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| (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.
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.
