Most of you are probably here from Personal Liturgical Calendars: Part 1. If you are not, why? I truly recommend reading the first part, and not because I wrote it. I explain much of the essentials in Part I, so check out the really cool crash course in grading. It includes the basepoint for our fun feasts that we track in this half of “Personal Liturgical Calendars.”

A quick recap for feast days goes as such: feast days represent the saints that are being honored in church that day. The grading, as discussed in the previous post, represents how many lessons (readings from the Gospels or a saint’s vita) should be read during matins. In this post, I break down the major feasts that show up in liturgical calendars. On this topic, Roger S. Wieck writes: “calendars also often included many local celebrations. These help to… determine its ‘use,’ the place where the calendar was intended to be used” (Wieck 1). Therefore, let us look at the four major feasts that we are using to localize the Hargrett Hours calendar.

I did a four-way comparison of the Hargrett Hours and Keble MS 44 calendars with two Parisian breviary calendars. Those two calendars are a Notre Dame Breviary (Bibliothèque nationale de France. Département des Manuscripts. Latin 15182) and a Sainte Chapelle Breviary (New York, The Morgan Library and Museum, MS. m.1042) – which Roger S. Wieck dubs the Morgan Breviary. The four major feasts below are the markers I tracked throughout these four calendars pulling from prior research by Team Calendar in their Sherlock Chapelle blog post: 

Dedication of Sainte Chapelle (26 April)

Crown of Thorns (11 August)

Reception of the Relics of Sainte Chapelle (30 September)

Reception of the Relics of Notre Dame (4 December)

The Hargrett Hours contains three of the feasts: April 26th, August 11th, and December 4th (see figure 1). The 11 August feast is common throughout all Parisian calendars, so this means the feast is not tied to a specific cathedral, but all of Paris. The Crown of Thorns relic is very important to the city itself, so it would be found in all Parisian calendars. The Dedication of Sainte Chapelle (26 April) is not found in the Keble or the Notre Dame Breviary calendars. Despite Keble’s lack of the feast, the Hargrett Hours calendar does have this feast, which connects the calendar in some way to the Sainte Chapelle cathedral. The Dedication of Sainte Chapelle is found in the Morgan Breviary as well, which continues to solidify the influence of Sainte Chapelle on the Hargrett Hours calendar. However, the influence is not in totality, which allows for the influences of other cathedrals’ uses on the Hargrett Hours calendar. 

Interestingly, the fourth feast day, Reception of the Relics of Sainte Chapelle (30 September), remains absent from the Hargrett Hours. This feast is also missing in the Notre Dame Breviary, as well as the Keble calendar. An important feast day for Sainte Chapelle should exist in a calendar from that cathedral. Therefore, the Keble calendar does not bear signs of a relationship with Sainte Chapelle. The missing feasts (26 August and 30 September) lead me to believe the Keble calendar originated from Notre Dame, or at the very least, was influenced by the cathedral’s use.

The feast of the Reception of the Relics of Notre Dame (4 Dec), despite the name, also appears in Sainte Chapelle calendars – as seen in the Morgan calendar. It never appears  in Parisian composite calendars. Of the 70 calendars that myself and fellow researchers have transcribed, the Hargrett Hours and Keble calendars are the only two Parisian Books of Hours to include the December 4th feast day. The December 4th feast’s relative rarity provides further evidence that the feast itself signals liturgical use, therefore placing these calendars within the confines of a church.

Considering these feast days, I infer that the Keble calendar was possibly copied from a Notre Dame liturgical calendar; it includes neither of the Ste-Chapelle-specific feasts, but it does include the Notre Dame Reception of the Relics. The Hargrett Hours, however, remains hard to provenance. The feast of the Dedication of Sainte Chapelle is present in Hargrett Hours, but moved up a day to 25 April, most likely representing a scribal error. Both the Hargrett Hours and Keble calendars are most certainly based on Parisian liturgical calendars. The two calendars are not entirely identical, but their resemblance is key to understanding the potential use of the Hargrett Hours calendar. 

As we descended on our roller coaster, the major feasts took us on abrupt turns. Along with the grading, the feasts provide evidence for a liturgical background for both Books of Hours. Our coaster took another sharp turn when we found these calendars in personal Parisian Books of Hours. The Keble calendar is most definitely influenced by Notre Dame as it has a 90% correlation with a Notre Dame calendar. There are approximately 35 feast days that are missing from either calendar or simply different from the Notre Dame calendar. If the Keble calendar had been graded, a better correlation could have been determined. The slight difference in calendars is how the Keble calendar is quasi-liturgical while the Hargrett Hours calendar is explicitly copied from a liturgical calendar. The Keble calendar leans more towards a personal Parisian calendar with hints of the liturgy due to the inclusion of liturgical feasts and its non-composite nature. The lack of grading highlights the oddity of finding liturgical grading in the Hargrett Hours. Yet, the Keble calendar continues to provide answers for the rarity and diversity of personal liturgical calendars. The Hargrett Hours calendar contains a mixture of liturgical feasts and grading from both Sainte Chapelle and Notre Dame. The best way to describe this calendar and its home is to call it weird. One thing is for certain, the commissioner of the Hargrett Hours was highly specific in their wants for the calendar and well educated in matters of the clergy. However, the questioning of the Hargrett Hours calendar will continue until an origin can be named, but the manuscript may be one twist closer to its home cathedral. 

– Authored by Rachel Warner. 

 

Works Cited

Bibliothèque nationale de France. Département des Manuscripts. Latin 15182

New York, The Morgan Library and Museum, MS M.1042

Oxford, Keble College, MS 44 

University of Georgia, Hargrett Library, Hargrett MS 836

Wieck, Roger S. The Medieval Calendar: Locating Time in the Middle Ages. New York, Scala Arts Publishers, Inc., 2017.

 

Websites consulted

Macks, Aaron. CoKL: Corpus Kalendarium, 2016-2024. http://www.cokldb.org/. Accessed 27 Apr. 2024.