CEMERS Bernardo Lecture Series

33RD ANNUAL BERNARDO LECTURE

“BEYOND THE BOOK OF HOURS: FEMALE LAY READERS AND THE WOUNDS OF SAINT FRANCIS”

HOLLY FLORA, Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, Tulane University

  • Thursday, November 9, 2023
  • Admissions Building: Room 189
  • 4:30 p.m. Reception | 5:30 p.m. Lecture

Scholars have long recognized the importance of female lay readers to the development of the genre of the Book of Hours in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance in northern Europe. In Italian contexts, where Books of Hours are relatively rare, other texts became adapted for devotional use in illustrated manuscripts, reflecting an eclectic urban religious culture. A little-known illuminated manuscript of the Legenda maior made for an unnamed laywoman in Milan ca. 1350 (MS 411 at the Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele II in Rome) is an example of this kind of adaptation.

In this paper, I will examine the way that MS 411 emphasizes the side wound of Christ or of Francis (which is of course Christ’s wound, also acquired via Francis’ stigmatization) as a focal point for the manuscript’s female reader. In MS 411’s highly personalized image cycle, the female devotee appears four times kneeling before either Christ or Francis, who expose their side wounds. The wound in Christ’s side, which can take on the appearance also of a vagina, is sometimes depicted on its own in Books of Hours; examples of the side wound as a singular devotional image occur in manuscripts made for lay women, such as in the Psalter-Hours of Bonne of Luxembourg in the Met Cloisters. I will argue that in MS 411, the privileging of the side wound as an object of the reader’s prayer was key to this manuscript’s re-imagining of the Legenda maior as a devotional text.

The Bernardo Lecture Series in the Humanities honors an esteemed colleague, the late Professor Aldo Bernardo, who taught Romance Languages at Binghamton for many years and co-founded the Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies with Bernard Huppé in 1966.

The series offers annual lectures by distinguished scholars on topics related to Prof. Bernardo’s fields of interest—medieval and Renaissance history and culture—with a particular focus on Italian literature and intellectual history. Most of the lectures have subsequently been published as individual booklets in a series of occasional papers sponsored by SUNY Press.