BOOKS FOR PRIVATE DEVOTION

Several types of books were made for Christians to use for personal or private devotion throughout the Middle Ages in Europe. These included breviaries, psalters, and books of hours. Books such as psalters and commentaries served both for private prayer and as teaching tools. The psalter is the Book of Psalms, but is often prefaced by a calendar and other auxiliary texts such as canticles, creeds, the litany of the saints, and prayers.
Books of hours were perhaps the most popular, and because of this many splendid examples have survived over the centuries. Devotional texts were intended to aid worshipers both during the Catholic masses as well as in their own private prayers. In the High Middle Ages, lay people tried to copy the religious devotion of the spiritual community. Beginning in the twelfth century, there was a new stress on lay piety as well as a revival of monasticism. By the thirteenth century, the book of hours had become the most popular devotional text.

In the detail from the scene of the Annunciation (the angel’s arrival to tell Mary that she will give birth to Christ) we get a glimpse of how a prized and much used book, perhaps a book of hours, was displayed in the home.
Other texts of a devotional nature fulfilled specific intellectual and spiritual needs of religious men and women.

For Moslems the Qur’an was the main book for religious prayer and individuals often commissioned or purchased small, personal-size copies, like the 14th century Qur’an (from the Houston Public Library) you see here. The framed page of the Qur’an from a private collection must also have come from such a small devotional book.

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