The Rhodes Hours: female devotional culture in early Renaissance France

Iris Bednarski is a fourth-year Honours Art History student and the Editor-in-Chief of Canvas: McGill’s Undergraduate Journal of Art History & Communications.            

Against the blue-tiled floor of a cavernous hall, a noblewoman kneels to pray. She clasps her hands in contemplation as an angel with golden wings and a flickering scroll enters from above. Before her, the Virgin Mary appears at a prie-dieu beneath the crimson folds of a suspended canopy. This unusual Annunciation scene is not the product of a divine miracle, but the subject of a manuscript illumination now part of McGill Library’s vibrant books of hours collection.

I had the chance as an art history student in the Winter of 2024 to consult the Rhodes Book of Hours (so-called after the Catherine Rhodes Tudor-Hart Bequest made to McGill in 1972). While conducting research for faculty member Dr. Chriscinda Henry’s course on the Northern Renaissance, Rare Books Associate Librarian Ann Marie Holland kindly recommended the manuscript to me. The resulting project was a fascinating exploration of the different forces that shaped the religious experience of women in the early Renaissance period.

The collation statement in McGill’s vertical file speculates that the Rhodes Hours was produced for a French female patron between 1460 and 1465.[1] This is perhaps unsurprising as, by the fifteenth century, books of hours were the most popular religious reading in France.[2] For women readers, however, these texts transcended the function of a simple prayerbook. Owner portraits like the Annunciation scene of the Rhodes Hours facilitated a unique spiritual experience that led to the development of a distinctly female devotional culture in both private and public realms. Composed of 192 leaves and seventeen miniatures, the manuscript is replete with standard devotional features. The owner would have flipped through its contents to access a calendar that indicates saint and feast days; illustrations that detail the life of Christ; and various prayers, including the Hours of the Virgin, of special interest to this case study.

The Rhodes Hours’ personalized Annunciation scene prefaces the opening page of Matins. As the first of eight devotional hours in the Hours of the Virgin, Matins begins with a general request for assistance in prayer. This is the source of the inscription in Latin that appears beneath the illumination beginning with a large initial D : “Domine labia mea aperies et os meum annunciabit…” (Lord, open my lips and my mouth shall shew forth… [thy praise]).

The owner would have engaged with this text while viewing her portrait in the Annunciation scene on the same page. In a striking illumination, we see the patron engaged in prayer alongside the Virgin Mary. God appears to the viewer in the upper right corner of the composition, surrounded by a blue haze. Notably, He is rendered in human form instead of the traditional symbol of the dove. Meanwhile, the angel Gabriel moves towards Mary to announce triumphantly news of the Incarnation.

The female patron’s intimate position within the composition is especially striking. She appears just a pace away from Mary, directly beneath the billowing robes of Gabriel. As Mary looks onward her gaze meets that of the patron in a humble gesture of recognition. Identical in stature, the two women appear almost as equals. The increased availability of the Virgin to the devotee became a hallmark of religious art during the fourteenth century in Europe. This was complemented by a more personal, reciprocal relationship between the reader and the sacred subject in devotional literature.[3] In the Rhodes Hours’ owner portrait, the apparition of the Virgin serves as a testament to the patron’s devotion. The patron’s placement within the holy scene, moreover, would have allowed her to experience the Annunciation as if she were really there. The resulting effect is a distinctly feminine, distinctly individual devotional experience.

Beyond individual meditation, books of hours enabled women like the patron of the Rhodes Hours to participate in broader networks of cultural transmission. As book commissioners, women exercised control over content. This was crucial in the making of books of hours for educational purposes. Given that women outside of cloistered life were often unschooled in Latin, books of hours with vernacular translations – like the middle French used in the Rhodes Hours – provided ample opportunity for the accessible transmission of knowledge within the home.[4] Aside from educational practice, women also shared books of hours with their family and friends through exchange. Patterns of gift-giving and inheritance now reveal to us how books of hours united women across generations through matrilinear networks of transmission.[5] These various public manifestations attest to women’s participation in greater networks of cultural transmission, mediated through their private books of hours.

The personalized Annunciation scene of the Rhodes Hours provides a glimpse into the female devotional culture of early Renaissance France. Behind the unusual imagery of a fantastical encounter is a combination of forces that shift between personal and public intention, its owner portrait a testament to women’s piety and cultural influence. These forces are highly dynamic: both secret and social, as well as silent and spoken, they point to private prayer with public influence. Perhaps most remarkable is their consistent insistence on femininity in an early Renaissance society. Books of hours were women’s books, alone in family chapels or shared between the hands of mothers and daughters alike.

© Iris Bednarski, 2024

To access McGill’s Books of Hours Collection online click here :  Horae: Collection of Books of Hours  

Footnotes:

[1] See McGill’s vertical file on  Ms. Medieval 155.  Collation statement established by specialist Dionysios Hatzopoulos  c.1990, Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec. See also Dunn-Lardeau, Brenda. Catalogue raisonné des livres d’Heures conservés au Québec, notice 39.

[2]Virginia Reinburg, French Books of Hours:Making an Archive of Prayer, c.1400-1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012): 1-2.

[3]Kathyrn Ann Smith, “Chapter 3: Devotional Themes and Pictorial and Textual Strategies,” in Art, Identity, and Devotion in Fourteenth-century England: Three Women and their Books of Hours (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003): 186.

[4]Susan Groag Bell, “Medieval women book owners: arbiters of lay piety and ambassadors of culture,” in Women and Power in the Middle Ages, eds. Mary Carpenter Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988):149.

[5]Myra Dickman Orth, “Family Values: Manuscripts as gifts and legacies among French Renaissance women,” Journal of the Early Book Society for the Study of Manuscripts and Printing History 4 (2001): 88.

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