The book of hours emerged from its union with the psalter at the very end of the thirteenth century like ripe fruit dropping off a tree, to use Victor Leroquais’s famous simile. Six independent English horae from before 1300 are cited in the Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles; twenty-one others span the 1300s (Nigel Morgan Early Gothic Manuscripts, 1190–1285, 2 vols., London: Harvey Miller, 1982 and 1988; and Lucy Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts, 1285–1385, 2 vols., London: Harvey Miller, 1986). From this wealth of early English material, Kathryn Smith has selected three personally commissioned books spanning the decades 1320–1340, noteworthy for their unusual and varied textual and illustrative contents; and she shows how they shed light on the multiple ways in which books of hours can reflect their owners’ interests. Her study brings these three surprisingly little known but highly idiosyncratic and lavishly illustrated books the attention they fully deserve: the de Lisle Hours (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS. G50), the de Bois Hours (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS. 700), and the Neville of Hornby Hours (London, British Library Egerton MS. 2781). Detailed descriptions of all three books occupy appendices; but given the wealth of their contents, Smith approaches them thematically, focusing on three issues: how the books’ decorative programs reflect the social identification of their owners, how the themes of the images shaped the owners’ religious experience, and how the gender of the owners affected the books’ contents.

The first chapter provides an illuminating exploration of the divergent social status of the horae manuscripts’ three female owners: Margaret de Beauchamp, Hawisia de Bois, and Isabel de Byron. Margaret’s husband, Baron Robert De Lisle, moved in court circles, and her book complements his more famous psalter (London, British Library Arundel 83 II) in important ways. Hawisia’s book is ostentatious in its size and heraldry, asserting the prestige of a lesser rural-gentry family. Isabel’s hours (the subject of Smith’s 1996 doctoral dissertation) are astonishingly rich textually and visually, reflecting the prominence of her husband Robert de Neville of Hornby’s family as well-placed gentry with crusading service. One gains a great sense of the landscape in this chapter—of property held, relations with neighbors, and strategic marriages—since biographical information about the women themselves is hard to find aside from their family networks.

Smith’s second chapter turns to the theme of sacred time (as depicted in biblical and eschatological images) and how it is personalized in these private devotional books through the insertion of family history and the owners’ own images. The de Lisle Hours presents a unique cycle of the ages of man to illustrate the hours of the Virgin and Office of the Dead. As the day progresses and dies away, the male interlocutor of the unchanging female owner ages dramatically in each historiated initial. Hawisia’s hours depict the history of the True Cross at the Hours of the Passion, lay worshippers at the Hours of the Trinity, and apostles at the Hours of the Holy Spirit spanning the apostolic, early Church, and contemporary eras. In the Neville Hours, Smith singles out images of family stability: a cosmological diagram with castles on earth depicted at its center, Old Testament themes of inheritance, and a pair of large miniatures narrating the destruction of Jerusalem in which Isabel de Byron stands triumphant above scenes of infanticide and slaughter below, asserting her family’s role as crusaders, and, according to Smith, her contrasting “defense” of her own family. (She has analyzed the iconographic tradition more fully in her article “The Destruction of Jerusalem Miniatures in the Neville of Hornby Hours and Their Visual, Literary and Devotional Contexts,” Journal of Jewish Art 23/24 [1997–98]:179–202.) Further explication of the siege of Jerusalem miniature (fig. 67) would be helpful, if at all possible: a man stabs a baby on the right—is this a desperate act of cannibalism or the vengeance of a crusader? And what is the woman on the left doing, seemingly holding out a plate over a headless (?) man? Smith’s argument here that Isabel was sympathetic to the Jews is not wholly convincing. Given the virulent anti-Judaism of the era, the miniature might indeed be read as a celebration of the Jews’ expulsion not only from Jerusalem but also from England; and, as Smith notes, the vengeful anti-Judaism of some of Christ’s childhood miracles discussed in chapter 4 reflect contemporary realities.

Perhaps surprisingly, given the rural-gentry status of the owners, the chapter on time does not discuss the very typical secular imagery of agricultural labor seen in the calendar miniatures. In Hawisia’s book, a woman performs several of these labors (including warming herself in December), which is highly unusual. The relationship of peasant labor to the wealth of landowners, however, has been thoroughly explored elsewhere in analyses of the contemporary Luttrell Psalter (see for example, Michael Camille, Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

The heart of Art, Identity and Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England is reached in the third chapter which looks at how devotional themes and texts in these books interrelate and reflect the literacy and devotional practices of their owners. The de Lisle Hours uses the devices of dialogue (most notably in the ages-of-man cycle) and visual contrast between passion scenes and the ages of man to create an ambiance of penitential self-examination. In the de Bois Hours, Smith looks particularly at the role of marginalia as metaphors for words and phrases of the text and as memory aids. In the Neville Hours she explores several forms of participatory devotion, observing ways in which the owner’s portrait is inserted into biblical scenes and the life of the Virgin. Most intriguing is her discovery of the ways in which contiguous text often interrelates with miniatures (material she presented in an Art Bulletin article in 1999 [“The Neville of Hornby Hours and the Design of Literate Devotion,” The Art Bulletin 81, no. 1 (March 1999): 72–92]). Finally she looks at the many images of images, in which the owner is shown praying before a statue, which affirms the power of visual contemplation.

In the final chapter Smith returns to the functions of books of hours, looking at the part these devotional books played in the owners’ roles as mothers. A better title for this chapter thus might have been “Books for Mothers!” Magical and protective prayers address menstruation, pregnancy, and childbirth, while other texts are explicitly geared to the education of children, as books of hours served as primers. The Virgin Mary mounting the temple steps at the Gradual Psalms models girls’ religious education. Smith looks too at child saints and Old Testament heroes who would have served as visual models, and particularly at the Christ Child’s miracles which form a major cycle in the Neville of Hornby Hours. This cycle is unique among known books of hours and makes this work a precocious precursor of late medieval books explicitly for children. The latter first appear in the late fifteenth century, those for the children of Anne de Bretagne being the best known (see Roger Wieck, “The Primer of Claude de France and the Education of the Renaissance Child,” in Stella Panayotova, ed., The Cambridge Illuminations, London: Harvey Miller, 2007, 267–77). There is, however, one thirteenth-century German psalter that also served as a child’s primer (see Judith Oliver, “A Primer of Thirteenth-Century German Convent Life: The Psalter as Office and Mass Book [London, BL ms. Add. 60629],” in F. O. Büttner, ed., The Illuminated Psalter: Studies in the Content, Purpose and Placement of Its Images, Turnhout: Brepols, 2004, 259–70).

A few points elicit comment: the Meditations discussed on page 58 may date well into the fourteenth century rather than the late thirteenth, according to Sarah McNamer (“Further Evidence for the Date of the Pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes vitae Christi,” Franciscan Studies n.s. 50 (1990): 235–61). Page 129 erratum: Joseph’s not Jacob’s dream and death. Finally, the perplexing family “portrait” (285–86) in the Psalter of “Yolande de Soissons” (actually made for her stepmother) is on a loose prefatory sheet so that its original location and relationship with any facing page as well as its actual subject (very possibly Old Testament) remain matters of conjecture (see Alison Stones, “The Full-Page Miniatures of the Psalter-Hours New York, PML ms. M. 729: Programme and Patron,” in The Illuminated Psalter, 287–88, n. 36).

How many independent books of hours from France and the Low Countries survive from before 1350 is something it might have been interesting to tabulate, to see how their popularity in England compared; but with rare exceptions Smith does not make comparisons with continental materials. The complexity and originality of the illustrative cycles in the manuscripts she analyzes might also have been underscored by tabulating the contents and major decoration in other English hours of the same era. How many of these early books of hours were made for women and depict their owners interacting with the devotional texts is another issue important to understanding this genre of medieval book. Some brief consideration of these broader contextual observations would have been welcome in an introductory chapter and appendix. A broad survey of the textual contents of English women’s books of hours has now been published by Charity Scott-Stokes (Women’s Books of Hours in Medieval England, Woodbridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2006), which makes good use of Smith’s book.

Smith’s study provides a wealth of material on the social and religious context in which fourteenth-century English devotional books were created. In exploring their diverse textual contents and illustrative cycles, she provides insight into numerous devotional themes, their literary sources, and the diffusion of these literary and iconographic traditions. Her impressive and insightful book will thus be required reading for scholars interested in a wide range of topics, and her novel lines of inquiry into the fusion of text captions with images and the many ways one can read the owners’ interests within their horae will also stimulate scholars to look in new ways at medieval books.