II.3. Before the Book of Hours: The Psalter & Other Prayer Books

In part highly personalized, in part no less standardized, the genre deserves its moniker as the “bestseller” of the late Middle Ages. Prayer, however, did not require images as an accompaniment. For the better part of the first Christian millennium, prayer books remained unillustrated. The history of the illustrated prayer book is thus simultaneously a history of the development of attitudes toward the visual and visualization.

The most important precedent for the book of hours was the Hebrew Psalter in its Latin Vulgate translation (one of several such translations that circulated in the Middle Ages). Although medieval psalter illustration extends as far back as the Carolingian period (i.e., the eighth and ninth centuries), it first flourished on a significant scale in the High Middle Ages. Many of the earliest illustrated examples were made for women, either nuns or pious aristocratic ladies (cat. no. 95). Beginning in the late eleventh, but increasingly in the twelfth century, psalters, whether for monastic or lay usage, received sometimes lengthy prefatory cycles of Old and New Testament imagery (cat. no. 97). In the most lavish examples, such cycles could include one hundred images or more. Only in rare cases did each psalm receive its own illustration, usually in the form of a small initial. Far more common was a distribution of narrative scenes among the liturgical divisions of the psalms (in non-monastic churches, psalms 1,26, 38, 52,68, 80,97, and 109), which defined the sets sung in the Divine Office on different days of the week, so that all 150 psalms would be performed over its course (cat. nos. 96,98). In other psalters, the psalms are divided into three groups of fifty (psalms 1, 51, 101). A combination of the two schemes produced a tenfold division, thereby increasing the number of opportunities for illustration.

In addition to transforming the Psalter into a Christian book (with, for example, the life of David providing a typological anticipation of the life of Christ), prefatory cycles provided substantial pictorial sections that, apart from captions, were entirely free of text. Vernacular captions can, but need not, point to lay readership. In some psalters, the subject of David as author of the psalms and type of Christ received yet further elaboration underscoring the allegorical interpretation of the psalms (cat. no. 99).

Outside of France, the Low Countries and, to a lesser extent, England and Italy, the psalter and, later, the book of hours, never quite displaced an older and often more flexible form of prayer book known simply as the liber precum (or prayer book). This type of devotional book, which had its origins in the Carolingian period, remained especially popular in Germany, where, by the fifteenth century, numerous examples were illustrated with prints and drawings, some glued in (cat. nos. 70, 72), others printed directly on the parchment or paper.

In whatever form, illustrated prayer books provide extraordinary insight into the interplay of text and image, image and imagination, and, not least, the delicate interaction of religious subjectivity and pastoral discipline.