The Vorarlberg Chapel I Wasn’t Looking For

I was in Vorarlberg, Austria (on the Bodensee) for research as part of a large summer archival trip – thanks to the Fyfe Faculty Excellence fund. Mostly, that was museum, or library, or archive, or street-front, or church, or chapel, or waystation.

And then there was the day I set off to see if I could hike to the Hirschberg.

This wasn’t a random destination, though it was definitely research-adjacent. You see, once upon a time the Franciscans (MY Franciscans if you’ll permit me an ownership-by-affection) were gathered up at the convent of Thalbach in Bregenz. That initial foundation happened in the 14^th century (if you believe the Sisters’ Chronicle) or 15^th century (if you tie yourself to actual documents like a true historian, sigh).

And they lived at Thalbach for centuries. And they became Franciscan-affiliated formally in the period after the Council of Trent, living as Tertiaries.

And time went on.

And then, AND THEN, closure happened. During the Aufhebung, when Emperor Joseph decided that contemplative work was at odds with state productivity needs, the convents of Thalbach and of St Anne’s in Bregenz were both closed (in 1782), the sisters dispersed, and the innards were sold or burned as useless.

So the building sat empty.

And sat empty some more.

But, BUT. One of the nearby surviving sisterhoods – a Dominican group – had, once upon a time, been living in community on the Hirschberg near Bregenz. And then the storms came through. Bad storms. Zapzapzap of lightning. Poof, their convent went up in flames. 1462 was a bad year. And you know what? So was 1463, when lightning struck again. Yikes!

So the sisters moved to Hirschthal bei Kennelbach. Yay, happy endings! For a while, that is. But the Kennelbach convent was vulnerable, too, and in 1796, their not-on-a-hillside convent was destroyed in yet another fire on the night of January 1–2, 1796. In the middle of winter. The fear was fierce. Could they survive?

The answer lay in an empty building. One even commissioned and, in part, built by nuns through the labor of their own hands, as it happens. Thalbach had been sitting around, just aging (as buildings do) for sixteen years. One of the Hirschberg (aka Kennelbach aka Hirschtal) sisters had a great idea: ask the city council for some building-based charity. And it worked! They were able to move in! And within six months, on 22 April 1979, they bought the “verwiaste Kloster Thalbach” from the city outright – for 4700 gulden, on the condition that they provide free schooling for girls in Bregenz.

And now Thalbach, which had been built for Franciscan Tertiaries, became, after that chronological gap, a home to Dominican sisters. And thus it stayed until 1983, when declining vocations and an economically disadvantageous environment meant another closure. This time, the building went to another Catholic spiritual group, Das Werk, and they still inhabit the convent now.

My chosen task on a Sunday, then, was to wander my way up to the Hirschberg. Because I can. Because it’s there. Because it’s easier to hike somewhere than just to hike when you want to plan your day.

It’s a longish hike from Bregenz, and I knew enough of my own capacities to plan for the bus-ride back in advance of my adventure. So I set off as one does, with water-bottle and snacks and hiking kit and phone charger, and went exploring uphill in the mountains.

It was splendid.

Hiking in Vorarlberg is easy (well, except for the hiking part). I use a combination of Waldfinder (the Vorarlberg hiking app) and AllTrails (which gives decent trail-dotted lines) and Google maps (which gives names, yay), and just zig and zag on the dotted trail indicators as mood takes me (and as the various trail signs indicate). I started by hiking up the Gebhardsberg to the former site of a Bregenz chaplaincy in the mountains, though the buildings there reflect the impact of the Swedish invasion – rebuilding in sacred spaces is certainly a “thing.”

GEBHARDSBERG

Uphill, yup: hiking up to the Gebhardsberg

Classic ruins

Inside the reconstituted chapel, set for someone's wedding

And then up and over hillsides, past lovely streams, in and out of shade, through various towns (Langen bei Bregenz being the most notable), and up and across 

VORARLBERG COUNTRYSIDE 

Shrub and hill-view

St. Wendelin at Fluh; founded in 1666, and rebuilt 1846–47; served as pilgrimage chapel and then in 1872 as Parish church; St Wendelin of Trier is patron of country folk and herdsmen.

Glorious roads and paths...

And stunning hillside views

A small waterfall

A parade of old cars

Lovely plantings -- the yellow blossoms were full of bees!

Yes, I was having a good time. Meadow and trees and a bit too much sun!

until I got up to the trail on up ….

The chapel of Maria Heimsuchung -- the Visitation -- at Hirschbergsau: a cute rural chapel dating from 1893, built over the grounds of a previous chapel. Contains a bell dated 1619, cast by Johann Baptist Ernst.

Another view of the Hirschbergsau chapel

...to the wrong Marian chapel. Yes, It seems that I went to the Maria Heimsuchung Kapelle (The Visitation chapel) in the Hirschbergsau -- the meadow part -- instead of the Marienkapelle (The Marian Chapel) at the mountain peak on the other side of the mountain. In other words, coming up from Langen, I chose the wrong fork in the trail, and went about 90 minutes out of my way. Whoopsies!

YELLOW GOAL / RED DESTINATION

Two Marian chapels, both in the mountains above Langen...

The day already being a long one, however, I took it as a signal that hiking is about the journey, not the destination, and instead of adding another two hours to my weary legs, I took my photos of the chapel that greeted me at MY destination, and put “hike to the Hirschberg Marienkapelle” onto my list for some future adventure.

And then I hiked back down and caught my bus back, and had a lovely beer and a quiet evening, and got ready for a scholarly week by list-making (as one does).

About all of this I have several reflections:

1) Wherever you are, that’s the adventure you’re having.
2) Hiking in Vorarlberg is among the most lovely things one can do in all of this wide world.
3) A sunny day of hiking is NEVER a mistake.
4) Always double-check your destination. If you care. Do you really care?
5) History gives us connections, but the hand-off isn’t always smooth.
6) Be interested in what’s around you; that can be as joyous as the thing you think you’re working on.
7) When in doubt, your next destination is probably uphill. Be ready for that.
8) Wrong turns still take us places. Sometimes they even have chapels.
9) Maps are excellent tools. Users can be excellent fools. You have permission to enjoy that gap!
10) Go for it. Take water, a sun hat and bus fare (or a bus app), but go for it.

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Resources

• Go here, not there: My goal was actually supposed to be THIS Marian chapel. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marienkapelle_(Langen_bei_Bregenz)

• Vorarlberg app for hiking: https://waldfinder.at/

• Vorarlberg app for managing bus / train routes: The Verkehrsverbund Vorarlberg route planner is available as the app “cleVVVer Mobil” for Android and for iPhone.

  • https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.hafas.android.vvv&hl=de_AT

  • https://apps.apple.com/at/app/clevvver-mobil/id533107345

• Pay for your bus with ease using the Fairtiq app, which calculates your fare based on check-in (when you get on the bus) and check-out (when you step off), and will calculate your day’s maximum fare for you without having to think about it. Easy peasy!

You might also be interested in…

• The Thalbach building campaign: Long before Hirschthal’s Dominicans moved into Thalbach, their prioress had helped support its building. This post gives a glimpse of the regional networks linking women’s religious houses.

• How Thalbach remembered its own beginnings: How old was Thalbach, really? The convent Chronicle had answers—and wanted you to know that they drew on documents!

• Why everything church-like seems to be uphill in Vorarlberg: Why are Vorarlberg’s sacred places so often uphill? Elevation could be inconvenient for walkers precisely because it was useful for bells.

Why Does a Bad King Get a Good Death? Imagining the Death of King Bolesław II

Once upon a time, a King murdered a Bishop. Trust me, there’s a political backstory, but at the end of the day, king-and-murderer Bolesław the Bold was deposed and banished from the country. He took refuge with King Ladislaus I of Hungary, but accounts claim that Bolesław continued to be a nasty piece of work in Hungary as well, ticked people off, and was poisoned. Or maybe he was sent on pilgrimage and died repentant in a monastery?

Or perhaps he was reconciled and given a good clean death surrounded by companions befitting his station?

Early on, he was known as Bolesław “the Generous,” and later Bolesław the Bold. To us, he might be Bolesław the Ambiguous, though, because the line between legend and fact is hard to determine in his case. The historical story and legend intertwine in the literature, and yes, Wikipedia here is one of the best capsule summaries I’ve found. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boles%C5%82aw_II_the_Bold). This is definitely foreign territory for me.

But, I went down this gripping story of betrayal and posthumous reputation because of a pictorial representation of his death. The focus of the whole set of panels is actually on St Stanislaus, the martyred saint whose death he caused, but the scene of Bolesław’s own death is a bit of a puzzle and worth spending time on. In a cycle devoted to his victim, why doesn’t the king get his comeuppance at the end?

IMAGE: The Death of King Bolesław II (grouped with the Death of St Stanislaus, and the Miracle at St St Stanislaus’s Relic), Anonymous, 1490 – Budapest, Magyar Nemzeti Galeria, photographs by Cynthia Cyrus, CC-BY 4.0

We have a whole series of interlocking groupings, shaped by environment and identity, and these are the pieces of which our puzzle is made. Moving across the image in columns, we have three large areas.

Consider the various levels on the left side of the image.

We have a Virgin and Child, her mantle in white and draped on the ground, her head pointing to 10-o’clock instead of noon / midnight; she's floating on a gold background, her halo and the infant’s inscribed in the gold as outlines, her high forehead visible. The rest of the sky is remarkably abstract, with gold droplets or blobs on the largely wooden backdrop.

A town on the water – the hillside across the way providing a suggestion of an oversized skull. (And as is the way of such things, once I saw a skull there, I couldn’t unsee it. If rocks and boulders can be grouped to remind us of death, the landscape contributes to our sense of earthly closure).

The town itself provided with shade and white highlighting that serves to emphasize roof-lines and the possibly octagonal (or decagonal) tower as well as the varied window shapes with arches and rectangles enlivening the building fronts. Trees and a shed appear in the nearer ground, and an out-of-proportion dog with bone, showing us his nearness in perspective. Loyalty, fidelity: the dog teaches us the ultimate morality of the people he joins.

Screens and/or doors as backdrop to the huddle of figures, eight on the back side of the bed accompanying the bearded Bolesław, propped up and gesturing with what might be last words. The crowd has three figures with bishop’s mitres and not-scallops – jewels with ornate settings pinned to the hats on either side of a center band. Two others have gray cloth wrappings for headdress, one looking down and wearing a plain black outfit, the other standing at the very back and glancing directly at the viewer. The remaining three appear to be more secular in nature. A young person with abundant curly hair and a cap wears armor and knee-length green cloak but sports curled-at-the-toes shoes in red; another bearded figure with shaggy light brown hear has a two-toned black and yellow hat and the same yellow lines the hood of his buttoned red cloak. The final middle figure is half-a-row back, and wears a black cap that covers hair and most of his ears; he has a black-on-black robe.

In front, on the “viewer” side of the bed, stands another figure, wearing red with slashed sleeves showing a lighter undergarment; this figure has a mustache and a pleated cap; a chain or a rib of embroidered cloth appears at the nape of his neck.

The man in bed is elderly; note the gray and white hair, the wrinkled skin of the elbow, the slightly flabby arm muscles. The coronet with open foliate ornament, its point terminating in trefoil and fleur-de-lis forms – with cross atop – is backed by fabric or cloth, so functions as cap as well as crown. His body is in stasis, tucked into bed, with only his head, torso, and arms showing.

But, Bolesław’s hands are busy: he gestures with pointer finger, and the other hand seems to be scooping the air. This draws our attention to the other figures’ hands as well – the black-dressed man holds his hand in a similar scooping gesture; one of the bishops is counting with the right pointer aimed at left thumb on closed fist; and curly-locks too uses the scooping gesture in his right hand, while his left leans on the edge of the bed, fingertips touching the presumably brocade cloth. The bedcloth, however, is protected by a folded-down sheet; the bed has been made just as my mother taught me, with the blanket not touched by the hands of the one in the bed, only the sheet.

And then there’s that figure on “our” side of the bed. The left hand is lifting something – a bottle lid? A folded paper cone? And the right hand is engaged (again with cupping gesture) in holding up a beaker. On the table are a variety of objects: a small cup, a paper scroll with writing that spills over the table; a case, possibly leather, with instruments (is that an ink pot? Cupping equipment?). The remainder of the table-top seems coded differently: a covered chalice; a golden plate and cup, a five-knobbed book with two buckled straps, and a larger covered chalice suggest religious purposes. The table-cloth with its stripes could in another environment be an altar cloth.

 

In front of the table is a wooden bucket held together by two hoops; it contains two items, a lidded pitcher with spout, and a lidded tankard.

Having spent some time with the depiction itself, there were a few important emergent elements in this image that spoke to me:

First among these is the management of the dying body. One element that struck me as notable is that liquids are everywhere, but always contained: there’s a beaker, cup, covered vessels, pitcher, tankard, bucket. There’s something to that, I think. Containment is critical. Moreover, the scene presents dying not simply as an event but as something attended, provisioned, measured, and managed. Even if we cannot securely identify the red-clad attendant as physician/apothecary, the imagery strongly suggests care directed toward the body. And that’s not the forgiveness-of-sins kind of care that a murdering king might require; we’re not in the realm of last rites and sacred oils, at least not as observable action. We’re in the human realm of treat-and-watch. *Something* is being done, but we as viewers only see the counting on the thumb and the raising of the lid on the container; we don’t see the action but the contemplation of action. It’s a wonderful space for ambiguity.

To my eye, the artist is playing with us as viewers; I suspect my own incapacity to say for certain what the objects are may have been a deliberate choice. I think that is because in this image, the artist is exploiting the overlap between medical and sacramental vocabularies. The table is delightfully unstable: some objects look therapeutic or domestic, others liturgical, and as I said, the striped cloth can almost become an altar cloth. That ambiguity may be more important than identifying every vessel. At the deathbed, bodily care and preparation for eternity occupy the same visual field. Nifty, eh?

Faith without conspicuous ritual. We have those bishops, the sacred-looking vessels, and the Virgin and Child above—but remarkably little overt performance of the rites of dying. No obvious priest administering a sacrament, no book being read aloud, no prominently displayed crucifix, no prayers at the foot of the bed. The sacred permeates the scene without dominating it ceremonially. It’s sacrality in a domestic context, yet one situated in the larger landscape. That memento mori skull-like formation meets up with the dying man and with the sacred raindrops of an unfinished sky. It is an interesting juxtaposition.

Gesture substitutes for audible speech. The repeated pointing, counting, and cupped and open-handed gestures make this an unusually active deathbed. We cannot hear the king’s last words, but the painting insists that communication is occurring. Hands create a visible rhetoric of counsel, explanation, response, and perhaps testimony. Furthermore, this is death made socially legible. We don’t have an intimate farewell between one dying man and a beloved companion, nor a community lifting up their representative through visible attributes of prayer. The open book(s) with prayer-giver(s), the praying hands, the candles of other kingly deathbed images are missing here. Instead, the bed is surrounded by representatives of different identities and statuses: ecclesiastical, courtly, perhaps medical. The king’s death is consequently visible as public, witnessed, and socially authenticated – things important to kingship, but quite possibly absent in Bolesław’s own life!

The “why” of these decisions for an anonymous fifteenth century artist seems to me to lie in the realm of creating a controlled or rehabilitated death. Given Bolesław’s unstable legendary biography, we’re getting a narrative of successful reconciliation that puts him back in the cognomen “the Generous” or “the Bold” – and not “ Bolesław the excommunicate.” For a presumably Hungarian artist who knew of Bolesław’s role in establishing Hungarian kingly lineage -- he'd put Ladislaus on the throne! -- we may be getting a story where the mistaken politics of end of life are subsumed in the human drama of death-as-exculpatory. And certainly, given our painting’s position as part of the St Stanislaus cycle, our panel sets out an argument that Stanislaus's sanctity does not require Bolesław's damnation. In our representation, Bolesław does not appear abandoned, nor poisoned in disgrace, nor grotesquely punished. Instead, he dies crowned (with a cross to signal his place in the fold), accompanied by people of many stations, articulate and alert, and attended by bishops. In short, the painter gives us a socially and religiously reordered ending for a morally compromised ruler.

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YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN…

• Practicing Death: The “Seven Last Words” at Thalbach — What did it mean to prepare for a good death? A messy text addition to a Thalbach prayerbook turns Christ’s Seven Last Words into a how-to for dying: confession, reconciliation, letting go, and the rather important business of getting one’s soul ready.
• Dominican Prayer Gestures — Hands matter. Medieval prayer was something you did with the body Gestures could make interior states visible to everyone watching. Bows, prostrations, raised hands, kissed books: a bit of gestural grammar for thinking about what all those busy hands in medieval images might be saying.
• The North Wall of Brand’s Parish Church: Challenges of Interpretation — Sometimes the surviving image simply won’t tell you exactly what it is. Faded saints, uncertain gestures, and a set of missing saints: an exercise in looking hard, comparing evidence, and knowing when “might” is the most responsible answer.

Vacation work… not an oxymoron

Down time matters. It matters a lot, in fact; it is the space of stillness where ideas have a chance to bubble along, mixing and mingling their flavors until new combinations arise. Sitting in the car can be incredibly productive; as a driver, I’m happy to dictate, and as a passenger, my ever-ready so-much-scribbling notebook is there for me as my adult-level comfort blanket.

Some of this trip has just been list-building. Oh, no, not that kind of list building – back up three steps: not “what do I think,” but “what do I plan to do to make room for thinking (and when.)”

And that’s the joy of vacation time. No need to cross things off (except for the “take the treadmill out of the basement in time to throw it away. THAT got written down and crossed off, and I’m resting from that exertion now!). Just sitting in as close to idle as I ever get, planning a day at the beach, sitting in the quiet and reading for a while, and poking at my phone a bit, and then breaking into active list-making-planning for another bit, and then back to idle mode.

Jack is reading the newspaper; Nissa is doing her paperwork. Tom has disappeared into the back room after saying sharp, incisive things about printer updates, many of which can’t be repeated in polite company.

The reality is that ideas have remarkably little respect for office hours. They show up while driving. Or while somebody else is reading the newspaper. Or during a dispute with a printer driver. Or in the five minutes that immediately follow the decision (ha!) that you are absolutely not going to think about work for the rest of the day.

Which may be why I have stopped trying to draw a hard line between working and not working. There is concentrated work, certainly. But there is also the long simmer: reading, noticing, talking, scribbling, staring out the window, putting two things next to one another and seeing what happens. An email which surfaces a quote for the next article. An idea that would be fruitful when it’s time to work on that article-related blog post. An image that might be worth a paragraph in the next chapter. Or do I mean the other chapter. Let me think about it for a while.

And, happily, vacation gives the simmer more room.

The trick, for me, is not to mistake every blurping bubble a command-to-action. Some things need to be written down. Some just need to be scheduled. And some need to be left alone until they become interesting enough to come back on their own.

And some things, like obsolete treadmills, just need to leave the basement before the trash truck arrives.

Good pre-term holidays, everyone!

 YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN: 

• First Monday of a New Month: What to Write? — On keeping a “to-consider” list of possible projects without turning every interesting idea into an obligation.
• Writing is Momentum — On blogging, listing, staring into space, and other forms of thinking that count as part of the writing process—even when they aren’t producing the Official Important Words.
• The Whiteboard Where Big Things Live — On getting obligations out of your head, making priorities visible, and accepting small, humane, imperfect progress instead of heroic productivity. 

The Blood Caught My Eye, But Love Dominated: The Prayer Vocabulary of Innsbruck FB 1118

When I opened the prayerbook, it was the gore that drew my attention first, as I mentioned in a previous post. That is hardly surprising. In Innsbruck FB 1118, Christ is bound, beaten, scourged, pierced, bloodied, abandoned, and repeatedly made to suffer in language vivid enough to provoke a modern “eww” reflex.

But once I stepped back from the most graphic passages and looked at the manuscript’s vocabulary as a whole, a different picture emerged. Blood appears forty-three times. Wound appears thirty-three times. Bitter appears thirty-one times. Yet the most common substantive words in this fifteenth-century Passion-centric prayerbook are not, in fact, words of violence. They are Lord, love, God, holy, heart, soul, eternal, and mercy.

That matters because in my view, frequency reveals something different from intensity. Graphic details may dominate the reader’s memory precisely because they are unusual, concrete, and difficult to ignore. But they do not necessarily dominate the manuscript’s devotional world. Love appears 117 times, far more often than blood, wound, or even sin. Mercy appears eighty-one times; grace fifty; peace forty-five; good forty-four; life forty-three; and joy thirty-one. The manuscript’s most startling images are embedded in a vocabulary of divine generosity, intimacy, and hope.

The same is true of the prayerbook’s anthropology. The body matters—body appears fifty times—but it is not treated as a prison or merely as a site of punishment. The heart appears ninety-eight times, the soul eighty-four, the mind forty-five, and the spirit forty-four. Such terms suggest an integrated devotional person: bodily, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually engaged all at the same time. The prayers do not simply ask the reader to contemplate Christ’s damaged flesh. They ask that her heart be changed, that her soul be released, that her mind be directed, and that her spirit join more closely to God. They ask, in other words, that she be acted upon to increase her own faith.

Even the vocabulary of suffering is usually oriented toward a particular outcome. Death appears eighty-seven times and suffer sixty-four, but redeem appears twenty-seven times, forgive thirty-four, grant forty-one, and offer forty-seven. Christ’s suffering, gruesome as it is, is not presented as pain for pain’s sake. It is repeatedly converted into mercy, pardon, protection, intercession, and transformation. The structure of the prayers makes that logic explicit: because Christ endured, the speaker asks that God now forgive; because Christ shed blood, a soul may be released; because Christ offered himself, the reader may offer herself in return.

The vocabulary of relationship is equally prominent. Father and Jesus each appear seventy-one times; beloved fifty-eight; Son forty-two; Mother twenty-nine; child twenty-five. This is not an emotionally bleak religious world populated only by sin, punishment, and fear. It is a familial and relational one. God is invoked as Father, Christ as beloved Lord and Son, Mary as mother, and the praying subject as one seeking incorporation into a sacred network of care. Even the repeated appeals to Christ’s Passion operate within this language of attachment. The prayers are gruesome, yes, but they are also intimate.

Word counts cannot by themselves tell us what a manuscript means. They flatten context, treat every occurrence as equivalent, and cannot distinguish a dominant theological concept from a repeated grammatical formula. Still, they offer a useful corrective to selective attention. The blood caught my eye, but upon deeper consideration love structures the manuscript more deeply. FB 1118 presents suffering as real, prolonged, and bodily; yet equally and importantly, it also insists that suffering will eventually open out toward mercy, grace, peace, life, and joy. Taken as a whole, this is not a faith obsessed with pain. It is a positive Catholic faith confident that pain can be remembered, offered, and ultimately transformed.

METHOD:

A complete transcription of Innsbruck FB 1118—including prayers, rubrics, reflections, and short treatises—was rendered into English with the assistance of Google Translate in July 2026. Passages central to my analysis were subsequently checked against the German transcription and revised as needed by the author.

The resulting English text served as the basis for this exploratory vocabulary assessment, in part because machine translation regularizes variant spellings of the Alemannic original. To be clear, the frequencies reported here describe the vocabulary of the translated text rather than providing a precise lexical analysis of the German original.

The translated text was uploaded to the word-cloud generator WordArt, with common stop words excluded. Word frequencies were then reviewed manually, with particular attention to emotionally charged vocabulary and to the relative prominence of words associated with suffering, sin, mercy, love, grace, peace, and joy. The results are intended as a broad indication of the manuscript’s devotional emphasis, not as a statistically rigorous linguistic analysis. As a rough cross-check, however, I also reviewed frequencies in the German transcription after consolidating obvious spelling variants; this produced the same broad pattern, with vocabulary of love, relationship, petition, salvation, and interior life appearing prominently alongside terms for suffering and death.

RELATED POSTS

Seven Times a Day: Prayer as Humane Practice:What did medieval prayerbooks actually ask their readers to do? This post explores repeated daily prayer in the Thalbach sisters' prayerbook and argues that devotion was built through small, regular acts of return rather than extraordinary spiritual experiences. A perfect companion to this look at the vocabulary of prayer. 
Counting Drop Caps: What a Prayerbook's Initials Reveal about the Divine Office Words are only one way a prayerbook communicates. Here I examine how large initials, layout, and page design quietly reveal the devotional priorities of a medieval community, showing that manuscripts guide prayer visually as well as verbally. 
Sooner or Later It All Gets Done: How History Emerges from Small Details Why spend so much time counting words, tracing tabs, or studying repeated prayers? This reflection explains how seemingly insignificant details accumulate into meaningful historical evidence—and why patient, close attention often changes what we think we know about the medieval past. 

Passion, Pain, and the Work of Prayer

Fifteenth-century prayer could, we have long known, center its attention on the more graphic elements of the Passion. Such imagery permeates certain kinds of prayerbooks, centering the darker side of the emotive wheel – pain, despair, angst, upheaval – as both warning and explanation, and I’ll come back to both of those elements. This Passion-based prayer is purposeful, designed to produce several kinds of somatic empathy.

First, it makes suffering hard to abbreviate. The reader must remain with particular blows, wounds, bodily positions, and losses. Not only does the prayer-cycle spend time rehearsing details, it does so in ways that are multi-sensory – the sight of the passion instruments one kind of signal to the reader, the sounds of cries (schrayen) and shouts, the texture of cloth or of wood evoked, and later the tang of vinegar or the metalic odor of spilled blood each calling for a sensory memory of the here-and-now to be repurposed to this form of cultural remembering. Matins becomes a time to rehearse Christ’s treatment as a criminal, the crowd surging around

with swords and clubs, shouting and terrifying visages; seized in fearful panic, captured and bound with covered face, led along rough paths amidst abusive words and blows [mit schwertern vnd knüttel gesuͦcht geschraÿ vnd erschrockenlich gesicht weiblichen ir vngestumme forcht erschrocken begriffen vnd gebunden mit verdecktem antlit durch scharpff weg gefirt mit laster worten vnd straichen bekuͦm...]

Things and sounds, touch and texture, motion and mortality: these elements expand from narrative to somatic experience. Which leads us to function.

In using such somatic details, such a prayer recruits the reader’s own body: her heart, limbs, tears, her knowledge of pain, fear, and exhaustion – all of these become instruments of meditation. The evocation of “spittle, blows, and filth,” the familiar unpleasantnesses of her present day, become through their function of opposites a way of understanding the “form … fairer than that of all the children of men.” [jn din antlit verspugt mit spaichel vnd schlegen vnd trächern begossen Du schone gestalt für all sün der mensche…] The tangible and familiar helps to frame out the space of the unfamiliar wonder of this miraculous story.

Such details help to convert empathy into action. The reader does not merely feel sorry for Christ; she uses recollected suffering to petition for forgiveness, a soul’s release, protection, or transformation. This is built into the structure of the Ermahnung; an early exhortation – I call upon you to remember – creates a dialogic space between the speaker and the divine. Their joint experience through guided recall of a narrative of suffering and redemption is then directly invoked as a motivation for future care. The framing lays out the logic of the requested action: “because you once did this, will you now do that?”

But it also hinges on the prayer-giver’s own involvement in this process. Because *she* has entered into this scene, with its dark intensity, its blood and its pain, she too has shared in the Passion experience. During her articulation of the Hours, she asks that this willing participation be enhanced – that she become “prepared to endure—not merely suffer, but with ardent longing—all Your trials and even death for Your sake.” (vnd allen dine pingungan vnd och den tod sy berait nit allain zeliden). In other words, this prayer format with its graphic and sometimes gory details can usefully complicate the word “empathy.” The goal is not necessarily modern emotional identification—“I can imagine how he felt”—but devotional conformity, compassionate participation, and the activation of Christ’s suffering as salvific currency.

Moving further into the manuscript, the 33 Ermanung (aka 33 Miserere) call up the kind of details that provoke my “eww” reflex. (Content warning for the remaining paragraphs – gruesome imagery included.) Here again, the blood and gore has a function, but these details may actually press against the too-easy “somatic empathy” explanation.

Here’s a bit of what the prayer says:

Then they seized you and stripped off your garments, and bound you to a massive pillar—so large that your arms could not reach around it. Then they took ropes and bound your holy hands to it, and pulled so hard that the blood forced its way out from under your fingernails [dz ſy dich do nomēd vnd dir dine claider ab zu: gend vnd bundend dich an ain stammne sul die wz groß daz dir dine arm nit darvmb mochtend geraichen do nomen̅s sy saͤiler vnd bundentz dir an dine gottlichen hend vnd zugend als ser dz daz blut zu den negeln vßtrang...]

Imagining the pinning of the limbs so hard that the skin ruptures and the fingernails become bloody from mere pressure strikes me as being disturbingly akin to a scene out of a horror movie. That kind of graphic detail asks us to do more than just invoke our own deflective shielding. It asks us to consider:

• Whether pain must be imaginable to be devotionally useful. This fingernail detail is so hyper-specific that it forces the reader to test the limits of bodily imagination. Can she feel pressure, constriction, throbbing, skin-rupture? The prayer here doesn’t just report suffering; it engineers an attempt to simulate it through imaginative reconstruction.

• Whether plausibility even matters. Blood forced from beneath the fingernails is probably not medically exact, but anatomical accuracy isn’t the point. The image translates the invisible extremity of Christ’s experience into a bodily sign that the reader herself can grasp. Its truth is more affective (or perhaps theological) than forensic.

• Whose body supplies the knowledge. Fingernail pain is intimate and commonplace in a way that crucifixion is not. (Yes, I’ve had the hammer experience; haven’t you?) The prayer bridges historical distance by using a vulnerable bodily site the reader already knows. Small pain becomes the imaginative entrance into unthinkable pain.

• How excess functions. The detail exceeds what is needed to identify a scene of scourging or restraint. That excess functions as a mechanism for prayer. If ordinary language cannot adequately represent Christ’s suffering, the prayer can escalate until the body itself appears to exceed its limits. Just as opposites taught the reader understanding in one context, exaggeration does in another.

• Whether the detail implicates the reader as well as aligning her with Christ. This is a critical question, since these prayers often move from “they did this to you” toward “you endured this for us” and its tag-along admission: “because of our sins.” Fingernail blood can therefore produce an unstable identification: the reader is compassionate witness, intended beneficiary, and indirectly one of the causes of the suffering.

In other words, these details of blood and pain ask us to consider not only how pain is shared, but how it is made credible, excessive, memorable, and morally implicating. The reader is invited to feel with Christ, but also to confront the uncomfortable fact that she occupies several places in the scene at once: witness, beneficiary, petitioner—and cause.

I mentioned in a previous post the importance to the manuscript’s rubricator of the kind of prayer-work such scenes invoke. The rubric says the brief Ermanungen should be expanded through meditation because the deeper one enters the Passion, the more unfathomable it becomes. To the world in which this prayerbook was copied, vivid elaboration is not incidental stylistic excess; it is part of the intended practice.

Gruesomeness, in other words, can be functional. It keeps the Passion from collapsing into an overly-familiar theological shorthand. It makes suffering available for repeated acts of memory, compassion, and intercession. The bloody fingernails matter because they resist abbreviation. They prevent “Christ suffered” from becoming a phrase one can recognize without bothering to enter. I paused over transcribing that particularly passage, and I’ll bet the Thalbach sister reading this prayer did too. It’s a moment of discomfort just to imagine that scene with all its sensorial cues.

And that, I believe, is the point of such details. Blood was supposed to slow the reader down until doctrine became scene, scene became sensation, and sensation became prayer.

RESOURCES

Thalbach prayerbook: Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, Cod. FB 1118, Gebete und Betrachtungen, copied (in part) in 1489.

Related posts: 

How Long is a Long Prayer? Medieval prayerbooks could ask readers to stay with a devotion far longer than we might expect. This post looks at what “long” prayer meant in practice—and what such length tells us about attention, repetition, and the work of prayer.

Practicing Death: The “Seven Last Words” at Thalbach: How did medieval women pray with Christ’s final words from the Cross? Looks at the Seven Last Words as a way of entering the Passion slowly, imaginatively, and personally.

An Indulgence Prayer for Mary of Swords: Centers on the Seven Sorrows of Mary to show how devotion to the Passion could move through the Mother of Christ. We don't simply observing her grief, but ask to share in it and to be spiritually changed by it. 

A Sixteenth-Century Segen for the Mass, Pt. 1 and Pt. 2 — Christ’s wounds, blood, hands, and feet are not just remembered here; they are called upon for protection. This unusual prayer shows how vivid Passion imagery could become something active in everyday devotional life. 

 

First Monday of a New Month: What to Write?

 

The first Monday of a new month is a day of possibilities, a day on which all kinds of streaks can start, a day on which… one wants to wind back the clock and have another couple days of weekend.

Monday practices vary by scholar, but one that I’ve found helpful is reviewing the writing-task spreadsheet. I keep a meta-list of all the project ideas I’ve got, and their possible (or actual) venues, and the status of the work involved. It’s not a “to-do” list, more like a “to-consider” list.

I treat this project-mapping like brainstorming. There are no bad writing projects; there are just projects that get assigned priority 1200.

That means I don’t automatically delete the oddities. Some sit at priority 1200 forever, and that’s fine. Others linger on the distant horizon for a year or four and unexpectedly acquire legs. Keeping those possibilities visible contributes to a kind of abundance mentality: the weird idea that pops out as an aside in a class lecture can remain available long enough to become an actual publication.

“Signposting Shakespeare” worked like that: from class observation to “huh, I think that has legs,” to collaborating with students on data collection and bibliography gathering, to writing to submission to publication. The first step in the process is to track the idea to begin with.

Which is why at the moment I have 107 items floating in the “I could consider this” array. Nine of those are in one of the “pending” categories (either waiting on proofs or waiting on publication), three are active, and one is in the “start gathering bibliography” stage.

Unlike my 30-day reading spreadsheets, I don’t actually put down everything I’m writing on my project-tracking spreadsheet. The point of THIS kind of tracking isn’t really to be able to show everything I’ve done – the gigantic CV is where that kind of thing goes. This is tracking-for-planning. Today’s post, for instance, is just the “hey, I need to warm up and get motivated” kind of writing that drops in and makes thinking through another task kind of fun. It never got entered.

But I did look over what last-month-me thought I should be doing. The spreadsheet helps me turn the vague sense that I have seventeen things I ought to be doing into something more concrete, and so more useful: this needs reading, this needs an email, this one is going to take a significant dive into my archival notes, that one can wait.

Plus the spreadsheet is a real blessing in terms of balancing what needs a fresh morning brain and which projects can be assigned to the afternoon me (who is less clever but often more dogged – a good bibliography ferret, but not so much a creative thinker). Putting words on page: morning task. Sending a follow-up email to the editor: afternoon work.

PRACTICAL DETAILS

Since this spreadsheet is for tracking purposes, I have fourteen headers that have been useful for my purposes:

Timeframe	Priority	PROJECT
Venue / scope	Data collection	Bibl
Data analysis	Writing	Submission
Awaiting	Nudge date	Revision
Publish	Thank-Yous

Obviously, project and venue + scope are the most important for purposes of project definition – remembering what it is exactly that I thought this project might become. I find it helpful to enter timeframes for some projects, but mostly that’s just a “panic here” date – an upcoming request for proposals gets a visual signal of “pending deadline,” but a blog post is never going to get a date due. And one doesn’t bother with deadlines for that Revise and resubmit; by its very nature, it just joined this week’s (or next week’s) work stack. Priority is a sorting tool for me, not a strict order-of-operations column. To that end, I reuse a lot of numbers: 1 is this week, and there might be three to five projects that are active. 2 is “keep this in mind” – needing to prep my travel-reading meant that an article which I wasn’t “working on” was sitting in the visible spot for the last three months as my brain-dead filler task; I compiled the full bibliography during late afternoons *before* it became an active project. 9 is a “this has been submitted and needs tracking until its fate is known” category. 1200 is a “probably don’t ever do this” and 1300 is blog posts. The idea of priority numbering is to bunch things into buckets of how much the project needs my attention.

Then there’s the active work: data collection and bibliography-building are two often parallel tasks; they might become yellow and then green simultaneously, or I might do one or the other in completely different months. Likewise, analysis and writing might be intertwined or separate; I just need to be tracking where I am.

Submission is enough of an act of self-flagellation that it gets its own dopamine reward. After all, the things you’re fighting with are fierce. Two-factor authentication across firewall barriers. Footnote formatting by all the weird templates that people use. Writing the abstract or defining the keywords. Deciding whether a cover letter is needed or going with the simple submission. All of this is so involved that I long ago decided that it deserved its visibility in my work-flow.

And then there’s the long afterwards. Awaiting and nudge date sit in the same zone of limbo: not accepted, not rejected, just hanging out in that “under consideration” land. I used to just use “Awaiting” and then “Revision,” but some projects require more interaction and the nudge date lets me actively decide how long I want to wait before putting in a reminder and then (and this is critical) to not do anything about it until that date. I’m in the humanities: the goal is for weeks not to become months and months not to become years.

Revisions are where the R&R and copy-edits go, and Publish where proofs live respectively. (An outright rejection gets recorded on the “completed projects” tab – it’s the less happy kind of completion, but it does draw the project to a close. Then I get to decide, and the project either goes back to establish a different possible venue and consider rewriting or gets pushed off the list altogether. In either case, feedback is a gift.)

The last category is also important: when a project reaches its final stage, I like to contact people whose ideas helped me frame my own thoughts and thank them, and to write to archives that supported my research to show what came of it all. So Thank-Yous are part of tidying up at the end of project, a sort of tack-and-tie to my scholarly peers.

And then the spreadsheet is ready for another Monday. Most of those 107 ideas will not become this month’s work, and some of them may never become anything at all. That’s fine. The point isn’t to turn every possible project into a writing obligation. It’s to cultivate a kind of abundance mentality: to keep enough of the possibilities visible that, when Monday asks me what I should write next, I’m not staring at an empty page.

OTHER PRODUCTIVITY POSTS

The Whiteboard Where Big Things Live — another approach to getting the sprawling mass of things-to-do out of your head and into a form where priorities become visible. 

How To Jump-Start a Scholarly Article: The Plan — for what happens when one of those distant-horizon ideas finally acquires legs and needs to become an actual article.

Managing Bibliography by Spreadsheet — my other spreadsheet habit: a 30-day system for turning a prospective bibliography into a reading plan and making progress visible.

Writing is Momentum — on why idea-generating, blogging, listing, and generally keeping in contact with your own thinking all count as part of the writing process.