{"id":331,"date":"2016-10-10T10:00:20","date_gmt":"2016-10-10T14:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/hargretthoursproject\/?p=331"},"modified":"2016-11-16T10:01:22","modified_gmt":"2016-11-16T14:01:22","slug":"passing-through-how-we-talk-about-devotional-images","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/hargretthoursproject\/passing-through-how-we-talk-about-devotional-images\/","title":{"rendered":"Passing Through: How we talk about devotional images"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Wien,<\/a>
Wien, \u00d6sterreichische Nationalbibliothek, cod. 1857, Stundenbuch der Maria von Burgund, f. 14v-15, via wikimedia commons<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Suspend your sense of disbelief for a moment and imagine that you are Marie of Burgundy. You are sitting in your chamber, studiously poring over your Book of Hours. You come to a particular page, lavishly illustrated with a picture of soaring church architecture, the Holy Virgin and yourself\u2014in two places. It\u2019s a familiar image, and even as your eyes settle upon it, you feel your self slide towards it. There you are reading. But there you are in the church, paying reverence to Mary and her Child. You are here\u2014but you are there also; not there, but also not here anymore. Finally, the once-wavering light overtakes you, strengthening until all you can see is the Holy Mother and her Son\u2014not the picture of her, but her. <\/i>You\u2019ve forgotten that there ever was a picture.<\/p>\n

Did you feel like you were able to \u2018pass through\u2019 the image? Maybe that thought experiment didn\u2019t work for you\u2014but that\u2019s okay. Neither you nor I are medieval religious people. Perhaps you couldn\u2019t engage with the idea or (way more likely) I was a poor guide. However, I\u2019m not really concerned with success or failure of my example. Rather, I\u2019m interested in the way that the scholarship around medieval manuscripts\u2014and Books of Hours specifically\u2014approaches images.<\/p>\n

Wait, do scholars actually try to interact with images this particular way?<\/p>\n

The answer is: sort of. They themselves might not necessarily try to \u2018pass through\u2019 an image, but they do depend on this idea of image as devotional aid, as a window for the devotee<\/i> to reach a different \u2018reality.\u2019 Dr. Alan Farber expresses this sentiment when he says\u00a0that<\/a> \u201c[i]n prayer, one learns to go through the text or image that one is contemplating to the spiritual reality that lies beyond.\u201d There is also the sense that this process of \u2018going through\u2019 the image can establish a deeper level of intimacy with that \u2018spiritual reality.\u2019 Virginia Reinburg deals with this idea when she discusses images of the Madonna in Books of Hours: \u201cmeditating on the picture could help the person praying to envision and feel the intimacy with Mary that the \u201cObsecro te\u201d encourages\u201d (Reinburg 43). I think we can definitely feel this idea at work in the miniature from Marie of Burgundy\u2019s Hours. We can easily imagine Marie using this image to place herself in a closer spiritual contact with Mary and Christ\u2014within the image itself, the Marie of the foreground can quite literally step through the window separating her from Mary. It\u2019s a short step from this to the idea that the Marie holding the book in \u2018reality\u2019 can just as easily step through the image itself.<\/p>\n

All this seems natural enough, even for those of us who aren\u2019t medieval religious folks. But even as I admit that, something strikes me as odd: in approaching medieval miniatures this way, we (and I\u2019m including myself under the umbrella of \u2018scholars\u2019 here) seem to be performing our own version of \u2018going through\u2019 the images. We treat illuminations and, more generally (and perhaps more importantly), Books of Hours as though they are a transparent medium through which we can examine their medieval users. Take the same piece by Virginia Reinburg. She grounds her discussion on the following observation: \u201cfor twentieth-century viewers [Books of Hours] are also windows<\/i> onto the interior, spiritual lives of ordinary lay people of the late Middle Ages\u201d (39). (We can expand her words to include the twenty-first-century viewers!) There is a real sense that these \u2018windows\u2019 can help establish intimacy with the lay people, much as Marie might have tried to build intimacy with Madonna.<\/p>\n

This rhetoric of seeing interior lives through the books isn\u2019t just limited to Reinburg. This is Roger S. Wieck, from The Liturgy and Medieval Church<\/i>, talking about Books of Hours: \u201cthe texts and their accompanying pictures are a true, uncensored, mirror of how the Church\u2019s liturgy was perceived and practiced by the unordained masses\u201d (Wieck 439). Not just a window, but a \u201cmirror,\u201d as if the beliefs of laypeople were very clearly discernible on the surface of a text<\/p>\n

And here is Seth Lerer discussing his newly discovered Book of Hours in the San Diego Public Library: \u201cLike many such volumes, the San Diego book bears witness to how public books were transformed into private objects\u201d (Lerer 410). The idea of \u2018bearing witness\u2019 does not necessarily denote a visual act but it can have that meaning. The visual possibilities are strengthened by Lerer\u2019s other remark that a reader\u2019s acts of marking a book \u201cinscribe a history of reading in ways that reveal private lives and public services\u201d (410). Again, there is this assumption that we are granted an unmediated access to interior lives. Perhaps \u2018unmediated\u2019 is not the right word\u2014the medium of the book is always the center of attention\u2014but the books are, at least, quite see-through.<\/p>\n

I admit that this is only a tiny survey of the available literature on Books of Hours. But I have the feeling that a more thorough examination will reveal that, even in cases where visual metaphors are not explicitly used, the assumption of direct accessibility is widespread. Now, I am not trying to unilaterally reject this claim. Perhaps we can gain some glimpse into the inner lives of medieval readers. But we should be careful of glossing over the immense distance erected by time (as I admit I tried to do in my own introduction to this blog post).<\/p>\n

Finally, I want to mention something that seems to go in the opposite direction of what I\u2019ve been arguing\u2014but I think it\u2019s cool, so I\u2019ll raise the point anyway. If the way we treat these Books of Hours as windows into interior lives is indeed analogous to how medieval people accessed spiritual realities, then perhaps we are not so different after all\u2014at least not in the ways we approach Books of Hours.<\/p>\n

\u00a0– authored by Ty Stewart<\/p>\n

\n

Lerer, Seth. \u201cLiterary Prayer and Personal Possession in a Newly Discovered Tudor Book of Hours.\u201d Studies in Philology <\/i>109.4: 409-28 (2012). Project Muse<\/i>. Web. 28 Sept. 2016.<\/p>\n

Reinburg, Virginia. \u201cPrayer and the Book of Hours.\u201d Time Sanctified: The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life<\/i>. New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1988. Print. 39-44.<\/p>\n

Wieck, Roger S. \u201cThe Book of Hours.\u201d The Liturgy of the Medieval Church<\/i>. 2nd ed. Ed. Thomas J. Heffernan and E. Ann Matter. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 2005. Print. 431-68.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Suspend your sense of disbelief for a moment and imagine that you are Marie of Burgundy. You are sitting in your chamber, studiously poring over…<\/p>\n

Continue ReadingPassing Through: How we talk about devotional images<\/span> <\/i><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2342,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,9],"tags":[42,43,36,38],"class_list":["post-331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-student","category-undergraduate","tag-devotion","tag-images","tag-mary-of-burgundy","tag-ms-richardson-34","entry"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7AbKE-5l","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/hargretthoursproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/hargretthoursproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/hargretthoursproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/hargretthoursproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2342"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/hargretthoursproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/hargretthoursproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/hargretthoursproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/hargretthoursproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/hargretthoursproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}