Reply To: Public vs. Private Devotion

[tmbergan]

Although the churches remained large and open for all individuals to come and visit, we see that a lot of wealthy people in the Gothic period began investing in different forms of private devotion. With their wealth and literacy, they were able to get books of hours and moralized bibles that the commoners wouldn’t have been able to understand. Another interesting thing that I noticed looking at this week’s artwork was the fact that a lot of the noble families would also get a stained glass window with their coat of arms. A lot of the stained glass that we saw would usually occur in churches to tell more of the stories, but wealthy families were able to make it more private by getting it in their homes, some of them even changing it so that instead of telling biblical stories it would tell their family’s stories.