While doing research on Saint-Chappelle in the Fall of 2023, my team and I noted that The Crown of Thorns was ritualized and fanaticized as one of the Sainte-Chapelle relics, with Louis IX dedicating a Feast Day to its prowess (Aug. 11th). The people of Paris even had the chance to see Louis IX cosplay…
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…
Welcome to Personal Liturgical Calendars, where I dive into a comparison of two calendars from Parisian Books of Hours. The roller coaster of questions about personal liturgical calendars stem from the mystery of the Hargrett Hours calendar. When I call something personal and liturgical, it sounds contradictory. Yet, I stand here with a very confusing…
Beguines were a unique or as some may say “underground” or “indie” group of religious women who were prevalent in later medieval Europe. In the Fall semester of 2023, I decided to conduct research on beguines in Paris and their relationship with books; this research can be found here. I conducted this research to determine…
Her [Genevieve’s] guardianship of Paris meant that Parisian men accepted a female patron. While many cities and countries (including France itself) put themselves under the patronage of the Virgin Mary, it was rare for a city, let alone a major city like Paris, to assume a totally human female saint as protectoress.” Patroness of Paris…
The list of suffrages to saints in a Book of Hours are like the owner’s favorite musicians: those saints can tell us about the owner’s devotional practice. Maybe they only listen to the Top 40 with saints like Peter, John the Baptist, and the Virgin Mary. Maybe they are ride or die for one artist…
Imagine you’re living in Paris in the fifteenth century. You have a little extra money set aside. How do you deepen your relationship with God while also publicly showing off your devotion? You want a Book of Hours. Books of Hours were the most common type of personal book in the Middle Ages, owned by…
One of the most compelling aspects of our research into the suffrages was learning about the saints contained within the Hargrett Hours. We have an extensive list of forty men and women, so Grace used David Farmer’s Oxford Dictionary of Saints to get some baseline information on all of them. From there, she chose a…
“Ohio is one of the areas of the country richest in medieval manuscripts, with more than 2200 codices and 2400 leaves in at least thirty-three collections. In fact, once you leave the East Coast, Ohio has the largest number of medieval manuscripts per person and per square mile in the United States.” – Lisa Davis, “Manuscript…
As the precinct delves further into the enigmatic Hargrett Hours investigation, we detectives of Squad Calendar have a hunch. Here’s what we know: the object of interest is a medieval manuscript called the Hargrett Hours that dates to the 15th century. It’s a Book of Hours, which is a kind of prayer manuscript intended for…