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

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.

---

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.

A Shared Devotional Grammar: Prayers after Communion

The devout sister reading one of Thalbach’s fancier prayerbooks, OENB 11750, had her choice of several prayers after she received the sacrament at mass. Five options are given, each with its own take on what the sacrament actually meant. The first reflects on the act of reception itself, the second draws on nature imagery, while the remaining three turn toward Christological belief, the Trinity, and thanksgiving to the Father.

(1) O dise empfengknus dess Zartten waren Fronleichnus vnnd koſtharlichen bluotts

        O this reception of the tender, true Body and precious Blood of the Lord

(2) O Du ware speis der Engell O Du/o wares himelbrot der Ellendenn Menschenn

        O You true food of the angels, O You, O true heavenly bread of wretched mankind

(3) HErr Jesu Christe Jch glaub das Tich dich waren gott vnd menſch eim empfangen hab

        Lord Jesus Christ, I believe that I have truly received You, true God and man

(4) O Du Edle Driualtigkeit las dir wolgefallen

        O noble Trinity, be well pleased

(5) Danckh dir millter Vatter. Wurdiger herr vnd barmhertziger Gott

        I thank You, gracious Father, worthy Lord and merciful God

That second prayer is why I’m here today. How lovely that the experiential world of trees, sun, food and spiritual grace mingle together in a meditative mix of high highs and low lows.

TEXT (which starts with a 3-line drop cap initial):

O Du ware speis der Engell O Dů
wares himelbrot der Ellendenn
Menschenn in der wüste des Jamerthals
O du Liechter glantz / der ewigen Clarenn
Súnnen O du hoher Cederbaúm, wie
hastu dich genaigt zu mir armes würmlin,
Nur beger ich von allem himlischen heer,
Das si mir Gott helffenn bitten dancken,
der groſen gnad die gott mit mir armē ſinder
gewurckt hat. Amen.

O You true food of the angels,
O You, true bread of heaven for wretched
people in the wilderness of the valley of sorrow,
O You bright radiance of the eternal, clear Sun,
O You tall cedar tree, how
have You inclined Yourself to me, a poor worm?
I only desire of all the heavenly host
that they help me to pray and give thanks to God
for the great grace that God has bestowed upon me,
a poor sinner. Amen.

Having received the sacrament, the food is both tangible and spiritual; a miracle and a metaphor. Christ is the food of the angels, heavenly sustenance provided through sacramental miracle to the wretched here on earth. People, in contrast to angels, are wretched: they are in valleys, in shade or darkness, in wildernesses. The sacrament, however, reminds the devotee of the “eternal clear sun,” moving her attention from shade to the strength of the towering tree.

And, of course, that tall cedar tree of mid-prayer calls on biblical resonances. Tall, sweet-smelling, beautiful, strong: the tree is a building material, the stuff of temples and noble dwellings, an adornment along river banks, the wealth of nature that can be evoked as landscape. Here, the sacrament as cedar “inclines” toward the penitent whose salvation comes from Christ’s sacrifice on a wooden cross. The body bent, the tree “inclined”: the prayer is curiously evoking the imperviousness of cedar wood to the “worm,” poor worm, who is also the speaker herself, seeking salvation. I think there’s likely a resonance of the voluntary nature of the passion here: Christ accepted the need of sacrifice to save the very essence of the poor. He “leans in” to support and to salvage the struggling “worm” of humanity. The prayer’s opposites -- food and wilderness, shade and radiance, wood and worm – swing us back and forth from grace to undeservingness and back.

The prayer shifts at this junction, however, and the angels who have dwelt naturally with Christ’s heavenly substance are asked to support those for whom he chose the sacrificial path. The very angels of the start of the prayer who live in a higher realm are to join the devotee in giving thanks to God for the gift of grace.

This is an attractive set of nature images – a rich image-bank for the communicant as she considers the sacramental experience from multiple angles. Thus, it’s hardly a surprise that the prayer was not peculiar to Thalbach; it crops up in a variety of sources. This prayer belongs to a known complex of companion texts, an array of a dozen prayers that have interlinking concordances. What becomes interesting in comparison is not (just) that the complex exists (see HAIMERL or KORNRUMPF), but how it works. Curiously, its constituent members vary, but the internal order for the complex remains strikingly stable. Haimerl noted the presence of the complex in 1952, but his presentation – a dense listing of prayer incipits relegated to footnotes – disguises its organizational logic. To my eye, there is a marked stability-with-variability that characterizes this set of post-sacrament prayers.

The full set typically starts with prayers of preparation, the devotee readying him- or herself for communion. For instance:

“O Milter guttiger Herre Ihesu christe. Ich pin nicht wirdig das ich heiß dein kint oder creatur. Vnd das du eingeest In mein hawß” -- O gracious, kind Lord Jesus Christ, I am not worthy to be called Your child or creature, nor for You to enter my house...(quoted here from its Cgm 127 instance).

The question of spiritual need and the common trope of unworthiness that is nevertheless redeemed in the act is rehearsed and reinforced. There is then a procedural gap in prayer as the devotee becomes the communicant, and the set picks up with what we will take as our focus, they prayers designated for “after taking the sacrament,” typically highlighted through rubric.

Here is where the patterning shows the adaptability of manuscript copying. Across half-a-dozen manuscripts which share a concordance with the Thalbach prayer, we see a range of solutions for “what to include,” showing that the prayers are not actually circulating as a fixed suite. No surviving complex contains every option, and the individual collections vary in length and selection. But all of them operate under the same idea-logic, as shown in the markedly stable performative sequence that emerges.

Ordered listing of prayers after sacrament from six 15th-16th c prayerbooks; blank cells are for alignment

That is to say: these prayers may not come as a completed unit, but neither are they arranged randomly. Comparison shows that this complex works less like a fixed textual cycle than like an ordered repertoire. Across the witnesses, they appear in a remarkably stable performative order: praise and reception come first; prayers reflecting on the meaning of the Eucharist follow; belief and a specifically Trinitarian address come next; thanksgiving follows reflection and affirmation; petition comes afterward; and Marian intercession, when present, comes last. Individual books can omit stages, but they do not jumble them.

The comparison therefore suggests something more sophisticated than either a single transmitted prayer cycle or a loose anthology. These texts circulated as a repertoire of possible devotional actions, with an understood sequence even when only some of its parts were selected. A compiler could expand or contract the sequence, but its basic choreography remained recognizable. One might move directly from reception to the “true food of the angels” prayer, then to belief, Trinity, and thanksgiving, as in the Thalbach manuscript. Another might add praise before reception, or petitions and Marian prayer afterward. What remains stable is not the membership of the group but its devotional logic. The complex functions not as a fixed cycle, but as a flexible repertoire whose devotional order remains stable even as compilers shorten, extend, and reshape it.

That matters for understanding the five prayers in ÖNB 11750. They are presented as choices (“Ein anders schon gebet”: another beautiful prayer) , but they are not merely five interchangeable reflections after Communion. Together they occupy successive positions within a broader pattern of Eucharistic devotion: first the communicant receives, then interprets what has happened, articulates belief, turns toward the Trinity, and gives her thanks. The Thalbach compiler, in other words, has produced a compact version of a much larger devotional choreography.

And the “true food of the angels” prayer sits at a particularly stable point within that choreography. It appears in every complex in the comparison, always after reception or an equivalent preparatory opening and before thanksgiving or petition. Its imagery of food, sun, cedar, worm, grace, and heavenly assistance grounds the devotee in a succession of images. In so doing, it helps the communicant dwell on the disproportion at the heart of the sacrament: heavenly food given to the wretched, radiance entering a valley, lofty cedar bending toward the worm.

Perhaps that explains this prayer’s stability amidst the variability of this complex of post-communion prayers. It is retained for the job that it does, for its work of centering spiritual experience in an observable view of everyday landscape. And, if the prayer gives the communicant a landscape in which to understand the sacrament, the prayerbook gives her a path through it.

And that is today’s take-away. A prayerbook does more than preserve words. It gives shape to the communicant’s movement through the sacrament, using a widely shared devotional grammar to create a particular path through the experience.

 

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WANT TO KNOW MORE?

• On another post-communion meditation from Thalbach
• On a Segen from the same manuscript (ÖNB 11750)
• Prayer practices as repetition with a purpose

MANUSCRIPT DETAILS AND SOURCES OF INFORMATION:

• OENB Cod. 11750, fol. 28r: an ornate Thalbach prayerbook from the late 16^th century; the prayers for after the sacrament come after an array of preparation *for* the sacrament. More details available from the author as needed.
• Beinecke Ms 28 (Germany, 1513), ff. 93v-98r, a prayerbook written in 1513 at the Benedictine monastery of Tegernsee, by Melchior Wigg (alias Bruder Paulus). https://pre1600ms.beinecke.library.yale.edu/docs/pre1600.ms028.htm
• Cgm 127, dated 1476 and likely for the Nuremberg St Katharinakloster, where, as Haimerl points out, it fits in a larger cycle of communion prayers by Heinrich Seuse and the so-called “St Bernhard’s Cursus” (Franz Xavier HAIMERL, Mittelalterliche Frömmigkeit im Spiegel der Gebetbuchliteratur Süddeutschlands, Münchener Theologische Studien I, 4 (München 1952), p. 48 n247).
• Cgm 165, dated 1510,, copied by M. R. (see fol. 318r), and belonged to “Dienerin” Elisabeth Röbin (HAIMERL p. 53 n267). Here again it, as Haimerl explains, Suso’s communion prayer is included in a larger group of prayers that closely matches the corresponding group in the other manuscript and serves the same purpose.
• The German Hortulus has a section of such prayers (HAIMERL p. 143 n897 and CYRUS Seelengartlein inventory). I have written separately about the Seelengartlein as a prayer collection.
• Augsburg, Cod. III.1.8º 6, fol. 159^v–160^v , discussed in Karin SCHNEIDER, Die Handschriften der Universitätsbibliothek Augsburg; Reihe 2: Die deutschen Handschriften; Bd. 1: Deutsche mittelalterliche Handschriften der Universitätsbibliothek Augsburg: die Siganturengruppen Cod. I. 3 und Cod. III. 1 (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz 1988)
• For further concordances for this widespread prayer-group, see Gisela KORNRUMPF and Paul-Gerhard VÖLKER: Die deutschen mittelalterlichen Handschriften der Universitätsbibliothek München (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1968), p. 282: https://bilder.manuscripta-mediaevalia.de/bilder/hs-bilder/k/HSK0051_b282.jpg

Seven Times a Day: Prayer as Humane Practice

One of the things that shows up again and again in early devotional books is instruction that feels, at first glance, almost excessive.

“…und bett das gebet ze vii malen ain tag… also an den vii tagen…”
(“…and pray the prayer seven times in one day… and so across the seven days…”)

Say this prayer seven times.
Do this (described action) for seven days.
Add seven Ave Marias.
Repeat it again tomorrow.

And again.

If you’ve never spent time with this kind of prayerbook material, it can feel like a kind of spiritual overkill. Surely once would do? Doesn’t sincerity matter more than counting?

But the more time I spend with these books, the more I think that repetition is not the excess. It’s the point.

In one section I’ve been working through recently, the instructions are precise and insistent: the prayer is to be performed multiple times a day, across a structured sequence of days, with additional prayers layered in. It is not simply said – it is kept in mind as active practice. Maintained. Carried forward.

“wer dis nachgeschriben gebett ain gantzes iar spricht…”
(“whoever says this written prayer for a whole year…”)

What’s going on here is not just devotion. It’s a kind of sacred timekeeping. Repetition, in this context, does something very particular: it organizes the day. It creates a rhythm that the body can learn: Stand. Kneel. Speak. Repeat. Rinse and repeat tomorrow.

“…sprich vii ave maria stend und knüw…”
(“…say seven Ave Maria, standing and kneeling…”)

These actions sculpt reliability, less by adding than by uncovering. (I’m thinking here of Michelangelo, releasing the sculpture from the stone.) Coming back to the same kind of prayer hones the inner person in an act of “social becoming,” crafting a prayer-centered persona which is the reader’s presumed ideal.

This matters because late medieval devotion – especially outside strictly regulated liturgical settings – has a problem to solve. How do you ensure that prayer actually happens? Not once, not in a moment of crisis, but consistently, over time?

Repetition is one answer. It’s the medieval equivalent of habit-stacking.

Not because people are forgetful (though they are), and not because God needs reminding (He does not), but because *practice needs structure*. A prayer said once is an event. A prayer said seven times a day becomes a habit. A prayer repeated across days becomes part of the fabric of life.

There’s also a sonic dimension to this that I don’t think we pay enough attention to. A single utterance disappears almost as soon as it is spoken. But repetition accumulates. It lingers. It fills space – not just physically, but socially. If multiple people are engaged in similar cycles of prayer, the result is not isolated sound, but patterned sound.

You start to get something like a devotional soundscape.

And that soundscape? Not grand or monumental. It’s small-scale, iterative, almost backgrounded. But it is persistent. It marks time as surely as bells do – just on a different register.

Repetition also does something else: it redistributes effort. If a single, perfectly attentive prayer is hard to sustain (and it is), then repetition allows for fluctuation. Some iterations will be distracted. Some will be rushed. Some will “land.” The concern is real; the scribe-compiler repeatedly reminds the reader that attitude matters:

“…ob mit andacht…”
(“…if [it is done] with devotion…”)

Attention and devotion can wax and wane; structured prayer – cycles of repetition – absorbs that variation so the cumulative effort preserves the necessary attitude.

I find this to be a very humane system. It doesn’t require perfection. It only requires return.

And then there’s the number itself: seven. Seven days. Seven repetitions. Seven Ave Maria.

This is not arbitrary, of course. It resonates with biblical time (creation, completion), with liturgical cycles, with long-standing symbolic structures. But in practice, it also functions as a manageable unit. Neither endless nor trivial. Just enough to feel like something has been properly fulfilled.

Enough to count.

“…so wirstu erhört und erlöst uff aller dinen not…”
(“…then you will be heard and released from all your need…”)

So when we see these instructions – repeat this prayer seven times a day, for seven days – it’s tempting to read them as quantitative, even mechanical.

But I’m increasingly convinced that what’s at stake here is not quantity, but persistence.

These repeated forms take something inherently fleeting – spoken prayer – and embed it within a set of temporal and bodily structures that allow it to endure: across the day, across the week, across the community that performs it.

These forms do so not by heightening a single utterance, but by distributing it.

Repetition, in sum, is not excess. It is a technology for making prayer last.

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WORKS CITED

All prayer excerpts come from VLB Hs 17, the Thalbach Sister’s Prayerbook, fols. 142-149. This section contains a prayer for sorrow and worry; the prayer "Stand auf"; a Prayer of St Bernard; the Prayer “In gotes namen”; a wonky version of the Golden Crown Prayer; a prayer in four sections to ULF (Mary) to be said on Fridays; a morning greeting to the ULF; and a prayer to Christ, O her jesu christe des ůbersten vatters sun.