Through Body or Eyes: Experiencing Devotional Books in Late Medieval Italy

Within the context of the Book of Hours’ academic research, scholars such as Stocks (1998), Zanichelli (2006), Manzari (2013), have rightly pointed out the surprising irregularity of the Italian context, which avoids the heartfelt standardization of the northern European production and is characterized by a more insistent sensory support for liturgical practices. The exceptional nature of the Italian context is, however, not only linked to the irregular character of its Books of Hours, but also to the fascinating plurality of devotional manuscripts that do not belong to this specific library typology and that are often neglected or wrongly assimilated to Books of Hours, as in the studies previously mentioned. In the multiform production of codices intended for the laity’s devotion in Italy, it is, for instance, possible to isolate another specific library typology (the “hybrid miscellany”) animated by a ritualistic but also a profoundly pedagogical intention, well expressed from both a textual and figurative point of view. In this regard, the comparison between two specific manuscripts can give us an idea of the different ways in which one could interact with the sacred through a book in the Late Middle Ages: the first, the ms. BAV, Vat. Lat. 13985 (made in Venice around 1370), is an irregular Book of Hours and offers a clear Holly Flora, Tulane University, The Meditationes Vitae Christi and Sight and Sound in Female Religious Experiences image of gestural and multisensorial rituals, in which it is the body through its movements that must complete the recitation of the liturgy. The second, the ms. BAV, Barb. Lat. 3984 (datable to around 1330 and produced in Florence), on the other hand, indicates a type of religious practice that is entirely mental and intellectual, where the act of looking is fundamental to the experience of the book and of the divine. Through the analysis of these two codices, it should therefore become clear how much the form of both the two books and their figurative program of illuminations - which are very different - tells us a lot of their function and of their probable connection to opposite patronages and production contexts.