Isaiah, Daniel and Luke: exploring scriptural material of medieval Books of Hours in English
Isaiah, Daniel and Luke: exploring scriptural material of medieval Books of Hours in English

Summary/Abstract: This contribution examines five canticles found in four Middle English translations of the Book of Hours, with the focus on New Haven, Yale University Library, Beinecke MS 360. The texts of the canticles come from the Book of Isaiah, Book of Daniel and Gospel of Luke, and represent scriptural content of this medieval prayer book, next to the lessons from Job and selected psalms. Out of the seventeen extant medieval Books of Hours in English, four have been selected for this study: St. John's College, MS G. 24, British Library, MS Additional 17010, Cambridge, University Library, MS Dd. 11.82, and New Haven, Yale University Library, Beinecke MS 360. The former three have received an edition, while Beinecke MS 360 still remains to be edited and, to the best of my knowledge, has only recently begun to be analyzed in depth. Apart from the primers, selected for the present analysis are the two vernacular versions of the Bible available at that time, namely the Early and Late Version of the Wycliffite Bible. This study aims to establish the textual tradition of the canticles in the four Books of Hours with respect to each other and within the broader Wycliffite tradition. This will be achieved by comparing the texts with the use of text similarity measurements, and more specifically, the cosine distance method. The obtained results will be presented in tabular form and illustrated with fragments of the text. It is hoped that the analysis performed in this paper will shed light on the textual affinities of the scriptural content of Middle English primers. This study is parallel to the one presented in Hordyjewicz (2023), where my focus was on the nine lessons from the Book of Job.

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