The Book of Hours

It's time for a brief history lesson.

Monasteries and cathedrals, i.e. large religious centers, celebrated a series of prayers every day in a sequence called the Divine Office.  The Mass (which I'm sure you've heard of) was the highlight of the day's worship, but the Office exists as a companion, with events throughout the day.  The highlights of the Office include Vespers, just before dark, Matins, in the dark of night, and Lauds at dawn.  Life in these places was centered around practicing the Divine Office.

Now, they did not use the same texts or music day-to-day, year-to-year.  Some texts were constant, but most was recited only once each year.  A number of different kinds of books facilitated remembering these rare events, but that's not the focus of what I want to talk about.

As you might know, Catholicism has a number of saints and has assigned a calendar day to each of them.  While every religious location honored these saints on their day, most areas had regional or local saints that they held especially dear (for example, Saint Martin was revered by all of France).  To especially celebrate these people, monks wrote Offices specifically for them - a collection of unique texts and music sung only for that saint.  Some of these Offices were quite elaborate and long, and (at least before the Council of Trent) multiplied until each location had their own, unique tradition and way of practicing Catholicism (and often did not follow the Pope's commands on that subject).  In fact, nearby liturgical communities would compete over who's Offices were better, and better celebrated a saint both places held in high esteem.  There's an adventure in there.  Or three.

Some really special Offices were added onto the end of every part of the Office - Notre Dame was significant in that it had at least two smaller Hours (each segment of the Office was called an Hour) following each regular one - the Hours of the Virgin and the Hours of the Dead.

What I wanted to talk about specifically, though, is the book of hours, the most important book of the late Middle Ages (15th-16th c.).  The book was a contained the Hours of the Virgin and the Hours of the Dead with a whole bunch of personalized stuff thrown in the mix.  Everyone who could read had a book of hours by the 16th c., as the printing press dramatically reduced the cost of these books.  Wealthy aristocrats commissioned beautiful books with unique illuminations on nearly every page, while poorer craftsmen made do with stock images.

The basic idea was that a person at home could read along with each of these so-called Little Hours while the monks or priests or whatever were doing them in the actual religious center, bringing sanctity into the home. Those who couldn't read Latin could meditate upon the images and get the same result.

Here's where they get really cool.  People customized these things like crazy, adding in prayers they'd heard once or twice, using special family prayers, venerating saints particular to their family, and all of these required distinct, unique texts designed by the individual or the individual's family (if it was an inherited book of hours).  By that, I mean that a book of hours functions like a religious spellbook.  The texts are completely mundane, but they have a special relationship with their rightful owner and serve as a channel for that person's faith to manifest.

Especially when you start thinking about those monk-scholars I mentioned a little while ago,journeying for new chants and new prayers, this gets very exciting very quickly.

Each (Catholic) cleric begins play with their book of hours.  The book contains a bunch of stock prayers in it, standard in all books - these would be used for all of the common clerical abilities, like healing, blessing, and so on.  Then we'd have a range of unique spells/chants/prayers, from which the character would have a couple (through some sort of random table) and the rest obtainable not through level advancement but through exploration, asking people about their faith and transcribing their prayers into your book.  Looting a book of hours wouldn't work - learning the story behind why this saint was important to this family or what makes this chant special is what gives the magic its power.

This is a very different take on the cleric.  Rather than trying to shoehorn the cleric into this, or make this some sort of weird optional subclass thing, this seems like a core mechanic for the cantor.  As I procrastinate and stay up late working on my world instead of sleeping or doing 'real' work, I'll keep developing this idea.