Religious Practice and Experimental Book Production: Text and Image in an Alternative Layman’s “Book of Hours” in Print and Manuscript

Start of the chapter for Monday (fols. a7v–a8r), 1484-1485,  University Library, Leiden

The Devote ghetiden vanden leven ende passie Jhesu Christi (Devout Hours on the Life and Passion of Jesus Christ) provides an intriguing case study of text and image relationships in the transitional age between manuscript and print. The 1483 and 1484/5 editions of the Devote ghetiden were an innovative commercial endeavor by the prolific printer Gerard Leeu. These editions of a new vernacular religious text, flexible in use and primarily aimed at laymen, combined with no less than eighty-four full-page illustrations, offered the lay reader an unprecedented level of visual material for private devotion located in the same object as the text. Changes in both composition and page layout, which occurred when text and image were refashioned in a different medium, altered the reader’s meditative experience, reflecting not only the multiform character and individuation of religious practice on the eve of the Reformation but also the influence of printed books on late medieval textual and visual culture as a whole.

DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2017.9.2.2

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Geert Warnar (Leiden University) and Nigel F. Palmer (University of Oxford) for their comments on draft versions of this essay and Walter S. Melion (Emory University) and Klara Broekhuijsen (University of Amsterdam) for useful discussions and suggestions in earlier stages of my research. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine.

Imprint

Review: Peer Review (Double Blind)
DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2017.9.2.2
License:
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation:
Anna Dlabačová, "Religious Practice and Experimental Book Production: Text and Image in an Alternative Layman’s “Book of Hours” in Print and Manuscript," Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 9:2 (Summer 2017) DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2017.9.2.2