Origin, Aims and Structure of the Website

Books for Prayer and Devotion

In the West, the late Middle Ages witnessed the emergence of widespread individual devotion centered on meditation on the events of the Life of Christ and Mary and on the life of the Saints. Thanks in part to the spirituality promoted by the Mendicant Orders, such practices spread widely and contributed to the origin of a new type of book, known as Books of Hours (Libri d'ore, in Italian). These manuscripts usually contain the Short Office of the Blessed Virgin, other liturgical texts taken from the breviary, and a great variety of other texts as well as images that aided in devotion. Such books comprise the main instrument for the personal prayer of the laity, in particular, of women, and were produced in vast numbers over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, especially north of the Alps.

The enormous quantity of French and Netherlandish Books of Hours produced in the late Middle Ages has somewhat obscured the very existence of Books of Hours made in other areas, particularly in the Mediterranean (Italy, southern France, and Catalonia). At the same time, the standardization of the northern material and the extensive scholarly literature that have been dedicated to it have led to the comparative neglect of the various types of books produced for the purpose of private devotion in other regions.

This website, HOURS/ORE. Italian Books of hours/Libri d’ore italiani, has been conceived in parallel with a book project on private devotion in late Medieval Italy to provide a wider range of material concerning Books of Hours made in Italy.

Books of Hours in Italy

While they are certainly connected to them in many ways, Books of Hours are not liturgical books. Nonetheless, they can be distinguished from other types of devotional or prayer books precisely by their ‘liturgical’ contents (i.e.: offices and psalms deriving from the devotional texts present in breviaries).

A new classification

I propose a new definition for this type of book, adapted to the Italian contexts. As I have argued in previous publications [Manzari 2010; Manzari 2013], Italian Books of Hours do not conform to the contents considered usual in transalpine regions, where – certain luxurious commissions aside – they soon take on a relatively standardized form.

In Italy, a devotional manuscript containing offices of any sort – in particular, the Short Office of the Virgin Mary, the Office of the Passion and the Office of the Cross (following Roger Wieck’s terminology in distinguishing these two texts), and the Office of the Dead – would, in contemporary inventories, have been called Horae or Officiolo (Offiziolo in Italian), while a prayer-book would have been designated Preces.

I therefore suggest including under the rubric of Books of Hours even manuscripts containing just one, or a few, of these Offices, even when they seem to be lacking the texts considered essential to such manuscripts, according to the classification introduced by Victor Leroquais, because in manuscripts produced in Italy they rarely appear all together.

Furthermore, to be defined as Hours, manuscripts must, in addition to their contents, as described above, conform to a particular book form, defined in terms of format, layout and illustrative program.

All these elements, taken together, would have made a manuscript recognizable as an Officiolum/Horae at the time of its production.

It is also important to remember that classification works, in so far as it does, for us and not for those who ordered, bought, devised, designed and produced devotional manuscripts in the Late Middle Ages and in the Renaissance. Classification and uniformity are issues important to us, ever so much more in the age of IT and digitization, but not at all to those who produced and used those books.

I hope to investigate these themes, which I have already discussed elsewhere (see “Essential Reading List”), in a book currently in preparation, which will draw on this website and complement it.

This website is published as an Open Access tool (see the Scientific Committee in About us and the indications on copyright issues). It is conceived as a collaborative effort and as a work in progress.

Users of this website are encouraged to submit missing information or corrections by emailing to:

francesca.manzari@uniroma1.it.

HOURS/ORE. Italian Books of Hours/Libri d’ore italiani

The website HOURS/ORE aims to provide information of different sorts on Hours (Horae, Offizioli, Officioli) produced in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and in the Renaissance.

It contains a survey that I have been carrying out from the 1990s, including manuscripts from a vast time span: ca. 1275–ca. 1550.

This survey can be found under the heading “A Survey of Italian Hours” and it is organized according to place and institution of conservation, under the heading: “A 'Map' of Italian Books of Hours”.

The survey has been conceived as a list of known manuscripts and will be updated continually as new manuscripts are added. For this reason a brief entry format has been devised in order to convey essential information on the manuscript: place of conservation, institution and shelf-mark, place and date of production, material, number of leaves and measurements, number of codicological units comprised in the manuscript, or indication that this is a fragment (in case of single leaves or fragmentary manuscripts), the type of script/s, the name of scribe/s, the phases of decoration, the name of illuminator/s, the patron or owner, and an essential bibliography consisting of the main studies on Italian Books of Hours (see the section “Essential Reading List”). All titles cited, in abbreviated form, in the Website are listed in full in the section “Extensive Bibliography”.

Other information will be added gradually and whenever possible, as the Survey is conceived as a tool to be updated continuously.

It must be borne in mind that the entries are not conceived as a full description of the manuscript.

Basic information to be indicated, whenever possible, includes: online digitization and existing descriptions of the manuscript, either online or in traditional published form.

This information considers partial digitizations, existing facsimiles and other useful bibliographic references. For the moment, information on artists and patrons has been privileged, whereas lists of the contents and of the illustrative programmes will be addressed in the future.

Further information, which may be progressively uploaded, includes: textual additions and missing parts; saints and cults indicated by the texts; presence of texts and/or rubrics in the vernacular; heraldry; provenance; and brief references to scholarly views on dating, placing and attribution.

Among recent additions is the new section INDEXES, comprising an Index by Area and Date of Production and an Index by Country of Preservation. These too will be updated gradually, as the number of manuscripts included in the Survey increases.

Another page can be found under the heading “A Survey of Italian Hours”:

- “Manuscripts not included in the Survey”. This section of the website consists of a list of manuscripts that have

been cited in studies devoted to illuminated Italian Books of Hours but which have been excluded from the Survey because: i) they are either lacking illumination, ii) they were not illuminated in Italy or by Italian illuminators, or iii) they are documented among the holdings of certain libraries, but were lost prior to being recorded photographically. Despite their not being included in the survey, the list provided here still serves a purpose in so far as they appear in the relevant bibliography.

The website does not focus only on “A Survey of Italian Hours”:

The page “Bibliography” contains:

- A section “Essential Reading List”, in which the main studies on Italian Books of Hours are presented briefly.

- A section “Extensive Bibliography”, in which all the titles mentioned on the website (usually abbreviated in the form ‘author/year of publication') are listed in alphabetical order.

The page “Tools” is conceived as a section in which material of different sorts, relevant to the study of Italian Books of hours is presented.

Among the sections are already:

- “Websites”: this contains a list of websites containing information relevant to this website’s themes.

- “Reference Scholars”: this contains a list of the names and links to scholars working in fields closely related to

the themes in this website.

In particular, the contents of Books of Hours are connected to those found in some liturgical books, and, also, to others contained in other devotional texts. It is therefore important to refer to scholarship on both fields.

- “Pdfs of essays and entries”: the aim of this section is to gradually make accessible material in pdf form, which can be downloaded.

- “Seminars, Conferences and Talks”: this will consist of links to recorded seminars and conferences and also unpublished papers or abstracts of talks.

This part of the website “HOURS/ORE” will gradually be supplemented as new material becomes available.

Updated: 19.12.21