ABSTRACT
Even a cursory glance through manuscript catalogues and library inventories will show that devotional literature flourished in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.1 This can be measured by numbers of manuscript devotional books, both editions and copies. We can find explanations for this flowering of devotional literature in social, economic, cultural and religious life. Over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries literacy expanded among lay people and the parish clergy, while at the same time changes in workshop practices allowed the production of increasingly less expensive manuscripts in cities like Tours, Rouen and especially Paris. For this period it is difficult to distinguish devotional literature strictly speaking from what we might call didactic literature. Many works combine succinct instruction about liturgical and moral behaviour, presented as brief rules of conduct, with texts of prayers and instruction about when and where to pray. The most popular works included treatises by Jean Gerson; the Imitatio Christi^ saints' lives; the related arts of confession and dying; collections of pious tales and exempla like La vie des pères and La fleur des commandements de Dieu; and above all books of hours. By the 1490s, and in greater numbers during the first two decades of the sixteenth century, these works were printed and available in inexpensive editions. To them we should also add works whose first appearance was in print, such as Jean Quentin's La manière de bien vivre dévotement et salutairement par chacun jour (c. 1497) and the anonymous Cy commence une petite instruction et manière de vivre pour une femme séculière (c. 1512-17).
