A 16thc Segen for the Mass, Pt 2

The Thalbach Segen for the Mass

The first half of this Segen – which I posted about last week – establishes its logic through enclosure, accumulation, and analogy: the devotee commends herself into sacred realities, borrows the authority of the Mass, and maps Christ’s body onto her own as a form of protection. Part 2 intensifies this same logic, shifting from verbal placement to embodied action. What was established through words is now reinforced through gesture, orientation, and repetition, as the sign of the cross is deployed to surround the body, bind danger, and authorize protection in motion. 

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PART TWO OF THE SEGEN, "HErr ich bevilch mich dir in alle die heillige wortt die alle Priieſter ſprech"  ÖNB Cod. 11750, fols. 21r-22v (Part 1 is transcribed and translated here). Division into segments reflects editorial assessments; bold is added to highlight structural repetition. Transcription and translation are CC-BY Cynthia Cyrus.

Beth ein vatter vnser vn̅ ein Aue mar[ia] 

           Pray an Our Father and a Hail Mary.

Das heïllig Gottes Creütz [REDCROSS] Jhesu christi seẏ heutt vor mir. [REDCROSS] Vnsers herrn creutz seẏ heutt hinder mir. Vnſers herrn creutz. [REDCROSS] ſei ob mir Vnſers herrn creutz [REDCROSS] sey heut zuͦ den ſeittenn neben mir. Ach Gott gesegne mich heut vnd Jmer bei dem heilligenn fron [REDCROSS] Creütz dagott die marter an leidt durch mich vund aller Chriſtenhait ·

The holy cross of God [REDCROSS] of Jesus Christ be before me today. [REDCROSS] Our Lord's cross be behind me today. Our Lord's cross [REDCROSS] be above me. Our Lord's cross [REDCROSS] be on my sides next to me today. Oh God, bless me today and forever by the holy [REDCROSS] cross, where God endured the suffering for me and all of Christendom.

Nur můs ich als wol geſegnet ſein als der Kelch unnd der wein den ein ieder Priester muß es das er die mass volbringen kan. [REDCROSS] Nur můs ich als war gesegnet sein, als des gutten hern Tobias ſun, do er in frembden landenn was [REDCROSS] Nur mus ich als war geſegnet sein, als dir heillige drei nagell / die Gott durch hend vnnd füess würden geſchlagen

I must be as well blessed as the chalice and the wine that every priest must have so that he can perform the Mass. I must be as truly blessed as the son of the good Lord Tobias, when he was in foreign lands. I must be as truly blessed as the three holy nails that God was struck with through his hands and feet.

Ich beüilch mich in die krafft vnd in die krafft wortt / da gott mensch inn ward. Ich beüilch mich in die fliessende bach vnd schwayss vnnd bluts, so vnnser lieber herr vergossenn hat. Ich beuil mich heut in die seligkeit ich armer sunder, vnd durch die krafft seines Lebendigen Sons gebe nedeiten tods. / Ich beuilch mich heutt in die seligkeit seines heilligen sacraments Ich fleuch heut vnder den schult vnnd vnder den frid, vnnd vnder dz heillig Creitz [22r] Das ſelber durch mich vnnd alle menſchen zuͦ einem Creutz gemacht hat Jch beuil mich heüt vnd allweg in die heillige Driualtigkeit vnſers herrnn Jeſu chriſti vnd in die heilige Senfftmuettigkeit Barmhertzigteit keuschheitt vnser lieben frawen Maria, vnd in die gemainſame aller heiligen.

I commend myself to the power and the word in which God became man. I commend myself to the flowing stream of sweat and blood that our dear Lord shed. I commend myself today to salvation, I poor sinner, and through the power of his living Son, grant me a blessed death. I commend myself today to the salvation of his holy sacrament. I flee today under the protection and under the peace, and under the holy cross which he himself has made into a cross for me and all people. I commend myself today and always to the Holy Trinity of our Lord Jesus Christ and to the holy gentleness, mercy, and chastity of our dear Lady Mary, and to the communion of all saints.

Dz creutz [REDCROSS] vnſers herrn Jeſu chriſti ſei heut mit mir Das [REDCROSS] Creutz vnsers lieben herrn verbind mir aller meiner feinden ſchwert. Das [REDCROSS] Creutz vnsers herrn eroffne mir alles güts Dz [REDCROSS] Creutz vnsers herrn neme von mir alles vbell vnd alle pein des ewigen tods. Nur [REDCROSS] geſegne mich der heillig ſegenn den gott vber sich ynnd alle menschen hatt gebem da gott ſelbs inn beſchaffenn wz.

The cross of our Lord Jesus Christ be with me today. The cross of our dear Lord bind the sword of all my enemies. The cross of our Lord open to me all good things. The cross of our Lord take from me all evil and all the pain of eternal death. May the holy blessing that God gave over himself and all people, in which God himself was created, bless me.

Ich beuil mich heut in die ſiben wort, die gott selbs ſprach an dem heilligen creütz. Ich beuil mich heut in den heilligen frid vnſers hern gesuchristi, der sei mir heut ein anfang vnd einausgang in allen meinen nötten, wo ich Jn der Welltt hinkör

I commend myself today to the seven words that God himself spoke on the holy cross. I commend myself today to the holy peace of our Lord Jesus Christ, may it be for me today a beginning and an end in all my needs, wherever I go in the world.

Nur gelegne mich heut der lieb herr Sannt Johannes in ſeiner keussigheitt. Nur geſegne mich der gut ſant Benedict vor Zauberei, diſe zwen haben gebet vnſern herrn Jeſum chriſtum, Welcher man oder fraw ſchmertzen hat, dz in ſeinem verdiennſt er geſundt werd. O Schmertz dich zerſtrew gott der Sun. O ſchmertz dich zerstrew gott der Heillig Gayſt. Jn dem Namenn gott des Vatters vnnd des Süns vnnd des heilligen Geists. Amen.

May the dear Lord Saint John bless me today in his chastity. May the good Saint Benedict bless me against sorcery; these two prayed to our Lord Jesus Christ, that whoever, man or woman, has pain, may be healed through his merit. O pain, may God the Son scatter you. O pain, may God the Holy Spirit scatter you. In the name of God the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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ASSESSMENT

Part 2 opens with formulaic prayer – an Our Father and a Hail Mary – and then immediately shifts register. The prayer stops asking and starts placing. What follows is no longer a petition addressed upward, but a sequence of directional statements that actively organize space around the speaker. Repeated invocations of “Das heilig Gottes Creutz … sey heut vor mir / hinder mir / ob mir / zu den seiten neben mir” (before me, behind me, above me, and to my sides) construct a six-directional enclosure, situating the devotee within a protective field defined by the cross.

This language is not metaphorical. It performs a spatial act. The cross is placed before and behind the body, above it, and on both sides; it creates a perimeter that surrounds rather than adorns. The red crosses marked in the manuscript are not ornamental flourishes, but operative cues. They prompt gesture, orientation, and repetition. They invite the speaker to action -- to trace the cross repeatedly in space, turning the prayer into enacted words that produce protection through kinetic movement.

In this sense, Part 2 takes up and extends the work already begun at the end of the first half of the prayer. There, the speaker mapped herself onto Christ’s body as a way of securing protection; here, that logic is expanded outward. Protection is no longer only anatomical or analogical but locational. The body is not simply aligned with Christ’s wounds or limbs, but physically enclosed within the sign of the cross itself, now rendered as a mobile defensive geometry.

This is characteristic Segen practice. Rather than cultivating inward reassurance, the prayer re-positions the body in sacred space. Safety is achieved not through reflection but through placement – through saying, marking, and standing within a configuration that has been declared protective. Like prayers before the image of Mary, the actions of the praying sister are integral to the prayer itself.

AUTHORIZATION THROUGH ANALOGY AND EQUIVALENCE

The prayer then pivots to a striking rhetorical strategy, signaled by the repeated formula “Nur muß ich als wol gesegnet sein als …” Rather than petitioning for blessing, the speaker asserts a claim to it through a series of carefully chosen comparisons. What follows is not metaphor but equivalence: the devotee aligns herself with persons and objects whose efficacy is already established.

Three such alignments structure this section. First, the speaker claims to be as well blessed as the chalice and the wine required for the priest to complete the Mass. Here, efficacy is functional and liturgical: these objects are blessed not because they are morally exemplary, but because without them the sacramental action cannot occur. Second, she likens herself to Tobias’ son, protected by the Angel Raphael while traveling in foreign lands. This comparison draws on narrative precedent, invoking a scriptural story in which divine protection accompanies movement, risk, and vulnerability. Third, she claims the blessing of the three holy nails of the Crucifixion, instruments rendered powerful through direct contact with Christ’s suffering body.

Taken together, these comparisons establish a logic of borrowed authority. The speaker does not present herself as worthy in her own right, nor does she wait for blessing to be conferred. Instead, she places herself on the same plane as liturgical vessels, biblical travelers, and relic-like instruments – things and figures already known to work. In doing so, the prayer authorizes lay access to protective power by grounding it in recognized sites of efficacy. Blessing here is not requested but claimed, secured through alignment with what has already proven capable of bearing and transmitting divine force.

SALVIC THINGS

The long middle section (Ich beüilch mich…) is a catalog of efficacious media:

• the wort of the Incarnation
• sweat, blood, and flowing fluids
• the sacrament
• peace
• the cross
• the Trinity
• Marian virtues
• the community of saints

This is not redundant piety. It is strategic stacking. Each item is something that:

• has already worked (historically or liturgically)
• can be entered or taken refuge under
• and can be carried by the speaker.

The repeated ich bevilch mich performs self-placement again and again. The speaker repeatedly moves themselves into zones of protection, as though tightening a net. Part one of the prayer set up her spiritual safety; her active remembrance of these holy things thus reinforces that zone.

The cross, of course, has a special status, and the next unit of the Segen re-activates it, showing its kinetic and temporal power through verb choice. It:

• binds enemies’ swords
• opens all good
• removes evil and eternal death

The cross operates metaphorically as weapon, key, and filter. This is apotropaic language in its strongest form: harm is actively restrained, not merely avoided.

COMPLETENESS IN TIME AND IN BINARIES

By invoking the seven last words spoken from the cross, peace as both Anfang and Ausgang (beginning and end), and movement “wherever I go in the world,” the prayer works deliberately to close all remaining gaps. Time is framed from beginning to end, speech is completed in silence, motion is paired with rest, pain with healing, and present vulnerability is extended forward to encompass future death. These paired terms are not incidental but systematic: the Segen seeks to leave no interval, condition, or threshold unguarded. What emerges is a prayer oriented toward completeness rather than intensity, one that aims not at a single moment of relief but at comprehensive coverage across the temporal and existential spectrum.

To this, she adds the saints as targeted intercessors. John, whose chastity aligns with bodily integrity; Benedict, who provides protection against sorcery, mark her world as one of pragmatic sanctity. Saints are invoked for what they do, not who they are. The direct address to pain (O Schmertz…) completes the transition from prayer to command. Pain is not asked to leave. It is told to disperse – twice, under Trinitarian authority.

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THE SEGEN AS PRAYER ACT

Taken together, the second half of this prayer is neither contemplative nor primarily petitionary. It is not oriented toward extended reflection or interior cultivation, but toward use. The prayer functions instead as a ritual technology of protection, assembled from spatial enclosure, authorized comparison, accumulated salvific matter, spoken command, and repeated acts of self-placement. What gives it force is not doctrinal exposition but correct enactment: familiar words spoken in the right order, gestures traced in space, and authoritative figures and objects invoked because they are already known to work.

Read in this way, the prayer aligns closely with recent scholarship that emphasizes the everyday, practice-oriented character of Segen. Ulrike Wagner-Rau, writing in Segen, characterizes blessings as rituals that are “unverbrüchlich angesehen” not because they offer explanation, but because they provide reliable ways of navigating ordinary life through repeated action. Christopher Spehr’s contribution to the same volume likewise underscores the diversity and adaptability of late medieval blessing practices, situating Segen firmly within lived religious routines rather than at the margins of official devotion. To make the point more directly: for our Thalbach sister to be enacting her Segen during and in the presence of the Mass is every bit as standard a sacred and parallel act as is the spoken delivery of requiem masses at a side altar underneath the Fronmass. Simultaneity has its own kind of sacred power.

Although he deals with an earlier 12^th to 14^th century repertoire of such Segen, Derek A. Rivard’s Blessing the World helps clarify what is at stake. His study shows that blessings were shaped by lay needs and aspirations and that their protective focus complemented the Mass’s role in sustaining communal order and integrity. I would argue that the Thalbach Segen operates in precisely this register. Drawing on familiar narratives, liturgical forms, and bodily practices, it translates shared Christian knowledge into ritual action calibrated for vulnerability – illness, danger, movement, and the prospect of death.

What emerges, then, is not an alternative to theology, but a way of living it. This Segen does not seek to explain suffering or risk; it offers a means of addressing them through repeated, embodied practice. Anchored in the Mass yet usable beyond it, the prayer extends ecclesial protection into the rhythms of everyday life. For the Thalbach sisters, and for others who prayed in similar ways, safety was not a matter of abstract belief but of learned habit: something done, enacted, and carried forward through words and gestures that had already proven their worth. At Thalbach, such habits were cultivated collectively – through shared prayerbooks, repeated attendance at the parish Mass, and the parallel rhythms of memoria and devotion – so that protection was not merely personal, but explicitly embedded in the sisters’ communal practice.

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WORKS CITED

Cynthia Cyrus, "Praying Before the Image of Mary: Nuns’ Prayerbooks and the Mapping of Sacred Space" Religions 16, no. 10 (2025): 1277. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16101277, https://www.mdpi.com/3532324

Martin Leuenberger (ed.) Segen. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015.

See especially Ulrike Wagner-Rau and her discussion of everyday rituals, “Unverbrüchlich angesehen – Der Segen in praktisch-theologischer Perspektive,” 187-210, here p. 194.

In the same volume, Christopher Spehr addresses the diversity of blessings in late medieval practice, and their re-evaluation in the Reformation; “Sengespraxis und Segenstheologie in der Christentumsgeschickte,” 135-164.

Derek A. Rivard, Blessing the World: Ritual and Lay Piety in Medieval Religion (Washington DC: Catholic U of America Press, 2009)

Note: This post presents a working transcription, translation, and preliminary analysis in advance of a planned journal article.

A Sixteenth-Century Segen for the Mass, Pt 1

A “Segen” is a prayer genre that combines words, gestures, and formulas to bring about a positive end such as divine grace, desired happiness, or protection from harm. Commonly translated as “blessing,” it is more than just cheery words or good wishes. It exists as a multi-dimensional “act” that can create good. Each element – words said, gesture properly performed, and multiple iterations – contributes to its successful deployment. A Segen is effficacious through utterance when properly performed. I always think of them as “an active saying”: something that calls on a human agent to take on its power. It is a speech act with material consequences.

PRAYER TYPE

A Segen differs from a Collect, which belongs to the formal liturgy, and from prayers of petition (Gebet, Bitte), which structure ordinary devotional speech. It can be recognized by its formal stability – since the wording matters, variation is limited. It’s also inherently performative speech. It does something when spoken: it protects, heals, averts danger, prepares for death. If you’re traveling? There’s a Segen for that. Childbirth? Likewise. Is it time for a transition, say, to get out of bed, or go to sleep? There is a Segen that will suit your purpose. Danger, uncertainty, the evils of pestilence? The warding function of the Segen makes it a deployable ritual technology for navigating risk, transition, and moments of vulnerability. They fit into the rhythms of the everyday.

Because it is a prayer of “doing,” it is suitable for a variety of contexts, be they lay, domestic, or paraliturgical. Segen often occupy spaces later described as “folk,” since apotropaic functions and familiar protective formulas are common. Warding off evil and thereby doing good in the world: Segen were thought to do useful work. And, the prayer workers, importantly, did not need to be clerical. Lay folk could use them, and so could monastics. In memorial contexts, like the ones I’m working on, a Segen can function as a spoken intervention on behalf of souls, even when no mass is present.

One of the reasons I’m drawn to Segen as a category is that they have a devotional logic that prioritizes outcome over explanation. They show a world in which prayer is not only expressive but operative. In other words: a Segen is not just a blessing, but a technology of care and control, especially potent in contexts of illness, death, and remembrance.

THE SEGEN ITSELF

To take up a specific case, here is “A Protective Segen anchored in the Mass,” as its label tells us, this one a sixteenth century prayer from a Thalbach prayerbook, ÖNB Cod. 11750, fols. 20v-21r.

Line numbers are for ease of reference; bold is to highlight the formulaic elements of the prayer. This is the first half of a two-part prayer.

Ein schoner segenn bei der heilligen Mäß

1. HErr ich bevilch mich dir in alle die

2. heillige wortt die alle Priieſter ſprech

3. enn von dem da du in verwanndlet haſt vorrden

4. brott in fleiſch vnnd in blutt. Herr ich beuilch

5. mich heut vnd allweg in die heillige gottheitt

6. vnd in die heillige menſchhait vnnd in die heil

7. lige Drÿfalltigkeitt vnnd in dem heillige seel

8. deinem leib / Jn dein heillige gegenwertigkeit

9. in deinem heilligenn fronleichnam deinem

10. heilligen fleisch deinem heilligen blutt beuilch

11. ich mich mit flaiſch vnnd blut mit leib vnd ſeel

12. mit zeittlicher eher vnnd allen meinen gelider

13. in deinen heilligenn frid / dz du mich beſchur⸗

14. meſt vnd behuetest vor allem ybel vor waffen

15. vor gefenckhnüs vor gesigung [=Geißigung] vor werffenn

16. Schüessenn vor waſſer vor Zauberey ehren

17. abſchneidenn vor feur / vor allem dem dz du er⸗

18. inneſt in deiner weiſzheit dz mir ſchaden mag

19. an leibvnnd seel an allen zeittlichenn dingen

20. vnd ehren: Behuetest mich herr durch dein

21. grundlose barmhertzigkeit, durch dein manig

22. faltige erbernd Guettiger herr ich bürg mich

23. in die verborgne tugent, als sich die hoche gott,

24. heitt verbarg indte krancke menſchheut vnd

25. als du dich uerbirgeſt in des Pruësters hennd

26. indem ſchein des brotts warer gott vnnd mēſch

27. Herr ich bürg mich heüt vnnd Jmer in deine

28. heillige fünnff wunden / trennck mich mitt

29. deinem roſen farbenn blutt: dein heillige dri-

30. ualltigkeit ſei mir ein ſchüllt vnnd ſchürm,

31. vor allem meinenn feinden / deine heillige

32. hennd seÿenn heütt v̈ber mich/ deine heillige

33. füess seind heut vor mir dein heilliger mund

34. beſcharme mich heütt / fruſch vnnd geſünd

35. vnnd vor allem vnglückh. Amen.

This is a protective, performative Segen that anchors itself in the Mass in order to borrow its power. The Mass is the source of authority, but the Segen is the mechanism by which the devout sister will deploy it. Flesh, blood, body; body, blood, flesh: this is God made man to act as armor. He can protect her without being consumed.

A TRANSLATION

1 Lord I commend myself to you in all the 2 holy words that all priests speak 3 from that moment, when you transformed it, 4 the bread turned into flesh and blood. Lord, I commend 5 myself today and always in the holy Godhead 6 and in the holy humanity and in the holy 7 Trinity and in the holy soul 8 of your body / In your holy presence 9 in your holy body, your 10 holy flesh, your holy blood, I commend 11 myself with flesh and blood, with body and soul, 12 with temporal honor and all my limbs 13 in your holy peace, that you may protect 14 and guard me from all evil, from weapons, 15 from imprisonment, from defeat, from throwing [=missiles] 16 and shooting, from water, from sorcery, from 17 dishonor, from fire, from everything that you 18 know in your wisdom that may harm me 19 in body and soul, in all temporal things 20 and honors: Protect me, Lord, through your 21 boundless mercy, through the many and 22 manifold compassionate goodness, O gracious Lord, I entrust myself 23 to the hidden virtue, as the high God 24 hid himself in frail humanity and 25 as you hide yourself in the priest's hands 26 in the appearance of bread, true God and man. 27 Lord, I entrust myself today and forever to your 28 holy five wounds; refresh me with 29 your rose-colored blood: may your holy 30 Trinity be my shield and protection, 31 from all my enemies; may your holy 32 hands be over me today; may your holy 33 feet be before me today; may your holy mouth 34 protect me today, fresh and healthy, 35 and from all misfortune. Amen.

HOW THE SEGEN WORKS

The Thalbach speaker who reads this prayer starts here with an act of self-enclosure (ll. 1-13): as devotee, she uses the repeated formula “ich bevilch mich” (I commend myself) to place herself inside sacred realities. The words of consecration, the reality of Christ’s body and blood, the Trinity, the holy peace: these are the space of devout devotion that she is actively choosing to inhabit. Moreover, she treats the Eucharistic presence as protective substance, not through communion and consumption, but through observation and modeling. His embodiment (ll. 8-10) is a model for hers (ll. 11-13).

The Segen here has a broad apotropaic scope, from the abstract to the concrete (ll. 13-20). She is to be protected from evil, dishonor and defeat, and more tangibly from weapons, imprisonment, shooting. Water and fire, sorcery, and “everything that you know in your wisdom may harm me”: God’s protective shield is all-encompassing life protection: bodily, social, legal, and moral. A prayer that names Zauberey, magic, is almost never a neutral “Gebet”; it is operating in a world where spoken formulas are understood to counter spoken threats.

The Segen shifts from protection to hiddenness: the hidden virtue (die verborgne tugent), the hiddenness of Christ’s nature as frail human, and the hiding of the eucharistic wonder in the Priest’s hand. She entrusts herself to what is hidden; faith does not need to see to be lived. This is a sacramental theory of invisibility, and to my eye touches on what Maaike de Haardt terms the quotidian aspect of faith:

They [daily behaviors and spatial practices, aka the quotidian] reveal the how of belief, much more than the what of belief, the subject of the ministers of belief. Besides the ethical and political choice implicated in this approach, there is yet another important dimension, which I have called a sense of presence, or aesthetic presence, sacramental presence, or incarnational presence.

De Haardt describes the way in which sensorial abundance -- sensual knowledge of touching, tasting, smelling – become a way of being -- of inhabiting the everyday sacred. For the Thalbach sister, her presence in church, with incense and candles and ritual action observed intently, but not intimately, is sufficient to call to mind the divine.

The Segen ends by mapping Christ’s body to the speaker’s body. Hands above, feet before, mouth protecting, wounds enclosing. We have here somatic ritual geometry. The body is reoriented inside of Christ’s body, not so much improved as guarded. Through the Segen, she achieves safety.

SEGEN AS RITUAL OF PROTECTION

In articulating the segments of the prayer, the devotee generates her own ritual of protection from all ills, based on and parallel to that of the formal Mass on which it depends. By invoking the correct wording, by using the Segen in the correct ritual space (at Mass, in the presence of the host), and by invoking the correct theological anchors, she creates a sort of spiritual insurance policy that will protect her, body and soul. This shows that a Segen is not marginal or “folk-like” in opposition to theology. Rather, it is orthodox theology operationalized for protection and survival.

The first half of the Segen, then, carries the devotee on a multi-staged spiritual journey, where her act of commending herself results through transformation to her being mapped to Christ’s body, secure in the warded protection of Christ’s love:

Commend self >> Eucharist >> Protection >> Hiddenness >> Mapped to Christ’s body

As we will see in a future post, part 2 of this Segen provides a layered ritual deployment of these same themes -- protection, enclosure, and authorization remain central, but in part 2, the physicality of the prayer is reinforced through keyed moments of signing the cross.

WORK CITED:

Maaike de Haardt, “Incarnational presence: Sacramentality of everyday life and the body or: unsystematic skeptical musings on the use of a central metaphor,” in Envisioning the Cosmic Body of Christ, edited by Aurica Jax and Saskia Wendel (Routledge, 2019): 114-125.

Note: This post presents a working transcription, translation, and preliminary analysis in advance of a planned journal article.

Happy January from the Teutsch Römisch Breuier (1535): Of Calendars, Convent Books, and the Lives They Touched

It is the first day of the second quarter of the 21st Century, and thus a time for a fresh new start. I’ll begin here with a bit of material from a sixteenth century print – an interesting one for my current chapter-segment. This is the top of the January entry from its calendar:

Top of January Calendar entry with poem & images (pouring from pitcher, taking medicine [?]; roasting on a spit on the hearth)

Multimedia, sixteenth-century style, right? Pictures and poetry, and calendar instructions, and the start of the daily list of feasts and saints. So many things to look at! 

Take the short ditty that starts our page-reading:

Im Jenner man nit lassen soll. Warin feucht speyss die thut dir wol. Auff warm bad magstu haben acht. Meyd artzney ob du magst

In January, one shouldn't let things run unchecked. Warm food will do you good. Be careful with hot baths. Take medicine if you like.

Warm food, don’t take a chill, take two tablets and call me if that hangover doesn’t get better: it’s like your mom is welcoming you into the new year. Well, greetings to us all from this new century-quartile; I’m sure we all have wishes for how it will turn out. May the good ones come true!

The Teutsch Römisch Breuier of 1535

And now a bit about the book itself:

I found myself down an interesting rabbit hole as I was expanding a discussion in my current chapter. As it happens, I was curious about the circulation of memorial prayers (well, the chapter does need finishing), which took me on a brief excursus to the realm of early print. For vernacular-centric tertiary sisters of the period, there are an awful lot of liturgy-adjacent books to choose from.

This particular book interested me because the Teutsch Römisch Breuier is the first translation of the Roman Rite to circulate in regions central to my work. It is also, delightfully, a nuntastic find: the title makes explicit that it is aimed at monastic women (Klosterfrawen). Also, as the title promises, it provides a gute verteütschung, a good German translation—not only of the liturgical texts themselves, but also of the rubrics that govern their use. 

In other words, it is a practical book for navigating liturgical life in the generation immediately before the edicts of the Council of Trent, when many convents were compelled to return to exclusive use of the Latin rite.

Title page of Teutsch Römisch Breuier in red and black

It's a lovely and quite informative long-format title:

Teutsch Römisch Breuier vast nutzlich vnd trostlich: Nämlich den klosterfrawen, die nach dem lateinischen Römischen breuier, als die clarisserin vn[d] ander, jre tagzeit bezalen: Auch der priesterschafft weltlich vnd ordenßleüt, die Römisch breuier brauchen, so yetlicher ding der Collecte[n], Capitel, Responsen, Antiphen, vn[d] der gleich, gute verteütschung auch zu[m] gotswort dienstlich, begerte[n] … Augsburg: Alexander Weyssenhorn [=Weissenhorn], 1535. VD16 B 8092.

German Roman Breviary, very useful and comforting: Namely for the monastic women who recite their daily prayers according to the Latin Roman Breviary, such as the Poor Clares and others; also for the secular and regular clergy who use the Roman Breviary, as it contains good German translations of all matters relating to the collect, chapters, responses, antiphons, and the like, which is also useful for the service of God's word

Not only is the content of interest, so are the copies themselves. You see, both surviving copies reflect the target audience: monastic sisters! First, a bibliographic orientation:

BRIEF BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR THE TEUTSCH RÖMISCH BREUIER (1535): Here is the VD16 entry. (VD16 is the standardized census of all known sixteenth-century printed works produced in the German-speaking lands. VERY handy when you life at the edge of the early printing world). And the two surviving exemplars are München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek -- 4 Liturg. 123 d (Munich exemplar) Regensburg, Staatliche Bibliothek -- 999 IE/4Liturg.18 (Regensburg exemplar)

The Munich exemplar comes from a sister of the Pütrichhaus, Susanna Gartnerin, as she says on the flyleaf:

Das pryfier [= brevier] Jst gewessen S susa / anna gartnerin jn der pitterich / reyehaus got der almachtig / pegnadt Jr hie vnd thort / ewigklich amen

This breviery belonged to Susanna Gärtner in Pitterich Regelhaus, may God Almighty bless her here and there forever, amen.

Susanna Gartnerin is an interesting case; she was a scribe and book owner (Kramer Scriptores), served the convent as librarian, and eventually became “Oberin” of the tertiary house. So she was both book- owning and book-loving, and hereby provisioned with a vernacular breviary that she could use and follow. Not a bad model for our happiest of New Years!

The Regensburg copy also was passed from sister to “mit sch[wester]” – I only wish I knew of which convent! A chain of ownership unfolds in the flyleaf area:

We actually have two different inscriptions here. The first: 

Anno 1538 an sant Mathias tag hat mir mein / lieber brueder Hanns Langawi disen brevier geschickt

In the year 1538, on St. Matthias's Day, my / dear brother Hanns Langawi sent me this breviary.

And then, with a change of ink:

Jryet [=Ihr gehört?] der Barbara Sedlmaierin hatt / mirs mein liebe mit sch Richila ^obsinerin^ im Jar / 1590 den 7 Junius geschencken gott / geb mir vnd alle den Jenigen ge / nadt die es Brauche vnd eines des / ander vmb gottes wile darbey ge / denokhe mit ainen pn nr / und Ave

It belongs to Barbara Sedlmaier, and was given to me by my beloved co-sister [mitschwester] Richila Obsinerin in the year 1590 on June 7th. May God grant grace to me and to all those who use it, and may we remember one another for God’s sake with a Pater Noster and an Ave [Maria].

What we’re getting here is a chain of ownership, common to convent books. The brother of one of the sisters sent this book when it was just three years old in 1538 – practically new! -- and it passed first to Richila, and then to Barbara by 1590.

Hanns Langawi > Sister X > Richila [Richildis] Obsinerin > Barbara Sedlmaier

And along the way, how many prayers were offered, and how many different Januaries did those convent women look at the January calendar and think about the meat roasting on a spit by the fire?

Happy New Year!

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RESOURCES

• Sigrid Krämer, Scriptores possessoresque codicum medii aevi (database, Augsburg: ERV, 2003–2025).
• VD16 entry: https://gateway-bayern.de/VD16+B+8092

Looking Back: Favorite Blog Posts of 2025

I have committed enough prose here this year that the process of looking back was actually helpful for me – and I hope it surfaces some things that you might find of interest. As a matter of practice, I throw some things up on the blog so I’m reminded of them later – a kind of outsourcing of the brain. There’s this, for instance:

Age and the Monastic Life at Thalbach in Bregenz

Looking at age in convents is an interesting bit of demographic thinking that must have impacted the lived experiences of the sisters, even in an unenclosed convent like Thalbach. (Talbach? Thalbach? I’ve spent so much times in the documents that I forget how I came to decide which spelling to prefer! Yikes!) Anyway, if you’re curious about monastic experience, you can look at the data; if you’re more of a newbie to understanding the monastic life, this post on Initiation into Monastic Life gives some orientation to the topic.

Another thing that was fun this year was thinking about inner voices and outer voices; Margery Kempe is a good example of that:

Margery Kempe Listens

This is a topic that still calls to my heart, especially since it’s the “bright shiny distraction” from the writing I’m doing in the moment, which is very much in the trenches shoveling of small details of practice based on nuances of text in the world of commemorations. But I digress.

The single most popular thing I wrote was another one of those exploratory pieces, thinking about archaeology of Chaco Canyon alongside the topography of Vorarlberg churches. It asks what it means to build for the ear, and not just the eye:

Building for the Ear from Chaco Canyon to Medieval Vorarlberg

I’m glad this post “resonated.” (I’ll see myself out…) Seriously, though, that question of how sound moves through space is really interesting, and if it doesn’t wind up fitting the book outline, it probably needs to move into article form. AFTER the book, self, AFTER the book.

Then there’s the question of writing process. I’ve written several posts about writing this year, a kind of meta-reflection on one way to get it done. I don’t believe in the One True Path to productivity – you do you – but I do believe we’re all a bit better off if we share our tricks for how to make that writing, and particularly scholarly writing, work. For example, how do you let things go and get to your primary focus? Enter, stage left, the research question:

Using Research Questions to Defeat Data Hoarding

This tool is helpful; it provides focus and helps winnow down to the core of an argument, particularly if your “just one more” meter is set as high as mine.

Then there are the practical details. This list of links is one I’ve pinned, for obvious reasons, so if you’re needing a quick where-to-go in the manuscript and incunable space, this is my first attempt to get things out of my overburdened bookmarks folder and up into navigable space. Kinda like the old web. Nostalgia as tool?

Manuscript and Incunable Research Links

Sometimes you post when your passions take you away. “In Praise of Janky Translations” is both about what I think important in a push-back against perfection, and about how translation and text prediction occupy very different spaces. It captures my voice pretty darned well, I think, and captures a moment of tech outrage that is my contribution to the “STOP PUTTING AI IN EVERYTHING” conversation.

In Praise of Janky Translations

I’m not anti-AI in the big picture, but it clearly, CLEARLY, does not belong in the translation tool in the form it took here. No, no, no. Just don’t.

And last, but not least, I’ll end with a post that reflects a practical exercise, one that still sits in my heart as one of the better things I’ve invented this year. I decided to make a gratitude list, with as many items as I am years old. It was a good exercise, and one I recommend to you as we close out the year that was.

Gratitudes

Happy New Year, everyone! May the words come...

What I’m reading in non-fiction… 2025

Not everything I read this year was about invented worlds. A significant portion of my reading life was spent with books that insist on the realness of reality: bodies, illnesses, narratives, institutions, uncertainties. These are not books I raced through, and to be honest a lot of them were article-adjacent. Still, these are the books that asked me for attention in some way, and each of them repaid my time spent. (Note: this is not my monastic reading list, which I keep separately. That reading was also rich and rewarding, but felt a bit too niche even for a cheerfully quirky blog. This is my curated should-appeal-to-all list. Message me if you want the professional version.)

John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis

This is a book about tuberculosis, but it is also a book about inequality, attention, and the moral frameworks we use to decide what kinds of suffering matter. Green is very clear about his own positionality, and I especially like that he never pretends to be neutral. What makes the book effective is precisely that combination: careful research paired with an insistence that facts alone are not enough. I came away thinking less about TB as a disease of the past and more about how we decide which diseases – and sufferers thereof – we choose to discuss, and which we don’t.

Arthur Frank, Letting Stories Breathe and The Wounded Storyteller

Arthur Frank has long been central to thinking about illness narratives, and returning to these books (even if under deadline!) felt to me a bit like revisiting a conversation rather than encountering something new. The Wounded Storyteller, grounded in Frank’s own experiences of heart attack and cancer, remains a careful meditation on what it means to tell stories from illness rather than about it. Letting Stories Breathe extends his work, asking what ethical obligations listeners, scholars, and institutions have toward stories once they are told. I found myself dwelling when I needed to be skimming; his books are so engaging and thoughtful that they resist instrumental reading.

Herman Roodenburg, The Eloquence of the Body

Roodenburg’s study of gesture, particularly through figures such as Constantijn Huygens, treats bodily expression not as spontaneous overflow but as a learned and practiced habit. Roodenburg’s insight is that gesture is cultural knowledge and cultural capital: acquired, refined, and socially legible. I found this book especially useful as a reminder that bodies do not merely express meaning; they are trained to produce it. Also, this book quietly reshapes how one watches people speak. I was naughty and read chapters that weren’t directly applicable to the work I was doing. Shhhh, don’t tell my family.

Rumer Godden, In This House of Brede

This is a cheat, since it’s fiction, but I chose it here deliberately. To me, Godden’s novel about Dominican nuns captures the texture of monastic life in ways that most non-fiction accounts struggle to do. She brings to life the rhythms of prayer, frictions of communal living, and the mix of discipline and intimacy. All are rendered with an attentiveness that feels ethnographic, even though it remains clearly imagined. Sometimes fiction is simply better at conveying lived experience than analysis can be. And yes, I’ve blogged about it before: https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2025/04/postulant-novice-professed-initiation.html

Hayley Campbell, All the Living and the Dead

Campbell writes about people whose work is death-adjacent: gravediggers, embalmers, executioners, forensic specialists. The book is notable for its restraint. Rather than sensationalizing these professions, she speaks to their ordinariness. It’s a job, even if it’s a job with a body involved. What emerges is not a meditation on death itself so much as on how societies distribute the labor of dealing with it, and how those who do that labor understand their roles.

Jamie Holmes, Nonsense

Holmes explores ambiguity and uncertainty, not as problems to be solved but as conditions that shape perception, decision-making, and belief. The book ranges from psychology to politics to everyday cognition but remains grounded in the idea that humans are deeply uncomfortable with not knowing, often to our detriment. I found it useful less for its individual examples than for the framework it offers: ambiguity doesn’t just confuse us, it actively changes how we see.

So pause, he argues, and look again. Holmes’s central recommendation is not the cultivation of better answers, but, importantly, of building better tolerances: for ambiguity, for incomplete information, for meanings that do not resolve on first encounter. Wherever uncertainty makes us anxious, he tells us, we tend to rush toward coherence – any coherence. We grasp at patterns, explanations, or stories that soothe us rather than clarify what we’re looking at. Holmes urges us to deliberately slow down that meaning-making reflex. Sit with the discomfort long enough to notice what your mind is doing. What shortcuts does your mind take? What assumptions does it accept? What narratives do we prefer for their stability rather than their coherence? As we pause, alternative interpretations have room to surface. What initially looked like nonsense may reveal itself as complexity, or at least as a problem improperly framed.

For Holmes, this is not a call to relativism or indecision, but to intellectual humility. He wants us to be willing to revise, to hold competing possibilities in mind, and to recognize that understanding often emerges not from closing down ambiguity, but from staying with it a little longer than feels comfortable.

Not a bad set of action items as we head into a New Year...

What I’m reading… 2025

I had an incredible year in booklandia, reading nearly 200 books. Of course, 60 of those were read during my Asian sojourn, and many of those were of the “lighter reading” variety. I happily binged my way through several of the Horatio Alger series, for instance – 19^th century views of American life that are unapologetically popcorn reading. If you’re curious, they’re freely available on Project Gutenberg (which is available to you even if you happen to be in China, by the way!): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/168

But alongside the binges were books that built world, wonderful worlds. These books have stayed with me as rooms in my mental house. Even thinking back on them now floods me with bits and pieces of their stories and revitalizes the characters that inhabit them.

Hao Jingfang, Vagabonds

A group of young people had been sent from Mars to Earth as a special delegation. Can you ever come home from a strange place again? I picked up this novel partly because I was heading to China, and partly because the idea of being an outsider in one’s “own” place feels profoundly 21^st-century. This book spoke to me, and I lingered over its intricate story.

Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (and the rest of the Wayfarers series)

It’s hard for me to articulate just how much fun this series is. Multi-species crew on a tunnel ship with an AI character – no, not that kind of AI, think sort of “Ship’s Doctor” from Star Trek, or perhaps even Data – legitimately a character. Each character is flawed; each is trying; each wants to connect. And really, isn’t that what it means to live fully? Go ahead, buy the whole series. It’s joyful, generous, and deeply humane science fiction. Much fun!

1. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
2. A Closed and Common Orbit
3. Record of a Spaceborn Few
4. The Galaxy, and the Ground Within

KJ Parker, Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City

Okay, I’m a sucker for the historically quasi-plausible and quasi-invented riproaringly good tale. Tom Holt’s Who’s Afraid of Beowulf was worth the re-read, as were the first 9 of the Lindsey Davis Roman mysteries with Flavia Albia (which were a significant part of my China reading), and the eight short novellas by Alex Zudor in his Agent Strabo mystery series.*

But for witty sarcasm and an engaging glimpse into Roman engineering, Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City was a gobble-me-up. (KJ Parker is actually a Tom Holt pseudonym; I’m not sure why he needed one, but, well, marketing is a mystery, eh?). In this tale of city siege, I loved not loving the main character! Orhan is grumpy, opinionated, loud-mouthed, rebellious, creative, crafty, and someone I wouldn’t want to *be* but I’d certainly like to *know.* We get the story from his perspective, snark and all. It’s fast-moving, and yet also full of very human moments. Read it!

Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Before the Coffee Gets Cold

I fell for these books thanks to my library app. Yes, and again yes. I read them in publication order but it doesn’t really matter. The premise remains the same: What if you could go back in time? But there are rules. Nothing you can do in the past will change the present. You can’t move from your seat. You can only visit people who have been to the cafe. And you must return before the coffee gets cold.

These lyrical invocations of human connections and missed connections revisited are heart-wrenching mini-worlds, each chapter a glimpse into a relationship that comes to life for the reader. It’s not that you won’t tear up; it’s that the tears have a purpose.

1. Before the Coffee Gets Cold
2. Tales From the Cafe
3. Before Your Memory Fades
4. Before We Forget Kindness
5. Before We Say Goodbye

Of course, there were work books and drive-to-work books and read-on-the-train books and too-tired-for-TV books. And so, so many were amazing reads. But in terms of world that are now part of my world, these four stand apart.

Happy reading to you all!

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*The Zudor collection

Special bonus, since they aren’t widely known: Alex A. Zudor, Vox Populi: An Agent Strabo Mystery Novella

These fit the theme of the unrepentant and unredeemable character, as we first meet Agent Strabo at a personal low: cashiered out of the Roman Army, and deciding if there’s any remaining reason to live. He gets hooked into an investigation, and the story takes off. These are great airplane reading – I read two on my flight to Nepal. They are short and have relatively simple plotlines, which is part of their appeal. They aren’t world-building in the way the other series are, but they are a yummy distraction, well-suited for the time waiting for the food cart to roll down the aisle.

1. Vox Populi: An Agent Strabo Mystery Novella
2. Si Tacuisses: An Agent Strabo Mystery Novella
3. Mala Parta: An Agent Strabo Mystery Novella
4. Quis Custodiet: An Agent Strabo Mystery Novella
5. Non Omnia: An Agent Strabo Mystery Novella
6. In Vino Veritas: An Agent Strabo Mystery Novella
7. Acta Est Fabula: An Agent Strabo Mystery Novella
8. Et Tu, Bruta?: An Agent Strabo Mystery Novella

...so many good books, so little time!...

In praise of janky translations: an anti-google diatribe

Once upon a time as recently as yesterday, I lived in a world in which Google Translate was an imperfect but useful tool. I could ask it my best guess of what someone had said to me, and it would spit out a decent explantion of what we were talking about. I could point my phone camera at a wall-label in a museum, and out would come the information I was reading about in a language I can speak. This all was incredibly useful, particularly on my Asian trip last summer.

Another thing I happened to use Google Translate for was as a short-cut in my research. Now, I’ve been trained up with the best of them. I know that looking at the original language of, say, a medieval charter is the best and most accurate way to understand that document’s meaning. Nevertheless, when working at volume, it can be handy to skim, and while I can get in the groove with modern German, my medieval Alemannic dialect reading is slower-paced. If I want a really fast assessment of something, there’s nothing like my native tongue, which is English, as you’ve probably guessed by now.

So, when looking over the roughly 200 charters relevant to the current chapter, I’ve been going through them quickly via google translate to see if there’s utility in doing the close-up work of line-by-line and word-by-word reading. About one out of every 5 will have a topic of particular interest. I can skim a 69-line whole-side-of-a-cow sized parchment charter in its janky English translation in about 10 minutes. I can read said document directly in something more like 45 minutes.

Let’s think about the math:

• To skim English: 10x200 = 2,000 minutes, or roughly 30 hours of reading.
• To read medieval Alemannic: 45x200=9,000, or roughly 150 hours of reading

Okay, I’ll even be fair; add back another 20 hours for going through the targeted documents in detail and I’m still looking at the difference between 50 hours of work and 150 hours of work.

Why am I heated up about this topic? Well, they broke google translate last night.

Let me say that again, with all the feels:

THEY BROKE GOOGLE TRANSLATE LAST NIGHT.

I have receipts, of course. I’m going to share just one, because it’s been a long and stressful day this morning (bwahaha).

Here’s a clause out of one of my documents:

3. brieff Alsz dann der vorgemelt keb hailig Santgall unnser hußsatter Jarlichen ain Suma gebt Im den vigrechten der gestifften Jorlichen Jarzeten

Here’s its translation, as of yesterday:

3. Furthermore, the aforementioned abbey of Saint Gall, our patron, shall pay annually a sum to the vicar for the proper observance of the established annual memorial services.

Usable, right? Tells me the basics of what’s going on. Is it elegant? No. Is it fully accurate? Also no. It is, I think we’d all agree, a janky translation. (Oxford definition of janky: “of extremely poor or unreliable quality.”).

But here’s the thing: this janky translation is USABLE. It tells me whether or not this is a place I want to spend some of my precious minutes. I mean, I like down time just like everyone else; these translations are a shortcut!

But no, it wasn’t getting enough time-on-the-page, I guess, so Google “improved” (and I use that word with scare quotes for a reason, so be scared, be very very scared) its translation tool. Let’s look at the result, shall we?

3. When the aforementioned [name omitted], the [name omitted], gives our [name omitted] an annual sum in accordance with the established annual [terms omitted].

This is predictive technology gone bad. The AI underpinning here is obvious. The “improved” tool is happy to predict anything that’s sort of standard in a regular document of this type. But all, all, ALL of the interesting details are now redacted. Because names, and places, and specific amounts of money are NOT predictable. So I guess we shouldn’t need to see them, eh? Because everything useful in life is predictable. (Mad, me mad? Whatever do you mean???)

And this, this is what they’re calling the “classic” version of the tool. Not that it bears any resemblance to what the tool was doing yesterday, of course. But it’s a handy marketing ploy for a company that clearly Does Not Give A Shit about the user experience. The advanced version, well, it simply redacted lines 6 to 9 of my document altogether since those are just like line 5, a list of payments to particular chaplains.

But MY study is looking (in part) at exactly that. I need to know how much more the parish priest gets than the altarist at the St Mang altar. It’s part of my evidence. And it changes over time. Oh, which makes it unpredictable.

So when we premise translations on what words mean, we get one kind of information. Yesterday, I might argue with whether the “Mesner” was better translated as a “sacristan” or a “sexton.”

In the land of predictive AI, however, we premise translations on what other texts think might come next, and that means skipping the “minutiae.” The result? I can no longer tell from the translation that the Mesner, whatever his role might be, was even present in the document. A bad translation is something I can argue with; a predictive omission is something I can’t even see.

This is arguably great if you’re translating prose. It’s an absolute disaster if you’re looking at legal records and payments and guidelines for the foundations. Those kinds of documents are actually designed to deliver the very small, unpredictable details that AI wants to suppress. They are accounting devices, legal instruments, and memory machines. It’s like AI trying to tell you what flavor of icecream is your favorite based on other people’s orders. It has absolutely, positively no idea of what *you* might want, but that won’t stop it trying, using that oh-so-confident voice, though.

Janky, bad translations, in other words, are part of my world of work. They have a use. They may be inelegant, but their very bumps and hiccups are pointers to the curious oddity. They keep the text visible as a text. As a user, I still see names, sums, offices, altars, weird textual repetitions – the very things that are likely innovations in this particular textual example. Predictive smoothing, by contrast, is a lie of fluency. It gives you the shape of a charter without its substance. To put it another way, jankiness is epistemologically honest. It doesn’t pretend to understand more than it does.

Cory Doctorow has brought us the concept of “enshittification,” the reality that a captured audience is merely monetary potential to the big firms that think they own our data. And yes, this update is truly, truly, truly the enshittified version of what a translator is supposed to do. In fact, from where I’m sitting, this is not even translation anymore. It’s instead content abstraction masquerading as translation. A translator is accountable to the source text; a predictive model is accountable to statistical plausibility. In fact, I have trouble communicating just how BAD it is at the job it was perfectly adquate at yesterday, but you get the general gist.

And the reality is that an enshittified product is pretty much what you’re stuck with from here on out, unless Google changes its mind, and rolls back to yesterday’s model.

Happily for me, I can, in fact, read my texts. I have access to good dictionaries, and I do subscribe to DeepL for toggling languages with modern German. (DeepL struggles *hard* with Alemannic, but then, don’t we all?). And in a pinch, ChatGPT actuall does a decent job with the odd sentence or two.

But the fact that yesterday was easy, and today my tool is broken? This is the way of this tech-heavy world of ours. Because yesterday’s Google Translate assumed that you were the expert deciding what mattered. Today’s assumes the model knows better. That’s not just frustrating; it’s a quiet and very, very creepy reordering of authority in knowledge production. Scholars of thin archives (like the ones I work on in Bregenz, Austria and in Bischofszell, Switzerland) are exactly the ones who lose when the world (or the tech-companies) decides that unpredictability is noise. Because the unpredictable is often where the truth lies.