The Thalbach Prayerbook is not a tidy manuscript. It isn’t richly illuminated, and its pages don’t draw they eye with color and beauty the way we’ve come to expect from early modern devotional books. Instead, it is a deeply personal collection: copied mostly by a single female scribe in the late sixteenth century, filled with vernacular prayers and translated services, and clearly designed to sustain the “poor sinner” (sündarin) who gathered them together. Its very roughness makes it valuable, because it gives us a glimpse into the lived devotional practices of Bregenz during the Counter-Reformation.
One of the striking texts is the prayer to Mary as the Schmertzen muter—the Mother of Sorrows (fols. 90–92). The opening strophe lingers on Simeon’s prophecy in Luke 2:25–35: “a sword will pierce your very soul.” The text imagines Mary’s dread at hearing this prediction,and repeatedly asks Mary to help the devotee share in the pain of various stages of her story of loss.
This prayer is, to my eye, particularly important because it echoes the woodcut chosen as paste-down at the very front of the volume: Mary’s heart being pierced by multiple swords, a visual shorthand for the Seven Sorrows. Its placement is also telling—it appears as a single but extended prayer between two Marian services, following the Advent offices and preceding the standard weekday prayers to the Virgin. In other words, we encounter it within a systematized framework of devotion. That element of ritual repetition is reinforced internally by its structure: every strophe ends with the Pater Noster and the Ave Maria.
From there, the prayer walks through key moments of Mary’s suffering: losing the child Jesus in the temple, seeing him bound and beaten, watching him hoisted on the cross, and cradling him in death. The language is tender and anguished, but it is also functional. The prayer-giver suggests in strophe 3, for instance, that just as Mary sorrowed over Jesus’s captivity as he was beaten, she can help “protect me from the wickedness and vice of the evil spirit” (behalt mich vor der boßhait und läster der bößen gaist). Because Mary’s sorrows mirror the devotee’s struggles, empathy itself becomes salvific – a way to transform suffering into protection against evil.
What’s especially interesting to me in this context is the prayer’s ending. The penultimate strophe focuses on the individual, asking Mary to intercede for my most earnest soul and to help in “all my pain”, but the final petitions widen out to the collective: “release us from all our afflictions.”
du behaltest mynaller ermeste sel / … yn alem mynen schmerzen... // ... von aller unser trübsäl erlöß uns
This shift from “me” to “us” happens frequently in the Thalbach collection, by my impression, in about a third of the prayers. It suggests to me a devotional rhythm where private petition blends into communal concern, aligning the voice of an individual sinner with her monastic responsibilities to the wider prayer community. She’s praying for herself, in other words, but that prayer also addresses the needs of her peersbe they fellow monastics, fellow residents of Bregenz, or, as sometimes specified, “all believing souls.”
This prayer reinforces that shift from the personal to the communal intervention, for it is capped by a Collect that places Mary firmly in her intercessory role. The collect appeals to her “eingebornen Sohn”her only-begotten Son for mercy. In this way, the swords that pierce Mary’s heart do double duty: they are emblems of her individual grief, but also reminders that suffering binds a community together. The Thalbach Prayerbook, however humble in appearance, is saturated with this kind of imagery. Mary of Sorrows emerges as both intimate companion in suffering and powerful advocate before Christ, her pierced heart a channel through which the afflictions of “me” and “us” alike might be transformed.
NOTE ON TRANSCRIPTION:
I follow the idiosyncratic spellings of the source, but supply punctuation in my translations.
RESOURCES:
- Indulgence Prayer ...von dem schwert des scharffen todes dines kind criste [INC: ge[g]rütz sÿestu ain müter Jesu crist EXPL: so befiechen mir uns verschmäch nit unser gebett yn unser nottürfigkait aber von aller unser trübsäll erlöß uns du gesegnet Junckfrow maria amen.], from the Thalbach Prayerbook, Bregenz, Vorarlberger Landesbibliothek Hs 17, fol. 90-92.
- For a review of another prayer from the Thalbach Prayerbook, see https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2025/09/the-verbal-vocative-change-ringing.html
Among the many studies of the Seven Sorrows, see:
Cynthia J. Cyrus, “Printed Images in a Thalbach Manuscript Prayer-book of the Sixteenth Century.” Journal of the Early Book Society 23 (2020): 173–82.
Dagmar Eichberger, “Visualizing the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin: Early Woodcuts and Engravings in the Context of Netherlandish Confraternities,” in The Seven Sorrows Confraternity of Brussels: Drama, Ceremony, and Art Patronage (16th–17th Centuries), ed. Emily Thelen, Studies in European Urban History 37 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2015), 113–143.
Christiane Möller, Jacob Cornelisz. van Oostsanen und Doen Pietersz: Studien zur Zusammenarbeit zwischen Holzschneider und Drucker im Amsterdam des frühen 16. Jahrhunderts, Niederlande-Studien 34 (New York: Waxmann Verlag, 2005).
Carol M. Schuler, “The Seven Sorrows of the Virgin: Popular Culture and Cultic Imagery in Pre-Reformation Europe,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 21 (1992):5–28.
Carol M. Schuler, “The Sword of Compassion: Images of the Sorrowing Virgin in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art,” PhD diss, Columbia University, 1987.
