And we’re back! Following the directed reading of last semester, Spring semester brings the promise of more progress and exciting new adventures. Truthfully, 2018 is rather intimidating; for one, I will be graduating in May and that is a giant bowl of stress by itself. Despite that, much of what is daunting now is fascinating and enticing at the same time.
By the end of last semester, I had made promising progress towards answering the question of whether the Long Hours of the Passion were standardized in any way. Working with a sample of roughly 25 digitized manuscripts, I decided that analyzing the Psalms and the hymns found in each hour would provide the best answer. These types of texts are the meat of the Long Hours, and Psalms are consistent in wording, only differing in minor differences, while hymns can vary a bit more. I focused on the Psalms in the Fall, finding a large number of them used in the Long Hours of the Passion in the manuscripts I sampled, with many of them appearing in multiple of the Books of Hours. I also discovered that many of these Psalms are connected to the Gospel accounts of the Passion when I checked the reference footnotes in a contemporary study Bible.
This semester I plan to focus on the hymns, recording which ones appear in the Long Hours of the Passion, and noting which ones appear more than once in my sample. I hope that by combining both the textual analyses of the Psalms and the hymns, I will be able to determine if the Long Hours are standardized, and if so, to what extent, as well as whether that standardization is determined by region or time period.
Finally, Katie and I will be traveling to New York City this semester, to work with Books of Hours held by the Morgan Library. We are incredibly excited by this opportunity and are grateful for the research assistantships that we’ve received from CURO for this. Just sifting through the Library’s database has already turned up several promising manuscripts containing the Long Hours of the Passion that I have added to a growing list. We’ll be following up on the trip’s planning once it gets closer, as well as actively blogging about the trip when we are in the Big Apple.
As always, it’s a pleasure to invite you to the inner workings of a student’s mind, and keep an eye out for future updates on both our research and our trip. This semester is going to be a wild ride.
– Madison