Hey! Welcome to our research project. We’re Katie and Madison, undergraduates here at the UGA. Madison is an English major with a medieval literature area of emphasis, and Katie is double majoring in English and Classical Culture.
We were both in Dr. Camp’s course last fall when this project was getting off the ground. By the end of the semester, the class had discovered that this little Book of Hours wasn’t quite what had been expected. Instead of finding the Hours of the Virgin, like is expected in a standard Book of Hours, there was a much more uncommon long Hours of the Passion, followed directly by an extended selection from John’s Passion, chapters 18 and 19 in their entirety, with an accompanying selection of Passion-related prayers. The Passion was an increasingly important focus for lay devotion in the 15th century, when we believe this manuscript was made, but the persistent focus on the Passion in the Hargrett Hours is, as far as we can tell, quite uncommon. At the end of the semester we were left wondering where these texts originated and developed from, and what purpose they had for this manuscript and people who would have used it.
This semester, the two of us are engaging in a directed reading that aims to take a closer look at the Passion texts within the Hargrett Hours in order to obtain a better understanding of the frequency and form in which these texts appear. We hope to develop an idea of the Passion’s purpose in both the Hargrett MS 836 and in the lives of medieval lay people. Who knows what kind of discoveries we’ll make and problems we’ll find, because nothing ever goes as planned, but we’re looking forward to the challenges this book contains. Hopefully we’ll have something new to present to y’all on these blog posts, and we promise to make it as entertaining as medieval christianity can possibly be.
Until next time,
Katie and Madison