ABSTRACT
This chapter examines devotional reading practices at the level of popular culture across a period of immense ideological and material transition, c. 1450–1560. This is a period that, in spanning our traditional categories of late medieval to early modern, is usefully called the ‘early English renaissance’. Vincent Gillespie has closely analysed mystical poetry to assess the nature of a medieval lay reader’s ecstatic mystical experiences. One such apparently popular form of doggerel verse is a set of poems relating to that traditional aspect of the Books of Hours, the yearly calendar. Another apparently popular form of doggerel verse is the selection of texts called ‘The Dayes Moralised’. In the doggerel rendition of ‘The Dayes Moralised’, each day of the week is given a particular characteristic which relates to biblical and liturgical issues and which also provides a model for how the reader should behave on that particular day.
