Abstract
In late fifteenth-century Europe, a heated debate raged over the Immaculate Conception – the belief that the Virgin Mary was born without Original Sin. In the midst of this controversy, art, literature, liturgy, and music celebrating the Immaculate Conception and promoting the cult of St. Anne, the Virgin’s mother, flourished. This dissertation traces a prayer cycle called the Hours of the Conception of the Virgin as recorded in a group of about fifty manuscript and printed books of hours and prayer books created primarily in the years between 1450 and 1550. To refer to this prayer cycle in the singular, however, is misleading: It exists in at least three distinct forms which, I argue, supplied trans-generational scripts for lay, bourgeois devotion, and continued to do so after the transition from manuscript to printed book culture. This dissertation, which constitutes the first substantial scholarship on the Hours of the Conception of the Virgin, fleshes out our understanding of the intersections of family and bourgeois piety in the late Middle Ages and into early modernity, bringing into focus the ways in which late-medieval and early-modern piety focused on the Holy Family as a reflection of earthly domesticity and devotion. The visual, material, and textual variety found within these prayer cycles related to the Immaculate Conception portrays the richness of individual devotional practice as well as the contested, creative, and evolving nature of devotion to St. Anne and the Holy Family in the period during which these books were produced.
