“I Sang with the Others”: Voice, Healing, and Margaret of Hungary

This is the first of several posts inspired by my summertime visit to Budapest’s Margaret Island, where the ruins of the medieval Dominican convent still preserve traces of the community in which Margaret of Hungary lived, prayed, and eventually became the focus of a thriving cult. I’m grateful to the Fyfe Faculty Excellence Fund, which supported the travel and research behind this work.

For a Dominican Sister, losing your voice meant losing more than speech. It meant losing your place in the sung services – a central part of the rhythms of religious life. In the thirteenth-century miracle accounts gathered to support Margaret of Hungary’s reputation for holiness, two stories (across three witnesses) tell of her restoring the ability to sing. Each begins with a multi-day sore and painful throat.

Margaret of Hungary (1242–1270), daughter of King Béla IV, lived as a Dominican nun in the convent on the island that now bears her name. The miracle stories recorded after her death offer rare glimpses not only of her cult, but also of the devotional and liturgical life of the women around her.

Dwell with that for a moment; consider strep throat, or tonsillitis, or the raging rawness of the Cold That Would Not Go Away. Pain, inability to eat, the lift of the shoulders as one tries to swallow. This is a human lived reality, in which the small irritation can be magnified, as the only, ONLY thing on your mind. No distractions, just the “ugh” of illness, mixed with the frustrations of being unable to do the work expected of you.

So there you are, a Dominican sister, unable to sing. You’re miserable. You’re mute. You’re unable to audibly join in, while all your Sisters are diligently doing their duty, singing the Liturgical Hours.

And in both these stories, the turning point comes right at the end of the liturgical day, when dusk descends and the sisters join together for Compline. The sick sister can be present, can hear, can pray – but she cannot add her voice to the sounds around her.

That’s where miracles happen.

The two women approach Margaret rather differently. Elizabeth, daughter of King Stephen V, makes her petition physically. Catherine, the convent’s cantrix, on the other hand, calls upon Margaret verbally, invoking Christ’s Passion and Margaret’s own tearful response to it.

Elizabeth actually goes to Margaret’s tomb. She puts her throat against it. As she does so, she petitions Margaret. The liturgical details matter: this is Compline on the Assumption while the Salve Regina is sung. And then, by Matins, her cure can be tested: “I was cured,” she reports, “and I sang with the others.”

The same pattern shapes Catherine’s account. After Compline she asks Margaret to heal her “so that I could sing and perform my office.” When she rises for Matins, she discovers that she’s cured. The pain is gone, her voice has returned, and she performs her office successfully. Both women also insist that their vocal affliction never returned.

Why Compline? We cannot know whether the end-of-day exhaustion mattered to either woman, but the timing is striking. In both stories the petition comes as one cycle of communal prayer closes, and the cure becomes apparent when the next begins.

These are also Sisters who think in terms of sacred networks. For Lady Elizabeth, the Marian connection is explicit, for she specifically mentions the Salve Regina as context for her petition. In fact, her moment of intercession is doubly Marian: it is the feast of the Assumption, and the sisters are singing the Salve Regina. Catherine, on the other hand, makes a different connection. She asks Margaret for help through the Passion of Christ, remembering how Margaret herself had listened to accounts of the Passion with tears. The two petitions thus call upon different memories of Margaret’s devotional life.

And then there’s the who. Both stories are about choir nuns, rather than lay sisters. Both are expected to contribute audibly to services, so the gap left by a missing voice mattered. Healing, in these accounts, means not simply feeling better but returning audibly to the community.

But one of the two stories – the one with two witnesses – is even more significant. For the sister who lost her power of audible prayer is none other than the cantrix Catherine, and the week is Holy Week, a time when sung services are central to the whole of the convent’s experiences. Her recovery, attested by herself and by her fellow nun, a Lady Candida in whom she confided, occurred between Compline of Maundy Thursday and Matins of Good Friday. The Cantrix, in other words, miraculously recovers her voice just in time to perform her Office in the middle of the Triduum, when the community’s liturgical demands are unusually intense.

Candida supplies something Catherine cannot: another pair of ears. She remembers Catherine unable to speak or sing, and then suddenly being able to do so. When Candida asks what happened, Catherine tells her—quietly, in the choir—that she had been healed after invoking Margaret. The cure has become audible.

To my eye (and ear!), Catherine’s story makes the stakes especially clear. She was not simply a nun who liked to sing; she was the convent’s cantrix, charged with leading others. A damaged throat therefore interrupted both her body and her office. And this is why her testimony and that of her witness matter: her cure was proven in the most practical and audible way possible: Catherine got up for Matins and was able to do her job.

In a community built around voices raised together, perhaps that is exactly what a miracle of healing should sound like.

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TESTIMONY

The three depositions behind this post are reproduced below, using the translation from Legenda vetus, Acta processus canonizationis, cited below.

Lady Elizabeth, daughter of King Stephen of Hungary of illustrious memory, a sister and nun of the said monastery on the Island in the Danube, (193ff, here p. 195-197)

“A year ago I had a terrible pain in my throat, so that I could hardly eat, and I couldn’t sing, and then I went to the tomb of the said Margaret and placed my throat upon her tomb, and I asked the blessed Margaret to cure and deliver me, and I was made healthy through the merits of saint Margaret herself.” When asked the month, she replied, “I don’t remember.” When asked the day, she replied, “The day of the Assumption of the Blessed Mary.” When asked the hour, she replied, “The hour of compline, while the Salve Regina was being sung.” When asked how many days she had that sore throat, she replied, “For two or three days.” When asked how long her soreness lasted after she placed her throat on the aforesaid sepulcher, as she said, she replied, “When I got up for matins, I was cured, and I sang with the others.” She also said that she [Margaret] used to visit the sisters and nuns when they were sick, and she was very attentive about doing for them whatever she could.”

Lady Catherine the cantrix, daughter of Lord Andrew of Várad, sister and nun of the same monastery, (379ff, here p. 387)

“One day at the Lord’s Supper, I was supposed to lead the choir, because I was the chief singer, and I had such a sore throat that it hurt terribly and I couldn’t sing, and then I asked this saint Margaret to heal me through her merits and the passion of Christ, which she tearfully used to hear expounded, so that I could sing and perform my office, and I said this after compline, and when I got up for matins, I was so healed and delivered, that I performed my office well.” When asked if there were others present at the time when she asked this of the blessed Margaret, as she said, she answered, “No.” When asked how many days she had that pain in her throat, as she said, she replied, “For four days.” When asked how many days she went without having that throat pain or something similar after she was delivered in this way, she replied, “I did not have that pain afterwards, nor have I had anything like it to this very day.” When asked if other sisters at the time knew she had the said pain, she replied, “Yes, Sister Candida.” When asked how many years it had been since she was cured, as she said, she replied, “Three.” When asked the month, she replied, “The month of Easter.”

Lady Candida, daughter of the late Lord Taurus of Gaura, a sister and nun of the same monastery, took the oath, (393ff) [Here, p. 401-3]

When asked about miracles, she said, “One of the sisters had such a sore throat that she couldn’t speak well or sing, and this condition lasted from Palm Sunday until the very early Friday morning, and then she began to sing, and when I asked her, ‘How can you sing? Are you cured?’ she replied, ‘I can sing well and I’ve been well and truly cured by calling on the name of the blessed Margaret.’” When asked the name of that sister who was ill in this way, she replied, “The cantrix Catherine, daughter of Andrew.” When asked if any other sisters knew about the said illness, she replied, “I don’t know.” When asked if any other sisters heard, when she asked how she had been cured, and what the said Catherine said to her, she replied, “No, because she was speaking softly into my ear.” When asked where they were at the time, she replied, “In the choir.” When asked how many years ago this was, she replied, “I don’t know for sure, but I think it is three years ago now.” When asked the month, she replied, “In the month of Easter.” When asked how long she had seen her thus delivered, as she said, she replied, “Until now.”

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RESOURCES

I have truly been enjoying having fun with the bilingual edition of Margaret’s miracles; I recommend it highly, and promise a return to its evidence in the weeks to come.

Legenda vetus, Acta processus canonizationis; et, Miracula Sanctae Margaritae de Hungaria = The oldest legend; Acts of the canonization process; and, Miracles of Saint Margaret of Hungary, edited by Ildikó Csepregi, Gábor Klaniczay and Bence Péterfi, translated by Ildikó Csepregi, Clifford Flanigan and Louis Perraud (Budapest, Hungary; New York, NY: Central European University Press, 2018).

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Guarding the Mouth: Speech and Silence in Thalbach’s 1479 Statutes

I started reading a set of Thalbach’s convent statutes and discovered that their late-fifteenth-century Provincial, Heinrich Karrer, was remarkably worried about women talking.

That’s perhaps an unfair way to put it—but not entirely unfair.

In 1479 Karrer, Provincial of the Upper German Franciscan province and Visitator General of the brothers and sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis, issued a new set of statutes for the women living at Thalbach in Bregenz. An earlier set of regulations had apparently not worked entirely as intended, so Karrer replaced it with something he considered more useful.

What caught my attention was what these new statutes regulate—and what they (mostly) do not.

There is very little here about reading. Nothing about study. Almost nothing about household labor. Prayer itself receives surprisingly little detailed attention. 

Instead, again and again, the statutes return to speech: when the sisters should be silent, what kinds of conversation they should avoid, what they may say to outsiders, how they may speak to one another, and what happens when words damage the peace or reputation of the house.

First,silence

The statutes begin predictably enough with worship. The sisters are to attend divine service diligently, especially Mass and preaching, unless illness or necessary work prevents them. Then Karrer moves almost immediately to silence:

Let all the sisters observe silence diligently in the morning, in the evening, and at the table. (Und das alle swesteren ir schwigen mörgens und öbendes und ob tische flißenklich haltent; und welche das an nottorft bricht, die sol vor tische sitzen.)

Break that silence without necessity and there’s a consequence: the offender must sit apart at table.

But this is not really a rule demanding silence all the time. The next provision makes that clearer. The sisters are to be prudent in “speech and conduct,” both inside and outside the house, and to avoid idle talk. Anyone who fails must confess not simply that she talked, but how often, in what way, and about what. The Mother then decides on a suitable penance.

And the regulation is communal. A sister who hears another breaking the rule and fails to report it receives the same punishment.

That last bit recurs often enough to matter. This is by prescript a self-regulating community. You’d better tattle if you see things going wrong.

Good sound, dangerous sound

To my eye (or ear), the contrast is not between sound and silence so much as between kinds of sound.

The very first sounds mentioned in the statutes are good ones: Mass and the preaching of God’s Word. The sisters should be there to hear them. Dangerous sounds come afterward: idle talk, private conversations, insults, accusations, gossip, contradiction.

That distinction makes sense within the broader Franciscan tradition.

The Third Order rule confirmed by Nicholas IV in Supra montem in 1289 imagined a religious life structured in part through hearing and speaking.

Let each strive, while the office of Mass is being celebrated and the word of preaching is being offered, to observe silence and to be intent upon prayer and the office.… (Studeat quilibet, dum Missae celebratur officium, et praedicationis verbum proponitur, servare silentium; orationi et officio sit intentus...

Brothers and sisters were to say the canonical Hours—or substitute Pater nosters if they could not—and attend Mass when possible. They were to hear preaching and exhortation. But during Mass and the homily they were also to observe silence and attend to prayer. The rule even warns about careless oaths made in ordinary speech, noting rather ruefully that slips happen when one talks a lot.

Silence, in other words, was not simply the absence of religious sound. It helped distinguish useful speech from useless speech, attentive hearing from distraction. Francesca Sbardella makes a related point in her study of silence in Catholic cloistered life: silence is not an empty space left when speech stops. It is a practiced condition through which speech, behavior, relationships, and religious identity are organized. And the rule thinks so too: unfortunate things tend to happen in much speaking (prout contingere in multiloqui consuevit).

That seems especially useful for Thalbach.

What words can do

Karrer seems intensely aware that words have consequences.

No sister is to have unauthorized “familiarity, conversation, or private interaction” with anyone, priest or layperson.

Furthermore, no sister shall have any familiarity, conversation, or private dealings with anyone, whether priest or layperson.… (Item und will auch daz keyne schwester kaynerlay fruntschaft noch gesprech noch haymlich mit nyemands hab, er sy priester oder lay..)

(Again, a sister who knows about such behavior and does not report it shares in the punishment. Self-regulating!)

Inside the house, the stakes rise further.

If one sister were to attack another’s honor—accusing her of theft or sexual misconduct, insulting her, calling her a liar, or cursing her—she must confess publicly before the Mother and the community, ask the injured sister’s forgiveness, and eat her next meal on the floor. (Shaming and visual set-asides reinforce speech rules, but no corporeal punishment is ever mentioned, except for food deprivation, which is mentioned for unauthorized jaunts outside of the convent and as part of the increasingly severe penalties for sowing discord within the convent community.)

Words directed upward are dangerous too. Insolent speech against the Mother receives a doubled penance. And speech does not need to stay inside the convent to cause harm. A sister who speaks maliciously to outsiders in a way that damages another sister or the reputation of the house is to be called to account and punished according to the harm—or even the potential harm—her words have caused. Once again, anyone who hears and conceals such speech may receive the same penalty.

The underlying concern is not difficult to see. Words can disrupt peace within the house. They can injure another sister’s honor. They can create suspicion around a woman’s relationships with men. And they can move beyond the convent walls, damaging the reputation of the community itself.

Speech travels.

Guard your mouth AND your ears

There is a wonderful late-medieval image that gives visual form to some of these anxieties.

[IMAGE: “The Crucified Monk,” Wellcome Collection, WMS 49, photo L0029361. CC BY.]

Almuth Seebohm discussed this image in her study “The Crucified Monk.” Around the figure are texts concerned with disciplining the senses and the body. One set of verses instructs the religious to guard speech, restrain anger, and metaphorically place a lock upon the mouth and a balance upon words.

Custodi visum vehementer comprime risum
Sis custos oris et habenam stringe furoris
>Ori pone seram verbis impone stateram
Ne quid confundas ne quid sine crimine fundas

Curb the urge to laugh; be the guardian of your speech and rein in your fury. Place a lock upon your mouth; set a balance upon your words, so that you cause no confusion nor utter anything blameworthy.

The image also draws on the biblical tradition of guarding both tongue and ears: “Keep your tongue from evil” (Psalm 33:14); “I have placed a guard over my mouth” (Psalm 38:2); and even the wonderfully prickly advice from Sirach 28:28 to “Hedge in thy ears with thorns, hear not a wicked tongue, and make doors and bars to thy mouth.”

What I like about the image in relation to Thalbach is that the discipline runs in both directions. You must govern what comes out of the mouth. But you must also govern what comes into the ear.

That is very nearly what Karrer’s statutes ask the sisters to do. A woman is responsible not simply for what she herself says, but sometimes for what she hears another woman say. Listening itself creates obligation.

Governing women’s speech

And here the statutes become particularly interesting to me.

There is nothing unusual about medieval religious rules valuing silence or warning against idle talk. Benedict had done both centuries earlier. Nor is a Franciscan concern with disciplined speech surprising. But at Thalbach, the issue becomes unusually concrete.

These statutes regulate women speaking to one another, women speaking to outsiders, women speaking privately to men, women insulting one another, women talking back to authority, women spreading damaging information, and women listening to one another’s prohibited speech.

It would be easy to turn that into a simple story about male authorities silencing women. Karrer was, after all, a male provincial laying down rules for a female community. Yet the statutes are more complicated than that – more nuanced, and more reflective of women’s own exercise of authority.

The Mother is repeatedly given discretion to judge offenses and assign punishment. Sisters are expected to admonish one another. They are responsible for noticing breaches and maintaining communal discipline. The system certainly governs women’s voices, but women themselves are also part of that governance.

Nor is the object silence for silence’s sake.

The convent was not imagined as acoustically empty. It contained Mass, preaching, prayer, confession, admonition, correction, and ordinary communication. Some speech was necessary. Some was holy. Some sustained communal life. The question was which words belonged.

Reading the statutes this way makes silence look less like the opposite of sound than one means of organizing a religious soundscape. What mattered was not simply whether a Thalbach sister spoke, but what she said, to whom, where, when, who heard it, and what her words might do.

That is a surprisingly large burden for a few spoken words to carry.

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Sources

Gerold Fussenegger, “Das Frauenkloster Thalbach bei Bregenz,” Alemania Franciscana Antiqua 9 (1963): 93–140; pp. 108-112 includes a transcription of the Thalbach statutes of 1479 that have been the basis for my assessment.

Nicholas IV, Supra montem (1289), Rule of the Brothers and Sisters of Penance. (This is a blog post; I used online copies today: a Latin text https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Supra_montem and the English translation from https://ofsgb.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Supra-Montem-1289-exNAFRA.pdf.)

Francesca Sbardella, “Embodying Silence: The Resilient Action of the Unspoken in Catholic Cloistered Life,” Studi e materiali di storia delle religioni 88/2 (2022): 494ff.

Almuth Seebohm, “The Crucified Monk,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 59 (1996), 61ff.

Translation note: Translations of the Thalbach statutes quoted above are mine, based on Fussenegger’s published transcription and checked against the original German wording.

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Diligent Devotion: Maria Euphrosina Vöglin’s Leadership at Thalbach: A later example of women exercising authority within the Thalbach community, complementing the 1479 statutes’ emphasis on discipline, oversight, and communal order.

The Blood Caught My Eye, But Love Dominated: The Prayer Vocabulary of Innsbruck FB 1118

When I opened the prayerbook, it was the gore that drew my attention first, as I mentioned in a previous post. That is hardly surprising. In Innsbruck FB 1118, Christ is bound, beaten, scourged, pierced, bloodied, abandoned, and repeatedly made to suffer in language vivid enough to provoke a modern “eww” reflex.

But once I stepped back from the most graphic passages and looked at the manuscript’s vocabulary as a whole, a different picture emerged. Blood appears forty-three times. Wound appears thirty-three times. Bitter appears thirty-one times. Yet the most common substantive words in this fifteenth-century Passion-centric prayerbook are not, in fact, words of violence. They are Lord, love, God, holy, heart, soul, eternal, and mercy.

That matters because in my view, frequency reveals something different from intensity. Graphic details may dominate the reader’s memory precisely because they are unusual, concrete, and difficult to ignore. But they do not necessarily dominate the manuscript’s devotional world. Love appears 117 times, far more often than blood, wound, or even sin. Mercy appears eighty-one times; grace fifty; peace forty-five; good forty-four; life forty-three; and joy thirty-one. The manuscript’s most startling images are embedded in a vocabulary of divine generosity, intimacy, and hope.

The same is true of the prayerbook’s anthropology. The body matters—body appears fifty times—but it is not treated as a prison or merely as a site of punishment. The heart appears ninety-eight times, the soul eighty-four, the mind forty-five, and the spirit forty-four. Such terms suggest an integrated devotional person: bodily, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually engaged all at the same time. The prayers do not simply ask the reader to contemplate Christ’s damaged flesh. They ask that her heart be changed, that her soul be released, that her mind be directed, and that her spirit join more closely to God. They ask, in other words, that she be acted upon to increase her own faith.

Even the vocabulary of suffering is usually oriented toward a particular outcome. Death appears eighty-seven times and suffer sixty-four, but redeem appears twenty-seven times, forgive thirty-four, grant forty-one, and offer forty-seven. Christ’s suffering, gruesome as it is, is not presented as pain for pain’s sake. It is repeatedly converted into mercy, pardon, protection, intercession, and transformation. The structure of the prayers makes that logic explicit: because Christ endured, the speaker asks that God now forgive; because Christ shed blood, a soul may be released; because Christ offered himself, the reader may offer herself in return.

The vocabulary of relationship is equally prominent. Father and Jesus each appear seventy-one times; beloved fifty-eight; Son forty-two; Mother twenty-nine; child twenty-five. This is not an emotionally bleak religious world populated only by sin, punishment, and fear. It is a familial and relational one. God is invoked as Father, Christ as beloved Lord and Son, Mary as mother, and the praying subject as one seeking incorporation into a sacred network of care. Even the repeated appeals to Christ’s Passion operate within this language of attachment. The prayers are gruesome, yes, but they are also intimate.

Word counts cannot by themselves tell us what a manuscript means. They flatten context, treat every occurrence as equivalent, and cannot distinguish a dominant theological concept from a repeated grammatical formula. Still, they offer a useful corrective to selective attention. The blood caught my eye, but upon deeper consideration love structures the manuscript more deeply. FB 1118 presents suffering as real, prolonged, and bodily; yet equally and importantly, it also insists that suffering will eventually open out toward mercy, grace, peace, life, and joy. Taken as a whole, this is not a faith obsessed with pain. It is a positive Catholic faith confident that pain can be remembered, offered, and ultimately transformed.

METHOD:

A complete transcription of Innsbruck FB 1118—including prayers, rubrics, reflections, and short treatises—was rendered into English with the assistance of Google Translate in July 2026. Passages central to my analysis were subsequently checked against the German transcription and revised as needed by the author.

The resulting English text served as the basis for this exploratory vocabulary assessment, in part because machine translation regularizes variant spellings of the Alemannic original. To be clear, the frequencies reported here describe the vocabulary of the translated text rather than providing a precise lexical analysis of the German original.

The translated text was uploaded to the word-cloud generator WordArt, with common stop words excluded. Word frequencies were then reviewed manually, with particular attention to emotionally charged vocabulary and to the relative prominence of words associated with suffering, sin, mercy, love, grace, peace, and joy. The results are intended as a broad indication of the manuscript’s devotional emphasis, not as a statistically rigorous linguistic analysis. As a rough cross-check, however, I also reviewed frequencies in the German transcription after consolidating obvious spelling variants; this produced the same broad pattern, with vocabulary of love, relationship, petition, salvation, and interior life appearing prominently alongside terms for suffering and death.

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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. 

 

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.