Lecture: “The Late Medieval Book of Hours and the Idea of the Literary”
Jessica Brantley (Yale University)
Room VC 213, Victoria College Chapel, 91 Charles Street W
Presented by the Toronto Centre for the Book in association with the Friends of Victoria University Library
Rather than offering a history of art or a history of prayer, this talk excavates the histories of literature that are manifest in this uniquely important textual archive. This study explores the evidence for connections between books of hours and vernacular literary culture in late medieval England. The complex understanding of what it meant to read—of how a person should engage with a book—can have enormous consequences for our sense of how medieval literary culture worked.