About the Little Offices of the Holy Spirit
Q. What are these things? A. These are brief liturgical offices popular during the medieval period. Those who lived within the intentional litugurical communities of the time - monastics and clergy - were bound to pray seven liturgical offices a day and one in the middle of the night. Matins was the long night office, Lauds and Vespers were prayed roughly around daybreak and sundown, Compline was right before bedtime, and the other hours were prayed at the various hours of the Roman day from which they received their names: Prime (6 AM); Terce (9 AM); Sext (Noon); Nones (3 PM). Naturally, when these hours fell depended broadly on when the sun rose and set, so the times listed here are approximate. The monastic hours focused on the repetition of the Psalms, but also included a hymn, a reading (usually brief) from Scripture called the "chapter" which was followed by a responsory. Most offices ended with a brief dialogue and a short prayer called a collect. The little hours were cut-down versions of the large hours that followed the broad patterns of the big ones but were shorter and did not change with the day or liturgical season. Too, they were often in honor or remembrance of something, commonly the Blessed Virgin Mary, the dead, or the Passion of Jesus. As monastic liturgies and devotions expanded towards the end of the early medieval period (approaching the year 1000), the number and type of these add-ons multiplied. Generally if it is an add-on that includes a psalm, we refer to it as a "little Office;" if it does not contain a psalm it is a "little Hour." As these devotions made their way out of the monasteries and into popular piety, the literate - usually the noble and wealthy - would pray the little Offices of Hours found at the end of their psalters. Eventually, the psalms themselves were largely dropped and these shorter devotions were gathered into the splendid Books of Hours which are treasures of artistic effort and spiritual devotion. Services for the Holy Spirit show up in some of these; Hours of the Holy Spirit (i.e., devotions without psalms) are more common than the Office of the Holy Spirit, but they do show up in some Books of Hours.
Q. Where did these texts come from? A. I transcribed these texts from one particular Book of Hours (Walters Art Museum, MS W. 86), a book written in Northern France in the late 13th century. Many of the texts that make up the Offices are traditional or are from Scripture. For the psalms and other liturgical texts, I followed the Book of Common Prayer. The hymn translations are mostly from John Mason Neale. Some prayers I adapted from from traditional translations, others I translated myself. (And a big thank you to Dr. Carin Ruff for helping me through a couple of tricky transcription spots!)
Q. Where are the pictures from? A. The pictures are from a different book of hours (Walters Art Museum, MS W. 196) painted in Belgium around 1470. The central images and the sidebars both come from this manuscript. Unfortunately, some of the images were cut out of the manuscript, including those for Lauds and Prime and also the Matins of the Blessed Virgin (which would have depicted the Holy Spirit descending on Mary at the Annunciation). As a result, I borrowed a picture from before the Penitential Psalms of David praying for Lauds, and recycled the image from Nones for Prime.
Q. Why did you choose these hours and make them look old-timey? A. I compiled these offices as part of a spiritual component to a course on early and medieval church history I taught for the Ecumenical Institute at St. Mary's Seminary and University. Because the students taking the spirituality portion were Protestant or non-denominational, I selected the Offices of the Holy Spirit as most conducive to their own spiritual practices. Since we were exploring spirituality through time, I wanted to give them the experience of praying from a book of hours, complete with the sort of images, texture, and visual cues that these books had.
Q. Where can I learn more about this stuff? A. I recommend any book by Roger Wieck on the Books of Hours. Additionally, Eamon Duffy's Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers is a great book exploring these devotional works right on the cusp of the Reformation and in the time after.
Q. Who are you? A. I'm Derek Olsen. I have a Ph.D. in New Testament from Emory University, but my research focuses on the History of Interpretation (i.e., how the Bible has been read through the centuries) with a focus on the Middle Ages. As a result, I do a lot of writing and thinking on liturgical spirituality. Check out my books on Amazon by searching for Derek A. Olsen!