'Book of hours' has rare female voice
Mary Dockray-Miller has dug in musty libraries from London to Paris - and now Copley Square. The latter has provided her with surprising research material right in her own backyard.
Dockray-Miller, who teaches English literature at Lesley University in Cambridge, is publishing a paper that prints, for the first time, three prayers from a 122-page medieval manuscript secreted in the Boston Public Library's rare books collection.
The Mohun Hours is one of many surviving "books of hours" - personalized medieval prayer books that usually were owned by wealthy Catholic women. This particular book was a wedding gift to English aristocrat Eleanor de Mohun, given either by her parents or new in-laws around 1330. The three prayers about which Dockray-Miller writes were added two generations later, probably by a female descendant of Eleanor's. All three, written in Middle English, put a feminine perspective on what could be a harsh, masculine medieval Christianity.
One petitions Jesus to calm the reader's soul as he calmed the River Jordan before being baptized. The second poem, just six lines, prays to Jesus "for the purity of your incarnation, for the merit of your wounds' blood and your passion, for the pledge and meaning of your death and your resurrection." The third asks for a pure life and an afterlife with the angels.
Dockray-Miller commends what she calls the BPL's unusual public access. Her paper is being published by a scholarly journal, Women and Language. Excerpts from a recent interview follow.
Q. Why wouldn't a man have had this?
A. They weren't all written for women, but a majority of them were female-owned. It was a very female form of private devotion. An aristocratic woman would have ladies in waiting or women who served her, and in the morning, they would all do their devotions together.
Q. Tell me about the Mohun Hours -who wrote it?
A. The liturgical texts are standard church texts in Latin. They're the same in every book of hours. The more personalized prayers are anonymous. We don't know who wrote them. The prayers that I was working with are a really small part of the entire book. A lot of [the prayers] are prayers to Christ, and they seem almost romantic in a modern sense.
Q. How did the Boston Public Library get it?
A. The BPL bought it [in 1954 from a London book dealer.] [Before then], it got passed around, probably after the Reformation, and we're lucky it didn't get burned or destroyed by Henry VIII and his idiots. [Henry famously broke with the church over his multiple wives and replaced papal authority over the Church of England with his own.]
Q. Is there something about the Mohun book that makes it special?
A. My scholarly interest has to do with women's literacy. I think there's this cartoonish stereotype of medieval women: They got married when they were 12, they had 10 kids by the time they were 25, and then they died. And they were all illiterate and had chastity belts. [By contrast], I'm really interested in the amount of female literacy and engagement with literature that I've found.
Twenty or 30 years ago, there was this assumption that women had no history in the Middle Ages, there weren't any documents associated with them, it was all about bishops and kings. And now, there [is research confirming female literacy.] There are hundreds of manuscripts that were used by women [in the aristocratic class.] I'm interested in what it says about the way women practiced Christianity.
Q. And what do we know?
A. We know there's this intense devotion to Christ as a personality. The three poems in this manuscript that are in Middle English say, [for example], "The water was wild but the child was good, the child with his right hand blessed the flood." There are no prayers to the Virgin Mary, to other saints. They're all pleas [to] a gentle and forgiving God. They wanted a Christ who was almost like a sweet boyfriend, a very personal Christ. This is at the same time as the Inquisition, mostly Spanish and Italian men who are, in the name of Christ, burning people alive at the stake and putting them on the rack.
Q. Are you Catholic?
A. I'm sort of culturally Irish Catholic. I have lots of cousins; many of them are named Mary. But I'm not a practicing Catholic.
Q. The publicity folks at Lesley called you Boston's own Indiana Jones.
A. I didn't bring my bullwhip. I guess Indiana Jones knew that the Lost Ark was in whatever city it was in. I knew that this book was at the BPL, and it was exciting for me to hold something in my hands that a literate woman in that time period [crafted].
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