By Lucia Billing

The Book of Hours lends itself as the most substantial symptom of germination for the privatised, individual devotion. A category of illuminated manuscripts, they are prayer books which serve to guide the prayers of the Canonical Hours. Also containing the calendar of Saintly feasts, extracts from the Four Gospels, Psalms, the Hours of the Cross, the Office of the Virgin, and for the Dead.

As the Middle Ages signified the emergence of devotional objects – iconolatry being relatively unquestioned – the materialisation of spiritual practices became ingrained into biopolitics. We may think of the parish church as the scene for piety, yet as it was the village centre, it was far more social and disorganised than we imagine. Thus, Christ moves to the individual, often attached to them by their hip.

Study of Mediaeval women (despite perceived as an understudied area) is a highly popular node of scholarly attention, which has been extrapolated to the study of Books of Hours. A result of the fact that most of these items which have been preserved did belong to (French) Women.
The collector’s object serves to increase the sense of self, it is the most available and performative extension of the desired projection of a person, while simultaneously being a limb for continuity. That constant attempted extension of man, desperate for perpetuity, who cannot reach his (her) flesh beyond his (her) skin moves him to fragmentise himself (herself) into commodities. The Book of Hours is then as the hand-held shrine, or the rosary — a biopolitical object moving the psychological and spiritual state into a site of bodily control and extension.

Yet, it is also a site for the development of the vernacular, one which breeds secrecy in the interior. It is the opportunity to ruminate on the superstitious, devotional, and individual. One might refer to the proliferation of presentation portraits in illuminated manuscripts. The patron portrait has of course been a long-standing element of typological (although not exclusively) painting, nonetheless, the prevalence of female patron portraits is much more localised to Mediaeval works. This locality, and sequestration of the trajectory of Books of Hours renders their historiographical analysis to lend themselves to a higher concentration of deconstructivism.

So the Book of Hours can be regarded in two directly contrasting ways. On one reading, it can be understood as the physical embodiment of a remarkable mediaeval laicisation of clerical forms of prayer, the adaptation of the Church’s complex liturgy […] Conversely, one might view the evolution of such book as a major monument to a baffling imaginative and religious failure, the imprisonment of mediaeval lay devotion within the constriction of an inappropriate clerical straightjacket

— Eamon Duffy, Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers 1240-157

For this age of Christianity was of a highly feminine strain. One may refer to the cults of two saints, the Virgin and Æthelthryth, which spearheaded the Occidental Catholic spirituality. Marian worship was naturally practised disproportionately by female Christians, yet mirrored itself in the monastic traditions.

The Abbess of Ely’s (Æthelthryth’s) long-standing resting place typifies that aforementioned genus. A Cathedral for both laypeople and monks, it branches and weaves the Solomonic temple into its Mediaeval equivalent: the incorruptible nature of Female sainthood. It exists in ‘a voluptuous language of insinuation, winding, bending and curving: an art of coral, intricate and digressive, here plain and smooth, there knotted and coagulated and apparently ever-changing’. A building which lends itself to such sensuality and softness may at first seem at odds with the Benedictine monastic order which it hosted, where ‘first step, then, of humility is [...] hasten to cut away the desires of the flesh’. The truth of the matter is that the subject ideal of the pious woman was in fact the monk.

Found in the cradle of the mediaeval monastic tradition, Benedict de Nursia’s Rules enforce a sequestering of time which has yet to be reconciled. The canonical hours were not a product of his being, rather he transferred them into the social and individual sphere. Christian centres of worship were the loci of any modern conception of temporality, the ‘hours’ were their creation and enforcement. Subsequently, monasticism has become the basis of post-industrial work. The common method of detachment has this word as singular origin. The concept of the menial, of the middleman, and of middle-management can tie itself to the Benedictine doctrine, where the conception of a ‘balance’ between devotion and work forms. This is in turn a balancing act where the two poles converge and interact lest there be spatiotemporal boundaries.

The self-imposition of the gesture increased as the female body was sequestered from religious rites following the bubonic plague outbreak, which erased the female agency over death. Preceding the pandemic, the body was a site of manifestation of spirituality. Women would wrap cloth with scriptures around their abdomens during childbirth, and were equally venerated for their role in funeral rites. It is thus evident that the Books of Hours contained the Offices for the Dead. The need for quick and repetitive burials during the plague quickly changed the procedures and categories of funerary procedures.

For that, not only did folk die without having a multitude of women about them, but many there were who departed this life without witness and few indeed were they to whom the pious plaints and bitter tears of their kinsfolk were vouchsafed; nay, in lieu of these things there obtained, for the most part, laughter and jests and gibes and feasting and merrymaking in company; which usance women, laying aside womanly pitifulness, had right well learned for their own safety.

— Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron

The shift from common liturgy to private devotion meant that the mediaeval woman was a product of useless surplus in most situations. In turn, learnedness became the most accessible mode of social mobility. The most well-known women in the Middle Ages – excluding royalty, and maybe Joan of Arc – fit the archetype of reclusiveness. In a way, secluded erudition became tied to the mythology of the annunciation. Divine knowledge for women was in that way proto-protestant, for as Christ-Man is greeted plurally, the Marian woman has a supposed need for reclusion in order to receive knowledge. That is in turn what leaves the woman castrated.

The monastic codes of being exist in attachment to the woman, and to the eunuch. These two poles, contrasting in interiority and – to some extent – sexual agency, are in fact one and the same. Discourse of the female castrate is unfortunately plastered by Germaine Greer’s text, and I will, for the purpose of this text, disregard it. States of eunuchism are in fact much vaster than sexuality. The repeated disregard of Freud continues to account for the failure of many contemporary attempts at feminist thought. For the woman has irrevocably been in a state of castration from the start, and the mediaeval woman thus becomes conjoined to the eunuch of the Middle Ages, that of the monastic order.

Bataille-ian standards outlined the temporality of the world as driven by everything but the eunuch.

Everyone is aware that life is parodic and that it lacks an interpretation. Thus lead is the parody of gold. Air is the parody of water. The brain is the parody of the equator. Coitus is the parody of crime.

Gold, water, the equator, or crime can each be put forward as the principle of things.

And if the origin of things is not like the ground of the planet that seems to be the base, but like the circular movement that the planet describes around a mobile centre, then a car, a clock, or a sewing machine could equally be accepted as the generative principle.

The two primary motions are rotation and sexual movement, whose combination is expressed by the locomotive’s wheels and pistons.

These two motions are reciprocally transformed, the one into the other.

Thus one notes that the earth, by turning, makes animals and men have coitus, and (because the result is as much the cause as that which provokes it) that animals and men make the earth turn by having coitus.

— Georges Bataille, The Solar Anus

What use is monasticism and celibacy when the earth rotates coitally? Furthermore, how does that movement – one which is driven by male forces (the Apollonian and Dionysian) – account for the excess which is the female?

The rotational, as well as coital truthfully depend upon the gravitational, which keeps the works away from a centrifugal distancing. For the instructions and inscriptions of spirituality alternate and convulse through the interaction of cosmos and nuclei.

The particularity of the Baroque, as a mode of viewing, and tool against historicization existed in its perceived decadence as a reversal to the pre-modern age. Before her sculpting by Bernini, Teresa De Avila integrated the pious woman into the living, to its movements and volumes.

In his hands I saw a long golden spear and at the end of the iron tip I seemed to see a point of fire. With this he seemed to pierce my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he drew it out, I thought he was drawing them out with it and he left me completely afire with a great love of God. The pain was so sharp that it made me utter several moans; and so excessive was the sweetness caused me by this intense pain that one can never wish to lose it, nor will one’s soul be content with anything less than God.

— St. Teresa de Avila, The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus