Contrary to widespread historical assumptions, religious devotion in Medieval Latin Christianity manifested through a variety of linguistic traditions beyond Latin. In fact, in the Low Countries prayer books in the Dutch vernacular were by far the most commonly read type of book in the late medieval period (late 14th until the first half of the 16th century). The mainstay of this vast corpus of handwritten and printed books is the Book of Hours in the translation attributed to Geert Grote, the founder one of the period’s most powerful religious reform movements, the Devotio Moderna or Modern Devotion. Libraries and archives across the world still hold approximately 850 manuscripts and copies of no less than 40 printed editions. Nowhere else outside the Netherlands do so many manuscript and printed editions of this type of prayer book survive in the vernacular, making these books a unique source for the study of religiosity before the Reformation.
While these books are fundamental for our understanding of religious practice, and of textual and visual literacy between 1380 and 1550 – a period that saw dramatic changes in the religious landscape and in book production – the sheer volume of material and its diversity has prevented researchers from fully grasping the nature and impact of this vibrant phenomenon. This project sets out to conduct the first large-scale investigation of this unique corpus by introducing a new approach that studies all aspects of vernacular prayer books in their mutual interdependence. The project aims to chart the entire ‘ecosystem’ of Dutch-language prayer books that supported their popularity for an extended period. The ecosystem included, but is not limited to, manuscripts, printed books, texts, images, producers, owners, patrons, places, devotions, and the relations between all of these aspects.
To study the books within the ecosystem the project combines quantitative and qualitative analysis to reach meaningful interpretations of the data. The nature of the material requires this research to be tackled within a multidisciplinary project that brings together philologists, art historians, book historians and digital humanities specialists. The project will yield an integrative understanding of the role of prayer books in the late medieval Low Countries on the threshold of the medieval and early modern era.
