Scriptural content of the English medieval Book of Hours: Tracing textual traditions of nine lessons from the Book of Job

Abstract

This contribution examines nine lessons from the Office of the Dead, found in a group of English translations of the Book of Hours. The text of the lessons comes from six chapters of the Book of Job and therefore constitutes scriptural content of this medieval prayer book. Selected for this analysis are four primers as well as the two vernacular versions of the Bible available at that time, namely the Early and Late Version of the Wycliffite Bible (cf. Dove 2007). As far as the primers are concerned, three of them have received an edition, while New Haven, Yale University Library, MS Beinecke 360, which is examined in this contribution, still remains to be edited and analyzed in depth. This study attempts to establish the textual tradition of its non-psalmic scriptural passages as well as that of other primers. This will be achieved by performing comparative analysis expressed by objective mathematical values, with the results presented in tabular form and illustrated with fragments of the actual text. The analysis performed in this paper will shed some light on the complicated history of scriptural content of the selected English primers.

Keywords

• book of hours
• book of job
• english primers
• text similarity measurement
• wycliffe’s bible