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Printed Books of Hours of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth catered to a public who were unable to spend money for the costly handwritten and illuminated copies. They contained the same prayers and devotions and followed the traditional scheme of illustration.
The late mediaeval best-seller was the personal prayer book. The books combined sacred and secular elements in a unique way. Each was personally commissioned and decorated according to the wealth and status of the owner.
Through their Books of Hours, layfolk were to identify themselves with the Mother of God. The Canonical hours are interpreted as Christ's Passion, or in the little hours, they are seen as episodes in the Life of the Virgin.
The essential contents of a Book of Hours would be:
The vellum pages were filled jointly by scribe and illuminator with initials, miniatures and borders. Planning a book of hours was a complex operation. Vellum sheets were assembled and ruled with vertical and horizontal lines, borders and initials were coloured, the miniatures were painted and finally gold leaf was applied.
In the traditional scheme of decoration, the Calendar would be illustrated with seasonal labours or occupations of the months and corresponding signs of the Zodiac.
The Gospel Passages would each be announced by a miniature of one of the four evangelists, writing his gospel and his attribute.
The two prayers to the Virgin may be introduced by a Virgin and Child or a Pieta, or a portrait of the owner with patron saints, kneeling in prayer.
These Psalms would be illustrated by King David's Life, as a Penitent old man or David watching Bathsheba at her bath.The Suffrages of the Saints occasionally would show Saints in the margins.
The Office of the Dead was illustrated by the Last Judgment or a procession to the graveyard. The theme of the three living and the three dead, anticipates the Dance of Death, frequently printed in the borders of later Printed Books of Hours.The purpose of the Book of Hours was to provide a personal prayerbook for royalty, nobles, and merchants and their wives. All literate people aspired to own one.
Books of Hours were carriers of both devotion and intellectual Christianity. It has been said they reflect the vanity and affluence of their owners, not piety. In the middle ages, piety was an important means of self expression.
Wills and inventories show careful disposition of the precious books. The most usual occasion for acquiring a book of hours was on marriage. They were often used to record details of births and deaths, and also as albums for pilgrimage badges.
Books of Hours were originally bound in silk or velvet, with gilt clasps and corners. Often a pearl studded rod, pipe was inserted in the spine to which the book marks were attached. The book had a box or chemise, of kid leather or silk, which formed a bag when picked up by the corners.
Instead of illuminated borders, printed books of hours have juxtaposable blocks.
Few editions had more than 20 woodcuts, though borders enclosed all the pages. In the mid 15th C, the means were at hand to produce Books of hours for a mass market.
At first, they followed the older manuscript examples, luxuriously printed on vellum, and cheaper ones on paper. Woodcut illustrations replaced painted miniatures, with the cuts often hand coloured, and the initials left blank to be filled in later by a scribe.
The increasing secularisation of the subject matter in the illustrations and borders is a further characteristic of printed Books of Hours.
A Papal Bull in 1571 purged prayer books of local idiosyncrasies. The last graceful personal prayerbooks were adapted from the Parisian format to Anglican use in 1569 for Queen Elizabeth I. The obsolescence of personal prayerbooks created a sudden market for Plantin Press in Antwerp, with its monopoly of church books.
For another two or three centuries after the invention of printing, Books of Hours lingered on as accessories of fashionable piety. At the court of Louis XIV miniature prayerbooks were the fashion. The Reformation and the French Revolution put an end to the kind of piety that made the Books of Hours a Mediaeval best seller, and replaced it with the printed Family Bibles.
