richard Marks and Nigel Morgan, The Golden Age of English Manuscript Painting 1200–1500 (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1981), pp. 7–8.
Janet Backhouse, Books of Hours (London: The British Library, 1985), p. 42.
Virginia Reinburg, “Prayer and the Books of Hours,” in Time Sanctified, ed. Roger S. Wieck (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1988), pp. 39–44; see also Saenger, “Books of Hours,” p. 153.
See Appendix 1 in Jonathan J. G. Alexander’s Medieval Illuminators and their Methods of Work (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 179–83, which provides examples of several such contracts.
L. M.J. Delaisse, “The Importance of Books of Hours for the History of the Medieval Book,” in Gatherings in Honor of Dorothy E. Miner, eds. Ursula E. McCracken, Lilian M. C. Randall, Richard H. Randall, Jr. (Baltimore: Walters Art Gallery, 1974), pp. 203–225.
Calkins, Illuminated Books, p. 246. For a complete description of the horae and their traditional illuminations, see Leroquais, Les livres d’heures, pp. iii–ix and xl–lxxxv; also Christopher de Hamel, A History of Illuminated Manuscripts (London: Phaidon, 1986), and Janet Backhouse, Books of Hours (London: British Library, 1985, 1988).
Christopher Wordsworth, ed., Horae Eboracenses: The Prymer or Hours of the Blessed Virgin Mary, According to the Use of the Illustrious Church of York, with Other Devotions as They Were Used by the Lay-Folk in the Northern Province in the XVth and XVIth Centuries, Publications of the Surtees Society, vol. 132 (Durham: Andrews & Co., 1920).
Durand quotes Gregory: “Aliud est picturam adorare, aliud per picture ystoriam quid sit adorandum addiscere, nam quod legentibus scriptura hoc ydiotis cernentibus prestat pictura, quia in pisa ignorantes vuident quid sequi debeant, in ipsa legunt qui litteras nesciunt…. Pictura namque plus videtur mouere animum quam scriptura…. Hinc etiam est quod in ecclesia non tantam reuerentiam exhibemus libris quantam ymaginibus et picturis.” A. Davril and T. M. Thibodeau, eds., Rationale Divinorum Offtciorum I–IV (Turnholti: Typograph Brepols Editores Pontificii, 1995), pp. 34–36. Translation from John Mason Neale and Benjamin Webb, eds., The Symbolism of Churches and Church Ornaments (London: J. G. F. and J. Rivington, 1843), pp. 53–56.
On the equation between text and image in the texts of the twelfth century, see Michael Camille, “Seeing and Reading: Some Visual Implications of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy,” Art History 8.1 (1985): 26–49.
Sixten Ringbom, “Devotional Images and Imaginative Devotions,” Gazette des Beaux Arts ser. 6, 73 (1969): 159–70.
See Michael Camille, “The Language of Images in Medieval England, 1200–1400,” in Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England 1200–1400, eds. Jonathan Alexander and Paul Binski (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1987), pp. 33–40.
Michael Camille, Image on the Edge (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 61–65; see also his article, “The Book of Signs: Writing and visual difference in Gothic manuscript illumination,” Word and Image 1 (1985): 133–48.
Margaret Rickert, Painting in Britain in the Middle Ages (Baltimore: Penguin, 1954), pp. 167–69.
Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, reprint (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), f. 21.
British Library, MS. Stowe 17, fols 29v and 246v, respectively. Lilian M. C. Randall also cites a series of readers distracted by “dangerous” events or mysteriously transformed into dangerous demons and the like despite the books they read, in Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), esp. pp. 72, 176.
Chretien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances, trans. D. D. R. Owen (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd, 1987), p. 1.
James J. Rorimer, The Hours of Jeanne D’Evreux, Queen of France (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1957), 23. Interpretations of the recto page differ; the Getty curators believe that Louis is depicted in the process of being disciplined by a Dominican tutor.
The Hours of Jeanne D’Evreux, f. 65v. See also François Avril, Manuscript Painting at the Court of France (New York: George Braziller, 1978), p. 53.
Michael Sargent, ed., Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Critical Edition, Garland Medieval Texts, XVIII (New York: Garland, 1991), pp. 21–22. See also Pamela Sheingorn, “‘The Wise Mother’: The Image of St. Anne Teaching the Virgin Mary,” Gesta 32, no. 1 (1993): 69–80; Klaus Schreiner, “Marienverehrung, Lesekulture, Schriftlichkeit: Bildungs und frömmigkeitsgeschichtiche Studien zur Auslegung und Darstellung von ‘Maria Verkündigung.’” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 24 (1990): 314–68.
Love, Mirror, p. 23. See also David M. Robb, “The Iconography of the Annunciation in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” Art Bulletin 18 (1936): 480–526.
Translations of both prayers can be found in the Appendix of Roger S. Wieck, Time Sanctified (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1988), pp. 163–4.
Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 101; Jonathan Harthan, Books of Hours and Their Owners (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), p. 80.
Hours of Mary of Burgundy, Austria, Österreichische National Bibliothek MS. E 5610-C(D), f. 16. See also Eric Inglis, The Hours of Mary of Burgundy (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 1995), p. 21.
Michael Camille, Gothic Art, Glorious Visions (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1996), p. 183.
Virginia Reinburg, “Hearing Lay People’s Prayer,” in Culture and Identity in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of Natalie Zemon Davis, eds. Barbara B. Diefendorf and Carla Hesse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 19–40.
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© 2000 Laurel Amtower
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Amtower, L. (2000). The Image of the Book: Mediating the Aesthetics of Reader Response. In: Engaging Words. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62998-5_3
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