In his latest work, Eamon Duffy takes an unconventional look at Books of Hours and their use. Duffy argues persuasively that annotated copies of these books can provide insight into the intimate world of late-medieval prayer. He investigates whether the use of Books of Hours contributed to the growth of individualism and encouraged elites to abandon popular religion while also evaluating the impact of the Reformation on traditional, book-based piety. While of immense value to those desiring a better understanding of the dynamic world of late-medieval religion, Marking the Hours also demonstrates the limitations of an approach based primarily on marginalia.

For medieval laypeople, images, beads, and books all functioned as aids to prayer and memory, but Books of Hours played a special role. Besides being the primary prayer book for Christians, Duffy notes that Books of Hours were frequently used to record births, marriages, and deaths. Books were passed from generation to generation or given as gifts to secure patronage relationships. They could even be used to record debts and contracts. Duffy argues that these various uses demonstrate how late-medieval people combined fundamental spiritual concerns with a desire for dynastic continuity.

The advent of print made Books of Hours more affordable and increased their use. Because praying from a book tended to be a solitary activity, some scholars have argued that the availability of prayer books contributed to individualism. Duffy argues that this is a misreading of the relationship between the Books of Hours and the public practice of religion. The medieval church stressed that solitude and quiet were the ideal conditions for prayer. Duffy contends that it was unlikely that the practice of this sort of prayer would lead people away from the communal life of their parish church. Pictorial evidence, for instance, suggests that it was not unusual for families to recite the prayers of the Hours together at home or out loud in church.

Duffy gives ample attention to how individuals prayed. Beginning with a book owned and annotated by John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, in the fifteenth century, Duffy attempts to elucidate the emotional and mental response of those who prayed the Hours. Talbot added many prayers for protection in battle—a sensible addition given that he was a soldier fighting in France. Duffy notes that many of these prayers carried indulgences. Prayers with attached indulgences or promises of blessing were common in English Books of Hours. Duffy found a similar profusion of added prayers that hovered uneasily between petition and incantation in the Roberts Hours, a cheaper manuscript book from circa 1400. What is not evident in either example is a flight into interiority. Aristocrats and the middling sort both favored prayers that meshed easily with parish worship and perennial spiritual concerns.

Duffy also confronts the question of whether the proliferation of Books of Hours encouraged the social elite to distance themselves from their neighbors. In this discussion Duffy diverges from John Bossy, Colin Richmond, and Jonathan Hughes. For them the prayers of the Hours were self-centered, complaining, and deeply concerned with worldly advancement. Duffy argues that their vision of late-medieval society is flawed, overlooking the fact that the Psalms and canonical prayers of the church often feature prayers begging protection from enemies and material blessings. To strengthen his position, Duffy again refers to an annotated book: the Book of Hours Thomas More took with him to the Tower. More's annotations reveal a man of conventional piety whose prayers show little evidence of the context in which they were crafted. For Duffy, this is further evidence of how the use of the Hours increased lay participation within the public world of Mass-centered religion.

Despite Duffy's best efforts to resurrect late-medieval Christianity as a subject worthy of study on its own terms, he cannot avoid discussing the destruction wrought by the Reformation on this traditional faith. In his discussion of the impact of the Reformation, however, Duffy's reliance on marginalia becomes problematic. Duffy points out that English Books of Hours on the eve of the Reformation showed little evidence of proto-Protestant ideas. While bishops on the Continent discouraged the printing of prayers that carried indulgences and promised supernatural aid for the devotee, English books were brimming with these sorts of prayers. This is useful to know, but Duffy's evidence fails him in tracing the origins and development of the Reformation. Many of the annotations that survive from this period are largely opaque in meaning. The fact that owners of Books of Hours dutifully scratched out references to Becket, the pope, and purgatory reveals very little about their motivation. Duffy's best evidence for religious change is by his own admission inconclusive. For a book that promised at its beginning to expand our understanding of “the prayer-life, and therefore some of the innermost thoughts and most sacred privacies of late medieval people” (4), this is a rather limp ending. As Duffy himself says, the Reformation in both its Catholic and Protestant guises rendered the late-medieval Books of Hours obsolete except, perhaps, as a convenient place to record family events. If one wants to find marginal annotations tracing the religious evolution of English men and women, it seems Books of Hours will be of little aid. In fact, one might have to look beyond marginalia altogether.

The air of disappointment that hangs over the otherwise exhilarating insights of Marking the Hours is not unrecognized by the author. Duffy candidly admits that the project began life as a lecture series and thus is not systematic or exhaustive. Despite this caveat, he has contributed a great deal to our knowledge of the devotional habits and preoccupations of the readers and prayers of the Hours. Duffy once more has produced the rare book that can captivate a general reader but still has the scholarly heft to demand attention from specialists.