Imagine a prayer that goes on and on (and on and on), praising Mary in every imaginable way – her virtues, her role in salvation, her intercessory power – layered up with both Latin and the vernacular. That’s exactly what a sister of the women’s convent of Thalbach in Bregenz copied into her Prayerbook during the Counter-Reformation. This prayer isn’t merely words on a page. It's designed to be a rhythmic, repetitive, almost musical meditation intended to draw the devotee into an intimate encounter with Mary. Short vocative lines pile up while the regular Latin refrains echo repeatedly, creating a devotional experience that teaches both prayer-giver and her audience by the shaping of affect – through rhythm, phrasing, and structural repetition. What follows is a closer look at how this multi-section Marian prayer works, how it structures attention, and how it combines reflection, rhythm, and affect to bring the devotee closer to the Virgin.
In the last third of the Thalbach Prayerbook (Bregenz VLB Hs 17), there are ten folios devoted to a single multi-section prayer to the Virgin (fol. 237–247). It’s a rosary prayer, centered on eleven (!) recitations of ten statements each of the Ave Maria, plus another dozen at the very beginning, so by the end, the devotee will have spoken 122 of them.
In between, the compiler provides “meditations” in strophes of seven to ten lines, each offering anaphoristic variants of Mary’s virtues. Strophes 1–4 establish Mary’s status and role in salvation history (Queen, Virgin, New Covenant); strophes 5–9 emphasize her participatory suffering and intercessory power, and the collect at the end pivots to a direct intercessory “ask.” Thus, like many rosary prayers, the sequence of strophes adopted here creates a pedagogical rhythm. First the devotee experiences awe, then empathy, then personal petition, with the culmination in the Collect with its request for personal salvation.
To my ear, the framing of the prayer is much like a litany, in which the call-out to each of the saints ends each and every time with an “ora pro nobis,” pray for us. But here, instead of the “pray for us,” an ask, the prayerful punctuation at the end of each line serves as a reminder to Maria of her connected status with the divine. The phrase – adopted and repeated 84 times (plus another 122 times in the refrain) – comes from the Ave Maria itself, as Gabriel reveals to her that “the Lord is with thee” (der her[r] ist mit dir):
o kaiseryn und ain künigin aler künig der her ist mit dir
o du lob aler gelobiger sohn der her ist mit dir
o du aler übertreffenlichste künigin der himel der her ist mit dir
o aler tůgenden vol der her ist mit dir...
O empress and a queen of all rulers [kunig], the Lord is with you
O you tribute of the praiseworthy son, the Lord is with you
O you exquisite queen of heaven, the Lord is with you
O you who are full of all virtues, the Lord is with you...
In that first strophe, notice that the devotee repeatedly addresses Mary with the intimate “du” form; this is a Mary seen in deeply personal terms as an intimate of the prayer-giver. Moreover, the similar beginnings and endings of lines make for an almost meditative incantation. As we see further down, the prayer consists of slight variations on a set of common themes. One or perhaps two lines per stanza might vary the form, but once a stanza establishes a pattern, the other lines tend to reinforce it. (See Table 1, below)
The effect is like change-ringing in a bell tower, where a set of fixed patterns is subtly shifted with each repetition to create movement and variation within a strict structure. Each line both mirrors and modifies the last, so that the rhythm feels familiar yet never static, drawing the devotee’s attention deeper into the text. This interplay of repetition and variation turns the prayer into a dynamic, almost musical experience, in which the voice, the mind, and the imagination are guided through the nuances of Mary’s virtues and roles.
 |
| Table 1: Marian Attributes and Repetition Patterns in Der Herr ist mit dir (Thalbach Prayerbook, fol. 237ff) |
As Table 1 shows, the various strophes work their way through elements of the Virgin’s importance. First, she is important and highly placed, serving as empress, queen, intermediary (Strophe 1). She became so as a Virgin (Strophe 2). Her presence was predicted by the prophets, and can be analogized to the good things that sustain human existence – house, city, garden, fountain, fruit (Strophe 3). She is the beginning of the new covenant, as witnessed by the announcement of the Angel Gabriel (Strophe 4).
Here, the devotee is asked to pause and meditate on what that announcement of Gabriel meant. To support that contemplative moment, the vernacular translation of the Ave Maria is provided.
bis gegrußet vol genad der her ist mit dir / du bist gesegnet ob aler frowen und gesegnet ist die frucht dines lieb Jhesus cristus.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. / Blessed art thou among women, / and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus Christ
That becomes a moment of sectional pause as well, while the devotee recites two decades of Ave Marias, ten in Latin and another ten recapitulating the vernacular version.
Then the latter part of the prayer picks up Mary’s story with her role as mother (Strophe 5) and as co-sufferer or “Mitleiden” with Christ with implications for her salvific role (Strophe 6). She is that “Veritable Virgin” who witnessed the stages of Christ’s suffering, with his flogging, thorns, and crucifixion iterated each in a single line (Strophe 7). Plus, she is the mother who had to handle her own son’s body, who attended to its anointing and then was consoled through recognition of him as arisen again (Strophe 8), Thus, she is the veritable mother of the recognized Christ, positioned through events to intercede in his judgment (Strophe 9).
Having laid out the whys of Mary’s existence – her special status as Virgin, as new covenant with God, as enduring mother who walked the road of the Passion with her son – the devotee is now prepared for the Collect.
The collect, as expected, pivots to the intercessory ask: “ that you will shield me and protect me from the pain of eternal damnation and make me to be conveyed into the eternal joy of eternal bliss.” But before that, it amps up the rhythm of repetition with fifteen very short apostrophe lines:
o du gebenedieste / o du aler süsseste / o du aler tugenhaffigiste / o du aler erwirdigiste / o du aler senffmütigeste / o d[u] aler edleste / o du aler kostbariste… junckfrow maria
o you most blessed / o you all sweet / o you all-virtuous / o you all knowledgeable / o you all gentle / o you all noblest / o you all precious… Virgin Mary.
These short vocative lines, stacked one after another, build a kind of rhythmic crescendo, until at last Mary is called upon as “the giver of God now” and at the time of judgment, hence her capacity for intercession.
ASSESSMENT:
The use of vernacular alongside the familiar Latin refrain suggests a teaching and contemplative function for the Thalbach prayer. It seems designed to help the devotee internalize not only the words but also their meaning, a practice encouraged in late medieval lay devotion. Moreover, the prayer repeatedly reveals Mary as full of enumerated virtues, unfolding them in a rhythmic sequence that combines intimacy of address with theological weight. The prayer must also have been fun to write; one can imagine dreaming up lists of closely-related concepts about Mary and then sliding them around in the structure until they fit nicely.
Structurally, the prayer resonates with rosary practice while also standing apart from it in somewhat quirky ways. The eleven recitations of ten statements resemble the praying of multiple decades, though the Thalbach version is unusually elaborate, and yields 122 invocations in total. More striking still, the prayer suddenly shifts the devotee into the vernacular for part of her Hail Marys, only to return again to the standard Latin. This bilingual pivot is not typical of the rosary prayers I’ve seen, and it hints at a distinctive local or pedagogical aim.
Similarly, the alternation between Mary’s virtues and her life events recalls the early Dominican “Psalter of the Virgin,” in which repeated Hail Marys were paired with meditative reflection on her life (Winston-Allen). Yet the Thalbach prayer differs in its form: nearly every line concludes with “the Lord is with you,” creating a cumulative effect more akin to a litany than to a conventional rosary decade. The proliferation of epithets, brief apostrophe lines that acclaim Mary in superlative terms, further intensifies its litany-like quality. We hear nearly the same thing over and over and over again.
I see this prayer as a hybrid devotional tool. To my eye, the prayer functions both as rosary AND as vernacular meditation. Its repetition works on several levels. It reinforces memory, so that the words lodge themselves in the mind. It shapes affect, drawing the devotee into contemplative intimacy with the Virgin (du...du...du). And it creates an important verbal rhythm, guiding voice and body into patterned devotion, one which speeds up like an orchestral codetta at the end.
This prayer from the Thalbach Prayerbook thus reveals how rhythm, repetition, and affect interwove in late medieval piety. Prayer practice, as exemplified here, is more than a recitation of words. Instead, it employs rhythmic and formal structures to shape the voice, the mind, and the heart toward a more intimate knowledge of Mary and her intercessory power.
NOTE ON TRANSCRIPTION:
I follow the idiosyncratic spellings of the source, but supply punctuation in my translations.
RESOURCES:
Der Herr ist mit dir [INC: o kaiseryn und ain künigin aler künig der her ist mit dir EXPL: von dinem lieben sun Jhesu criste der da regirett mit got dem vatter und mit got dem hailigen gaist und du Junckfrow maria mit ym yn der ewigen glory amen.], from the Thalbach Prayerbook, Bregenz, Vorarlberger Landesbibliothek Hs 17, fol. 237–247.
Anne Winston-Allen, Stories of the Rose: The Making of the Rosary in the Middle Ages, Penn State UP, 1997.
