Customer Reviews

Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers, 1240-1570

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This fascinating and delightful book takes a different approach to most others on the subject of the medieval book of hours. Rather than assessing the books as art objects, it focuses on the very personal annotations and amendments that owners have made to the text, giving us an intimate glimpse at how the owners used and regarded their books. The books are no longer mere objects, but extensions of their owners. There is an academic movement currently examining readership, and this adds significantly to it as it examines the most commonly owned book of the middle ages.
The author is an important authority in historical studies of the English Reformation, but this work, derived from a set of lectures, is very readable for a more general audience interested in the history of books and literacy. The illustrations are of excellent quality (even if some librarians were mystified as to why he wanted to photograph pages covered in scribble!).

Marking the Hours is a superior book. And those who've seen my other reviews, including of Duffy's Stripping the Altars, know I can be hard to please.

Are you interested in church history or in illuminated manuscripts? Then this is a must buy. In fact, I lugged this book (It's not small!) with me to Oxford for my studies, and it came in very handy for a tutorial essay and more.

Do you just like medieval art? Marking the Hours is very well illustrated. Just looking at the pictures and reading the captions is a pleasurable education.

Duffy does take sides on some questions concerning English church history. (He is a devoted Catholic.) But he's fair and not overbearing in this book at least.

I can't praise the book enough. If this area interests you in the least, Marking the Hours is well worth buying.

As in his wonderful "Voices of Morebath," Eamon Duffy uses artifacts of daily living to illuminate the effect on real people -- great and not so great -- of the Reformation's massive changes at the top on everyday life. Names scratched out of prayer books, new prayers or names written in, sections and illustrations removed -- his use of " a librarian's nightmare" of "defaced" prayer books, books of hours and other devotional materials shows the filtration of changes on high down to society in general. The section on Richard III's prayerbook is particularly interesting.

Another superb book from Eamon Duffy; not only exceptionally richly illustrated, but his research and telling to us of the use of Books of Hours is not only exceptionally readable, but engaging, informative and entertaining.

Eamon Duffy is an extraordinary historian; he brings a counter balance to religious matters that has been seriously lacking in English history. For far too long, the history of the Roman Church and the English ("Henrican") Reformation of that church has been written by writers with too many axes to grind. Duffy shows how the laity in England used and modified the official prayers of the church to meet their everyday needs. His study of Thomas More and his family and how their prayer life sustained them is of particular interest. Duffy is a great scholar who is also a wonderful writer. This book is a great companion piece to his "Stripping of the Altars."

As always, a beautiful reflection of the depth of profound religious feeling of the late middle ages. Hopefully books such as these will allow us to understand the beauty of the art as well as thought that was dedicated to higher aspirations for life itself.