Daily Life of Women in Medieval Europe by Belle S. Tuten;

Author:Belle S. Tuten; [Tuten;, Belle S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781440872358
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
Published: 2022-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

Hours and Days

The medieval day was divided into sections referred to as the canonical hours, referring to the specific prayers that were said at particular times of the day and night. Monks and nuns, as we will discuss below, observed a worship schedule according to the canonical hours. Upper-class women outside of the cloister, some of whom had books of hours, could keep the canonical hours themselves by praying specific prayers at specific times of day. Cecily, Duchess of York (1415–1495 CE), provides an example of a noblewoman who organized her day around religious services: she rose at seven in the morning, prayed with her chaplain, heard two masses before lunch, prayed extensively in the afternoon, and heard the last service of the day before retiring at eight o’clock. Cecily also read the work of women mystics such as Mechtilde of Hackeborn and Catherine of Siena, introduced below (Leyser 1995, 232–233).

Women with less leisure to worship quite so extensively were also encouraged to observe religious practices whenever they could. In the early fourteenth-century poem “How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter,” the speaker advised her child to “Go to church whene’er thou may,” and to be quiet and respectful while she prayed the rosary (Furnivall and Rickert 1908, 31). As in many societies, affluence and education allowed for a broader range of religious practices; only women who could afford to do so had the liberty to devote large parts of their lives to observation of religious duties.

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