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.

Supple Rules for Prayer: Daston’s Ideas Meet the 16thc Prayerbook

I’ve been re-reading Lorraine Daston’s Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (which is brilliant -- you should go read it yourself!), and thinking about its relevance for the sixteenth-century prayerbooks that are so much part of my life right now.

Rules, Daston tells us, are important, but the best rules are thick rules; they are specific, yes, but they are also supple. They come with examples, and exceptions, and mechanisms of interpretation that don’t get befouled by absolutist thinking. Circumstances change; people get sick; time runs short. And yet in all three instances, the goal of the rule presumably still applies. A little judgment, she argues, goes a long way toward effective implementation of “the rule.” (Her chapter 2 discussion of the Benedictine rule is particularly fruitful for understanding this perspective.)

What I want to do here is play a bit with what this might mean in the context of the sixteenth-century prayerbook copied for women’s use. I’ve chosen the most ornate of the Thalbach Prayerbooks, ÖNB Cod. 11750, again, since it represents Thalbach at its most careful. “Nice” hand, carefully organized layout, clear directions, many labels, distinction between the red-ink rubrics and the brown-ink text. It’s tidy, in other words. But it also shows a tidiness of approach, in that it frequently offers up prefatory instructions to a prayer that guide the reader into the appropriate stance, place, movement, mindset. It’s what I think of short-hand as prayer choreography.

So I’m here to ask: what if we think of those rubrics as “thick rules” instead of “verbal choreography”? What do we gain? In one sense, of course, the answer is obvious: rubrics tell readers what to do. But Daston’s account of thick rules helps me ask a more precise question: not whether rubrics direct practice, but what kind of practice they assume, enable, and refine.

Rules that are not rule-bound

It is easy, especially from a modern distance, to read rubrics primarily as instruments of control: say this, do that, turn here, kneel there. But in a pre-modern devotional manuscript, a rubric may be less like a traffic sign and more like a craft instruction. It tells the practitioner what kind of action is called for, while assuming that the practitioner already inhabits a world in which the action makes sense.

Are rubrics rules? Yes—but I think they are rules of practice rather than regulations of compliance.

ÖNB Cod. 11750, fol 15r; texts have been lightly normalized by the author. Ein schön Gebet, damit alle Glieder unseres Herrn gegrüßt werden, vor einem Crucifix zu sprechen. GEGRJESST ſeyeſtu du aller heilligſt haubt vnnſers lieben herrn Jesu christi welches für unns gekrönt mit dörnen vnd geschlagenn mit einem ror…. A beautiful prayer with which all the limbs of our Lord are honored, to be recited before a crucifix. HAIL to you, most holy head of our dear Lord Jesus Christ, which for us was crowned with thorns and struck with a reed….”

We have here several elements: a description (a beautiful prayer), a content summary (with which all the limbs of our Lord are honored), and the part I am thinking of as being the rule: performative details of how and of where the prayer is to be delivered – it is to be recited (sprechen) before a Crucifix.

This isn’t complex. The supplicant isn’t drowning in detail. She’s merely guided to a best practice in prayer delivery, shifted to a space where sight (the crucifix) can reinforce the task of prayer (to consider in turn each of the body parts of the suffering Lord of the crucifixion. As a rule goes, it organizes her prayer, binding text, image, body, and gaze into a whole.

It’s a bit like “craft knowledge.” The rubric assumes some proficiency; the supplicant will know when the prayer might be useful, But it guides her through specificity of where she should stand, what she should face, and how she should let the image structure her attention. In so doing, it invokes a practice of visual, affective, and bodily meditation.

Yet this “rule” is supple too; this isn’t necessarily the crucifix of the main altar at the parish church. She could read this prayer in front of the crucifix by the convent refectory, or the one in her cell, or by flipping back a few folios and gazing at the image of the Crucifixion that adorns OENB 11750 folio 8r. The gaze will guide, but how she achieves the gaze is flexible enough to accommodate a variety of circumstances.

That’s a nuance that I didn’t think to talk about when thinking of the instruction as choreography. So, one point for Daston’s utility.

Rules for transitions

A rubric makes the page actionable, but can also provide guidance for time-of-day transitions, from the mundane to the spiritual, from the world-oriented to the spirit-oriented, from the activity of daytime to the closure of bedtime ritual.

If the crucifix rubric shows how a rule can organize devotional attention around an object, the bedtime rubric for our next prayer (OENB 11750 fol. 3v-5r) shows how a rule can organize an ordinary daily transition. I like this intervention, since it gives the actions as a set: first the rubric provides a label, then the confession, then the guiding script to ready the supplicant for bed:

Bedtime ritual (OENB 11750 fol. 3v-5r, excerpts): Volgen schuene gebet so man schlafen geeth The following are beautiful prayers to be said before going to sleep. So du ietzund wilt ſchlafen gen: so sprich dise bekantnus der ſunden. Alſo. ICH bekenne dir Herr Allmechtiger Gott erſchaffer himel vnd der Orden alle meine ſünd die ich gethon hab von meiner Iugent an bis diſe zeit vnnd ſtund... So now you wish to go to sleep: then say this confession of sins. Thus: I confess to you, Lord Almighty God, creator of heaven and earth, all my sins that I have committed from my youth until this time and hour…. Wan du gleich in dz Beth schlaffenn gehst so bezaichne dich mit dem Zeihen des ehilligen Creitz an dem stirn, und sprich also: Iesus von Nazareth sey allezeit mein abeschiirmer. (An deiner mund) Jesus von Nazareth sei allezeit in meinen mu/ond. (An dein brüst) Jesus von Nazareth sey al zeitt in meinem hertznn. Amen. [PRAYER]: O Lieber herr Jesu Christe, nur will / ich dise rüo vnd aüffenthalltung meines leibs empfahenn, in der verantigunng deiner lieb gegen vns dardürch dü vns den ſchlaf zu guttem geben hast auch desselben… When you go to sleep in your bed, make the sign of the holy cross on your forehead, and say thus: Jesus of Nazareth, be my protector at all times. (On your mouth) Jesus of Nazareth, be always in my mouth. (On your breast) Jesus of Nazareth, be always in my heart. Amen. [PRAYER] O dear Lord Jesus Christ, I now wish to receive this rest and repose of my body, in acknowledgment of your love for us, through which you have given us sleep for our good, and also...

It’s sort of like the modern ritual: first you turn off the TV, then you brush your teeth, then you climb into bed and take up the work of stilling your mind.

What’s special in the Thalbach rubric is that it provides a bodily procedure, marking the forehead, mouth, and breast, along with accompanying words. It’s apotropaic, yes, spiritually protective, but it’s also that kind of Daston middle-ground. The instruction is specific, but it’s non-narrative. There’s no need to explain every theological or bodily assumption. It presupposes habit – a practitioner who already has insider knowledge: how to make the sign of the cross, why sleep is spiritually vulnerable, and how short verbal formulae can guard thresholds.

The rubric turns ordinary sleep into a devotional exercise. It does not regulate sleep bureaucratically; it ritualizes that regular daily transition. It is, to use the common convention, a habit-stacking rule.

Again, “choreography” thinking me was VERY excited about all the actions in this rubric, but the “rule”-based assessment is more empathetic to the time-of-day and purpose-driven nature of the actions involved.

Prayer as craft knowledge

Early modern rules, in Daston’s account, assume prior experience and promise improvement, particularly when the stem from the artist’s workshop. They systematize and extend experience rather than replacing it. They are designed, she argues, to be learned but also practiced.

“To formalize craft knowledge into rules was to give it voice and dignity but not to remove it from the workshop. Dürer intended his instructions as a 'thorough introduction' to be expanded by 'daily use,' which in turn would deepen understanding and kindle invention.” (Daston p. 51)

This observation was particularly exciting to me, since there are so many similarities here with prayer as codified in prayerbooks. Prayer as something learned through repeated, bodily, attentive practice. If we draw the parallel out, we could think of prayer in prayerbooks as a mechanical art, separate from the theological and argumentatively-grounded work of the university setting. As a craft, it fits into a realm of acquired-and-enacted wisdom.

The fit is imperfect, of course. Daston’s artisans are often making things: pictures, fortifications, meals, calculations. The Thalbach reader is not producing an external artifact in the same sense. She is cultivating attention, protection, repentance, and memory. The “thing” being shaped is not primarily an artifact but the praying self: attention, contrition, memory, bodily readiness, protection, and receptivity and capacity to return to God. That difference matters because the prayerbook rule is not only guiding what she does; it is helping shape how she becomes disposed to pray.

Nor do I mean that prayer was mechanical in the sense of being merely manual, servile, or technical. But I do want to invoke Daston’s ideas to argue that prayer has craft-like dimensions. It is learned by repetition. It uses tools. It depends on timing, memory, posture, voice, attention, sequence, and correction. It can be done badly, habitually, fluently, intensely, communally, or with practiced skill.

Daston provides a summary of craft-rule guidance:

“rules were always framed in the imperative mood… , the knowledge in question was often gleaned from personal experience ….seldom addressed to rank beginners … the promised payoff of mastering the rules was improvement.”

Yes! That tracks for prayerbooks too:

1) Rubrics are typically imperative, if not always in a strict grammatical sense. Many are titles or summaries, occasions for use, or navigational cues. But they are directive all the same: they tell the reader how a text is to be used. I think that gets at the “imperative mood” element pretty effectively.

2) Similarly, they share the wisdom of previous enactments in capsule form.

3) They assume a familiarity with context and pattern, so are not “beginner books” (those are psalters!) but more the “intermediate-to-advanced” guide helpful to honing one’s personal practice. The implied reader already knows many of the gestures, formulae, and devotional contexts being cued.

4) And, as Daston argues, improvement is the goal.

In other words, OENB 11750 treats prayer as a practiced art both in the sense of being enacted and in the sense of being repeated. It assumes that technique will help devotion take on durable form.

The morning prayer sequence of Segen and prayer (OENB 11750 5v-7r) illustrates this practice. It’s not a beginner’s catechism; it’s a set of cues for someone already embedded in devotional habits. It uses cross-reference, and embodied action, and praise texts to start the day in a positive and spirtually grounded way:

Segen and prayer for morning (OENB 11750 5v-7r, excerpts): Segen vnnd Gebett: Wann man am morgen vom Schlaf auf steth IN dem Namen des Vatters des Suns vnd des heilligenn Geists…. Blessing and Prayer: When one rises from sleep in the morning In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit... Zaichne dich darauf / an dein stirn mit dem ʒeichen des heilligenn Creütz vnd ſprich. Jeſus von Nazareth ꝛc. wie oben steth. Darnach knien ider vnd sprich. ICH bette dich an vnd lobe dich O du heillige Driualtigkeit du mein Gott alles in allem ich ſage dir danckh für alle bewarung weissheit vnnd guettigkeit... Make the sign of the cross on your forehead with the sign of the holy cross and say: Jesus of Nazareth, etc., as stated above. Then kneel and say: I adore you and praise you, O holy Trinity, my God, all in all. I thank you for all protection, wisdom, and goodness...

In the first portion, there’s no need to tell the informed reader that she’s to speak these words; the ink-color transition is obvious and her actions implicit. In the second half of this text, her knowledge of the standard Jesus of Nazareth formula that she’d said just the night before saves the scribe some valuable parchment space. In Daston’s terms, these rubrics offer a system and occasion for practice. But, as she reminds us, this was already a great deal: experience refracted through the lens of the rules of art was better ordered, more sharply focused, and above all broader than that of most craftsmen occupied with the pell-mell of particulars encountered in their own workshops” (Daston p. 69)

Again, yes for the prayerbooks too.

Conclusion: rubrics as supple rules for living

Thalbach’s devotional books preserve not only texts but habits of life. Their rubrics belong to a world in which rules were not necessarily the enemy of vitality. Rather, rules were one way of making practice durable. The question, then, is not simply whether rubrics direct practice. Of course they do. The more interesting question is what kind of practice they imagine, and here the answer is more nuanced. They imagine one that is repeated, embodied, adaptive, and interiorly formative.

To read rubrics as rules, then, is not to flatten prayer into procedure. It is to take seriously the practiced intelligence of devotional life. It is to treat prayer as practiced and ever-renewed: a craft of spirituality in which small guiding texts could lead to improvement -- a more ordered disposition, better attention, more durable memory, more ready access to words and gestures, a more practiced capacity to return to God.

I don’t think reading rubrics as rules replaces the choreography model so much as it shifts the emphasis. “Choreography” catches the embodied sequence; “rule” catches the learned, repeatable, adaptable form. Drawing on both perspectives gives us the fuller picture.

Considered through Daston’s lens, the Thalbach sister’s manuscript does not simply tell its reader what to say. Its rubrics teach the reader when to pray, how to begin, where to stand, what to face, what to repeat, how to move the body, and how to carry liturgical forms into the ordinary hours of life. Its rules are specific enough to guide action and, critically, supple enough to live with. In that sense, these prayerbook rubrics belong not only to the history of books, but to the history of how people learned to inhabit devotion.

WORKS CITED

Lorraine Daston, Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022).

On habit-stacking, I found Clear’s version substantially less smarmy than some of the more industrial “habit-stacking” banged-it-out-for-a-buck narratives out there on the market: James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (2018).

For a somewhat more choreographic assessment of such rubrics, see 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

Other posts on OENB 11750:

• Threefold Illumination: A Nun’s Prayer After Communion
• A Sixteenth-Century Segen for the Mass, Pt 1  and Pt 2
• Practicing Death: The “Seven Last Words” at Thalbach

On viewing the frescoes at St George’s, Reichenau

If you are certain kind of medievalist, the painted wall of long ago holds a special allure. Not only can you Look At Pictures for credit, but you also have the fun of decoding the stories that are being told. When you have a whole church covered in paintings, so much the better.

And so dad and I found ourselves on a train, then a bus, to get to St George’s at Reichenau. 

The summertime tours are limited, and if you want to be sure to get in on the fun, you absolutely need to be on time to the open-to-the-public tour. Which meant that I planned our trip to start with some birding first before the tour itself, a two-fer that I strongly recommend. The kestrels had bred so there were five of them; we had a great time! (A cellphone camera isn’t up to the job of capturing kestrel glory, so here’s a picture of a European Serin instead):

Anyhow, at the appointed time, we paid the tour guide and in we went. First there’s an extended discussion of the fragility of the frescoes, and of their origins and influence, and then you’re let into the church itself.

Wowser.

Whole walls. Multiple layers. Decoration and figural program. Text as guide…

To keep today on focus, let’s take Lazarus as a case in point.

In case that Latin there at the bottom of the picture is beyond you, it’s:

Lazare, perge foras, quarto iam sole sepulte!
Rumpe moras mortis! Hoc dat imago Patris.

Lazarus, come forth, you who have now been buried for four days! Break death’s delay! Thus commands the image of the Father.

And there we have the scene: an observing crowd; Christ calling forth Lazarus at the request of the standing Martha reaching out in supplication, the prostrate figure of Lazarus’s sister Mary, who glances over her shoulder to see the miracle.

Plus, there is the embodied miracle: Lazarus in his grave-cloths, standing in his open sarcophagus. Two robed figures appear to hold their noses, a signal of the smells that would emerge from a tomb on the fourth day. And then a second crowd, many with neck cloths – a representation of prayer shawls (Boeckler and Jantzen p. 24), again observers to the miracle.

The story comes from John 11, and is the miracle that causes the priest Caiaphas to predict Christ’s death “that the whole nation perish not” – John 11: 50. But the miracle itself is the story in focus at St George’s. We have the assemblage of people, we have Martha, who met Christ afoot, and Mary who came to see him when summoned; we have the crowd, and we have the miracle:

And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus saith unto them, Loose him, and let him go. (KJV)

I like this scene because I think it captures a kind of optimistic, good-things-can-happen Christianity that is distinct from the more Passion-focused Christianity of my research period, some three centuries later. The needs of the congregants at Reichenau lay in the possibilities inherent in the possibilities of divine intervention. The images of St George’s encode these beliefs: demons could be expelled, sick bodies could be restored, storms could be quieted, and even, as here, death be interrupted. Kurt Martin has suggested that the eight great miracle scenes form a kind of crescendo, moving from Christ’s victory over the forces of darkness, through sickness and the dangers of the natural world, to victory over death. “Not the suffering of Christ is meant, not his humanity, but his public ministry, the demonstration of his supernatural power” (Martin, 22). 

Whether or not every viewer followed the sequence so systematically, its cumulative message is plain. Again and again, these paintings show a world gone wrong and then set right. To me, Lazarus is the climax of that promise: the tomb has opened, the dead man stands, and the sisters’ grief has—in a moment that signals the great events to come—been reversed.

That is what I mean by an optimistic, or perhaps better, an affirmational Christianity. It is not that Ottonian Christians ignored sin, judgment, or the Cross. St George itself contains a Last Judgment, and Ottonian Germany produced formidable images of the Crucifixion. But the dominant register of this nave is the triumphant, efficacious Christ. Colin Morris’s influential account of medieval religious change describes a broad movement after 1050 from emphasis on Christ’s cosmic victory and lordship toward a more human and suffering Christ who invited the viewer’s emotional identification (Morris, 139–44). St George stands on the earlier side of that change. Unlike the 15th-century prayerbooks I’ve been immersed in, its walls do not first ask viewers to share in Christ’s pain. Rather, they ask the viewer to consider what divine power can do: those storm might just fall silent, the sick may walk home, and Lazarus can emerge from his grave. 

 

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Works Cited

• Boeckler, Albert, and Hans Jantzen. “Auferweckung des Lazarus.” In Ikonographische Studien zu den Wunderszenen in der ottonischen Malerei der Reichenau.Munich, 1961, 22ff. https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.28646#0030
• Martin, Kurt. Die ottonischen Wandbilder der St. Georgskirche Reichenau-Oberzell. 2nd rev. and expanded ed. Sigmaringen, 1975.
• Morris, Colin. The Discovery of the Individual, 1050–1200. London, 1972/Toronto, 1987.

Interested in frescoes? I've also written on the frescoes of Brand, Vorarlberg (Austria) as a two-part post: Brand Pt 1   Brand Pt 2

How Long Is a Long Prayer? Innsbruck FB 1118

(Image from Walters Ms. W.438, text from Innsbruck FB 1118, fol. 60v)

The first thing I noticed about Innsbruck FB 1118 this second time through was its sheer devotional bulk. I’d met the manuscript in person, and that’s always more fun, so maybe the downer of transcription duties shaped my mood. But transcriber me just felt like this book was *endless.* Prayer follows prayer across the manuscript in a tangle of different genres: Hours of the Passion, confession prayers, devotional instruction, invocations of saints, a mystical treatise, thirty-three Miserere, further appeals based on Christ’s suffering, and finally an incomplete Marian prayer. The effect is cumulative. Page after page returns to Christ’s body in graphic and often discomforting details: blows, spitting, binding, scourging, wounds, blood. Even before pausing to distinguish the separate texts, the manuscript feels long.

But “long” is a slippery word here. It may describe the number of folios, a density of the language, the repeated return to the same scenes, or simply the fatigue of the modern reader who is transcribing and translating everything in sequence. FB 1118, copied (at least in part) in 1489, certainly contains prayers that take up substantial space. Yet my first impression—that these were extraordinarily long prayers—began to seem less obvious once I took a step back and stopped treating the manuscript as though someone were expected to read it straight through.

For the women who eventually used this book at Thalbach, prayer was not leisure squeezed into the edges of a working day. It was part of the work itself: distributed across hours, occasions, intentions, and repeated devotional routines. The more useful question, then, is not simply how many pages a prayer occupies. It is what kind of time the prayer asks its users to create.

The manuscript’s first major prayer sequence makes that distinction especially clear. The Tagzeiten zum Leiden Christi occupies more than twenty-five folios. That’s formidable when described as a single work. But it is organized according to the Hours. Matins begins one part of the Passion narrative, and then Prime, Terce, Sext, None, and the later Hours take up succeeding moments. The codex gathers these prayers into a single extended sequence, while the devotional schedule breaks that sequence apart.

What looks long in the manuscript, then, may have been experienced as a series of smaller appointments with the Passion. A user did not necessarily begin at folio 1r and continue until folio 27r. She returned to the book as the day advanced, taking up the next prayer when its hour arrived. The manuscript preserves the whole arc at once, but prayer-as-practice distributes it across time.

That difference matters because modern reading habits make the codex look more expansive than it may have felt in use. Transcription encourages continuous reading. So does scholarly description: “folios 1r–27r” turns a sequence of separate observances into a single block. But the Hours are designed precisely to resist continuous consumption. They interrupt the day and ask the reader to re-enter the Passion repeatedly, not to complete it in one sitting.

FB 1118 is therefore “long” in one sense and yet carefully portioned in another. Its textual scale reflects the number of occasions it serves. The better analogy may not be a very long prayer, but a full calendar or work schedule: substantial when viewed as an undifferentiated whole, manageable because no one performs all of it at once.

Repetition intensifies that impression of length. FB 1118 returns again and again to the same scenes out of the Passion: Christ is bound, struck, spat upon, scourged, stripped, pierced, mocked, abandoned, and made to bleed. From a modern reading perspective, this can feel less like progression than accumulation. The manuscript does not move efficiently from one event to the next. It circles back, retells, and enlarges.

But repetition here is not simply redundancy. Each return gives the reader another point of entry. One prayer may dwell upon Christ’s bodily pain; another upon his obedience to the Father; another upon Mary’s grief beneath the Cross; another upon the salvific value of a particular wound or word. The Passion remains the same story, but the devotional action changes. The reader is asked to pity, remember, imitate, petition, confess, or entrust a soul to mercy.

The repeated wording also creates a stable rhythm. Again and again, the prayer addresses Christ, recalls a particular suffering, and turns that memory into a request. In the thirty-three Miserere, the recurring formula ich ermanen dich does not merely introduce new information. It performs the same act repeatedly: “I call this suffering to your remembrance.” The length of the sequence lies partly in that insistence. Mercy is sought not through one comprehensive summary of the Passion, but through the cumulative force of many separate reminders.

To call these prayers repetitive might therefore be accurate, but it is certainly incomplete. Repetition is one of the manuscript’s organizing tools. It slows the reader down, distributes attention across Christ’s body and story, and makes the Passion available for many different devotional purposes. What appears excessive when read straight through may have functioned in use as a series of focused acts, each familiar in structure but distinct in intention.

The thirty-three Miserere make this distinction unusually explicit. Despite occupying more than forty folios in FB 1118, the prayer-sequence rubric introduces its individual manungen as being written mit kurczen Worten—“in brief words” (FB 1118, fol. 59v) Such brevity, however, is only textual. The reader is instructed to think further upon those words and to recall whatever good matter they might generate, because the more “deeply” one follows Christ’s Passion, the more “unfathomable” it becomes.

This is almost a miniature theory of prayer length supplied by the manuscript itself. What the rubricator is saying is that a prayer is not complete when the written words have been pronounced. Rather, the words are prompts, openings into a larger act of recollection. A short ermanung may name one moment—the Last Supper, the prayer in the garden, Mary beneath the Cross, Christ’s final cry—but the user is expected to expand that moment inwardly. She is to supply remembered narrative, imagined detail, emotion, and petition.

The manuscript therefore distinguishes between the length of a text and the duration of the devotional action it initiates. A compact formula such as ich ermanen dich can open into a sustained (and to modern taste overly-vivid) reconstruction of Christ’s suffering. The reader does not merely remind Christ of an event; she must first make that event sufficiently present to herself to use it as the basis of her appeal.

This helps explain the peculiar combination of brevity and excess in the Miserere. The structure is highly repetitive and the individual premises of each miniature Passion scene can be stated quickly. Yet each one invites the reader to linger—to descend further into a Passion that the manuscript describes as effectively without bottom. The prayers are short in wording but deliberately long in attention.

From a modern reader’s perspective, FB 1118 can still feel enormous. Transcription encourages us to move continuously through the manuscript, measuring prayers by folios, words, and the time required to finish them. But it’s important to remember that the book’s original users were unlikely to experience the book in quite that way. For the sisters at Thalbach, the prayers were distributed across different temporal frameworks: the Hours of a single day, the eight days of the concluding Marian prayer, Easter and successive Sundays in the prayer to St. Erasmus, and the thirty-four days prescribed for the thirty-three Miserere. The manuscript does not simply contain a great deal of prayer. It organizes prayer across time.

That does not make the prayers easy or brief. Before beginning the Miserere, the user is instructed to put aside worldly concerns and drive idle thoughts from the heart: Wenn der mesch daz gebett wil sprechen so sol er sich alles zittlichs geschafftes abtun vnd alle uppigen gedenck vß sinem herczen (fol. 59r). The work of prayer included preparation, concentration, recollection, and endurance—not merely the pronunciation of the words on the page.

So transcriber me was not wrong: FB 1118 really is endless. But it was not meant to be finished in the way I was trying to finish it. Its prayers spill beyond their written boundaries—into the next Hour, the next Sunday, the next day of an eight- or thirty-four-day sequence, and into the meditation generated by a few “brief words.” For the women of Thalbach, that was not a design flaw. Prayer was the work, and for them, the point was not to get to the end, but rather to get to the end of suffering.

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MANUSCRIPT CITED:

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

Why associate this manuscript with the Franciscan Tertiaries of Thalbach?

• a Thalbach ownership statement dated 1727

• the feminine self-designation Sünderin in the prayer on the Name of Jesus (fol. 37v)

• the presence of the scribe Jörg Wittlinger, who also wrote in another Thalbach manuscript, ÖNB Cod. 2837, fol. 204v

• and the copying of the thirty-three Ermahnungen or Miserere by Heinrich Beck, chaplain of the nearby—and Bregenz-dependent—St. Nicholas Chapel in Wolfurt.

FB 1118 may not have been copied specifically for Thalbach, but it was certainly used there, although exactly when it entered the sisters’ hands remains uncertain. I like to imagine Heinrich Beck working on their behalf as he labored over the copying of those 33 passion meditations in the Ermanung section. That remains speculation, of course—but a later Thalbach prayerbook, Bregenz VLB Hs. 17, makes one thing quite clear: the sisters really, really, really appreciated collections of Ermahnungen.

How Did Medieval People Learn Music? A Call for Papers

How did medieval people learn music? The answer was not confined to treatises or classrooms. Musical knowledge passed from voice to voice and instrument player to instrument player, through listening, imitation, gesture, repetition, and varied kinds of participation – in worship, ceremony, dance. Music, as we know, was preserved and reshaped in manuscripts, but was also embodied in performance, devotional practice, memory, and the daily routines of religious and educational communities.

These processes of musical learning have often been studied within separate regional and disciplinary traditions. Histories of music education in Latin Western Europe do not always enter into sustained conversation with scholarship on Russian, Ukrainian, Balkan, and other Slavic cultures. Yet bringing these traditions together raises productive questions:

• How was musical knowledge made teachable? 
• What relationships connected theory with practice, written texts with oral transmission, and technical instruction with spiritual formation? 
• What can manuscripts, diagrams, rubrics, corrections, and performance traditions tell us about teaching as it actually occurred?

A hybrid session that I am helping to organize for the 2027 International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo seeks papers addressing these questions.

Call for Papers

“Pedagogies of Sound: Medieval Music Education in Slavic and European Contexts”
International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 13–15, 2027
Hybrid session 

The session explores music education across medieval and early modern European and Slavic traditions, focusing on the transmission of musical knowledge through pedagogy, performance, spirituality, and creative practice.

Possible topics include theoretical instruction, chant pedagogy, performance traditions, mystical and devotional approaches to musical learning, manuscript culture, and the relationship between theory and practice. We particularly welcome comparative and cross-cultural perspectives connecting Western Europe with Russian, Ukrainian, Balkan, and broader Slavic contexts.

The session comes at a moment of renewed scholarly interest in premodern pedagogy, cultural transmission, and global approaches to medieval studies. The forthcoming Russian translation of Music Education in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance also points to growing international engagement with the history of music education and creates an opportunity for broader dialogue between Eastern and Western European scholarly traditions.

By foregrounding Slavic and Russian-language perspectives alongside Latin European materials, we hope to foster conversation across disciplinary, regional, and linguistic boundaries. A designated translator will be available to help facilitate discussion.

Proposals are due September 15, 2026.
Submit through the Confex portal using session ID #8258:
https://icms.confex.com/icms/2027/prelim.cgi/Home/0