Аннотация:In 1956 Henry Hargreaves wrote a short notice that drew scholarly attention to a group of English translations of the Book of Hours: although he identified the translation of some of them as being drawn from the Wycliffite Bible, they have not been added to the lists of Wycliffite Bible manuscripts and no further research has been done on them. Scholarly acknowledgment of these books, and hesitation to study them, may be due to their troubling complexity. The English Hours pose a serious puzzle to modern scholarship on late medieval England. On one hand, the English Hours are an excellent introduction to the process through which a traditionally Latin text was transformed into an English one. On the other hand, they challenge our understanding of audiences for vernacular scripture in general and the Wycliffite Bible's text in particular and seem to contradict our understanding of the religious practices of people scholars call "Wycliffites" or "Lollards." These are all reasons to reconsider this group of seventeen manuscripts as a key towards a more nuanced understanding of vernacular religion in fifteenth-century England.
