How to Look at Lots of Books of Hours: Big Data and Disciplinary Difference

Abstract: The most common late medieval manuscript is the book of hours—a prayerbook for laity organized around the canonical hours of the day. Although the popularity of books of hours makes them indisputably important to the history of medieval reading, their very numbers also make any comprehensive study of them difficult. Even such truisms as “books of hours are often illustrated” or “books of hours are closely associated with women readers” are difficult to substantiate objectively, and the genre remains in several senses an unknown quantity. This paper considers the value of various approaches to this large archive, including studies focused on: a single manuscript; two or three related manuscripts; small groups of manuscripts located in a particular medieval community; larger groups of manuscripts defined by a span of time, a national boundary, a genre, or a formal characteristic; and the manuscript holdings of a modern library. Describing the questions raised by a Mellon-funded case study, it also considers the possibilities created by digital tools and collaborative scholarship and the implications of disciplinary difference for research methods in the digital humanities. Ultimately, the essay observes, “looking” digitally at a large archive poses challenges different from those involved in “reading” it.