Farnese Hours (Morgan Library, MS M.69)
Deus in adiutorium meum intende. Domine ad adiuvandum me festina.
Our renderingO God, come to my assistance. O Lord, make haste to help me.
What it is
Regarded as the last great Italian Renaissance illuminated manuscript and Giulio Clovio's masterpiece, the Farnese Hours is a Book of Hours for the Use of Rome created between 1537 and 1546 for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, grandson of Pope Paul III. Its twenty-six paired full-page miniatures align Old Testament and New Testament scenes; the borders of thirty-seven text pages contain landscapes, portraits, and grotesques of extraordinary quality — praised by Vasari in 1568 as unparalleled. The manuscript is now at the Morgan Library (MS M.69); the inside front cover bears the incised name and arms of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, and the back cover those of Cardinal Odoardo Farnese, confirming two generations of Farnese private devotional use. The Corpus Christi procession miniature features Pope Paul III himself, anchoring the manuscript in Farnese dynastic piety.
Why it still matters
The opening versicle of each Hour of the Virgin — unchanged from this 1546 text — remains the opening of the Liturgy of the Hours today; Christians using the Divine Office still pray these exact words at every hour.
Kept alongside
Thomas à Kempis: De Imitatione Christi (The Imitation of Christ)
Perhaps the most widely read Christian devotional work after the Bible, the Imitation of Christ counsels interior piety, Eucharistic devotion, and detachment from worldly ambition — values promoted at both the Wittelsbach Counter-Reformation court and in Erasmian Lutheran circles in Saxony. The Jesuits recommended it throughout their German mission work, making it a standard text in the Bavarian court milieu under Albert V and William V; Luther himself was formed in the Devotio Moderna tradition from which it springs. No single Wettin or Wittelsbach ownership record has been located, and the dual-house listing reflects the near-universal presence of the text in every German Catholic and Erasmian Protestant court of the period rather than documented patronage.
Book of Common Prayer (1559 Elizabethan edition)
The Book of Common Prayer provided the complete liturgical and devotional framework for the English Protestant monarchy and aristocracy, combining Daily Morning and Evening Prayer, the Eucharist, the Psalter, and occasional offices into a single vernacular text. The 1559 Elizabethan revision drew primarily from Cranmer's 1552 edition and remained in use substantially unchanged through the Stuart period, making it the formative devotional text for every English royal and noble family for nearly a century. Its Collect for Purity, the General Confession, and the Comfortable Words represent some of the most durable penitential and eucharistic prose in the English language. The BCP was simultaneously a royal political instrument and a genuine instrument of mass devotional formation across all levels of English society.
Les Pseaumes de David mis en rime françoise (Genevan / Huguenot Psalter)
Les Pseaumes mis en rime françoise par Clement Marot et Theodore de Beze
The complete 150-psalm Huguenot Psalter in French verse, published in Geneva in 1562. Over 30,000 copies circulated within a year, and it became the single most formative devotional text for French Protestant nobility, functioning simultaneously as prayer book, hymnal, and identity marker. Gaspard de Coligny, Louis I de Condé, and their families sang these psalms at daily prayers, before battles, and in camp services conducted by Reformed chaplains. Psalm 68 ('Que Dieu se montre seulement') served as the Huguenot battle anthem at multiple engagements; Psalm 118 was sung by Condé's forces kneeling before the Battle of Coutras (1587); Psalm 144 was the victory cry at Sancerre (1572). Bèze preached from this psalter in the lodgings of both Condé and Coligny during the early 1560s.