Poems from a Very Long Prayerbook(TM)

After hours and hours immersed in the Very Long Prayerbook^TM from the 16^th century that I’ll be speaking on at the Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo this year, I thought a little leavening -- something that WASN’T a description of lines (Curved? Straight? Red? Black?), crosses (marginal, interlineal, in-line, red, black) and prayer structures -- was in order. As yeast is to bread, so is poetry to the brain, right?

So here’s to Sunday’s completion of the (urrrrrrrrgh) 871-line data table, which should provide me delights in the week to come.

For now, here’s a glimpse of what’s been on my mind, translated into end-of-work-cycle poetry:

LIMRICK

There once was a scholar at work
Who thought that her scribe was a jerk:
She’d no sense of style
And her hand? simply vile
But still, to have data’s a perk!

CINQUAIN

Circles
Drawing the eye
Calling out what matters
Attending to the audible
Now mute

TANKA

End-of-line spaces;
Overlining weighty words;
Rubrics and titles
She wants us to understand
And care for her chosen prayers.

Back to the prayerbook tomorrow. Today, though, the data table can rest -- and so can I. Is that the garden I hear calling?

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.

---

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.

Discovering Johannes Nider on the fly: A binding fragment from Thalbach

Every archival journey has its moments of mystery. One of those dropped in my lap this week. Late last year, one of the Thalbach library volumes was digitized (yay!), and made its way to my attention thanks to a very helpful librarian. (Andrea Kollinger of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum is my “thank you” of the week!)

The volume itself has now entered my “to-do” stack, but as a curious nerd, I did have to open the digital link and glance at the volume to see what state it was in.

And, happily for me, it had paste-down flyleaves – some old folio something-or-other in dense Latin with all those chewy abbreviations that allow for efficient text rendition, if not always the most fluent reading.

Front Flyleaf, GNM 22273

The type is the dense, angular Gothic used in many incunable theological folios – compact, heavily abbreviated, and clearly meant for readers already fluent in the conventions of scholastic Latin.

Okay, I love a challenge. And it’s spring break, so I can play with my material if I want to, right? And so I launched a journey of more hours than it should have been.

A few words jumped out at me immediately: scandalum, peccatum, ignorans. Clearly in the theology orbit. But what theology, and from where?

This kind of work is always a mixture of frustrating and tantalizing. As you can see from the image, the page was trimmed down – just half the folio sheet – and parts of the first column had been effaced at some point in the book’s journey. So one winds up with fragments of a fragment to work from, and a chance to practice one’s transcription skills.

A quick flip to the back fly showed more of the same.

Back Flyleaf, GNM 22273

Still two columns, no helpful headers (sigh), no big paragraph marks or drop caps or other orientation marks. Well, there’s that marginal “E.” So, probably two fragments from the same folio book, and some kind of marginal reference system. (It took me an embarrassingly long time to notice the I/J in the margin of the front fly. I was distracted by the Latin.)

The text was organized as a scholastic discussion: questions introduced with phrases like An autem… and Dubitat secundo…, followed by tightly argued distinctions. Elsewhere the text referred to examples from Scripture – including the familiar Pauline warning about food that might cause a weaker Christian to stumble.

All of that pointed toward a very specific intellectual world: the dense, systematic moral theology taught in late-medieval universities and religious orders. The fragment clearly belonged to a large theological folio, the kind of book used for teaching and preaching rather than private devotion. But which one?

That question turned out to be the beginning of a small detective story.

DETERMINING CONTENT

The first step with a fragment like this is simply to slow down and read what survives. Even when the page is incomplete, scholastic texts tend to give themselves away through their habits: recurring vocabulary, familiar examples, and the logical scaffolding of argument.

In this case, several phrases began to stand out as I worked through the abbreviations. The text discussed “scandalum activum” and “scandalum passivum”, distinguishing between the act of leading another person into sin and the act of taking scandal from something done by another. It cited the Pauline warning: “Si propter cibum frater tuus contristatur, iam non secundum caritatem ambulas” – if your brother is grieved because of food, you are no longer walking according to charity. There was also the classic example about eating meat sacrificed to idols in front of weaker Christians.

If that sounds familiar, it should. These are standard examples in the medieval theological discussion of scandal, a topic that runs through the moral theology tradition descending from Thomas Aquinas. The fragment also asked a question about ignorance – “Cum omissio sciendi sit peccatum…” – and went on to discuss when failing to know something might itself be sinful. Again, very much in the Thomistic moral-theology orbit.

The structure reinforced that impression. There were a couple of slightly larger cue words, “An autem,” and “Dubitat,” which signaled the start of a formal question, followed by argument and resolution. And those marginal letters fitted with this type of writing: best guess was a scholastic teaching text, the kind used in classrooms and by preachers preparing sermons. Maybe not the kind of devotional reading that was most common in the Thalbach library, but not completely out of character either.

So far, so good. But where to go from here? “Scholastic teaching text” covers a very large swath of early printed books, and I do mean very large. The later Middle Ages produced a small mountain of theological compendia, and many of them summarized or adapted Aquinas. Some were organized by topics such as sin or virtue; others followed the Ten Commandments; still others took the form of alphabetical confessor’s manuals. All of them could look, at first glance, rather like this fragment.

My first guesses followed that logic. Perhaps the leaf came from a Dominican moral-theology summa such as the widely printed works associated with Antoninus of Florence. Or from another scholastic digest circulating in the late fifteenth century. The typography – that dense two-column Gothic type I mentioned above – certainly suggested a large theological folio of the incunable period. And Fechter (Inkunabeln) noted only that it was a fragment of a moral-theological text. Hmmm, that’s not very specific.

But guesses only get you so far. At some point, one has to start matching words on the page with words in actual books. And that meant turning the fragment’s surviving phrases into search clues and seeing where they led.

BREAKTHROUGH!

This is where the detective work became a little more methodical. With fragments, the trick is to find a phrase distinctive enough to search, but not so damaged by abbreviations that it disappears in transcription. Scholastic Latin can actually be helpful here: its formulas repeat across texts, but the exact phrasing often remains recognizable.

One of the lines that caught my eye early on was the question about ignorance: “Cum omissio sciendi sit peccatum…” Another promising lead was the formulation of the problem of scandal: “An autem scandalum sit speciale peccatum vel generale.” These phrases were long enough to be distinctive, but common enough in moral-theological discussions that they might turn up somewhere searchable.

So I started doing what scholars increasingly do with fragments: turning bits of Latin into search strings and seeing what the digitized book world would give back.

At first, the results pointed broadly in the direction I expected: Thomistic moral theology, discussions of scandal, questions about ignorance and culpability. But then one of the searches landed on something more specific – a passage that looked suspiciously familiar, not just in topic but in the sequence of arguments.

The text belonged to the Dominican theologian Johannes Nider, in his Praeceptorium divinae legis (often also called the Expositio Decalogi). Nider organized this work as a commentary on the Ten Commandments, and within each commandment he developed a series of scholastic questions about moral life. When I looked more closely, the match became unmistakable.

NERD ALERT: When I’m working with a just-matched text, I work forward and backward from my new-found phrase. Particularly given all of the abbreviations in my flyleaf fragments, it’s helpful to work through the more spelled-out text and do the matching. Being a color nerd, I do that by taking images of the text and its match, and highlighting the match – first match is always in yellow in my process – to see the extent of the parallel. This is helpful – earlier in the research journey I’d actually matched a passage to Aquinas himself, but that moment of joy soon dissipated as I realized that unless someone’s paraphrase had gotten out of hand, it was actually a passage citing Aquinas as authority, and not an actual ID to my text. Patience is a virtue. When I did get a hit, the yellow extended backwards, and backwards again across a couple of different screenshots. We definitely had a match.

Also in nerd-dom: when I moved to the back fly, I was cautiously optimistic that I might have a single folio sheet cut into two pieces, but I use a different highlighting (blue) until I match the sections. That was a no-go; I did find the text of the back fly in the same book, but it was NOT in the same section – it was several gatherings away.

The fragment from the front flyleaf corresponds to Nider’s Praeceptum Nonum, chapter III, discussing the nature of scandal. The back flyleaf comes from Praeceptum Quintum, chapter XIII, dealing with related moral questions about ignorance and culpability. In other words, both scraps derive from the same book – a large scholastic folio – even though they preserve pieces from different parts of it.

That also explains why the fragments look the way they do. The binder who reused the pages was not preserving a coherent leaf, but simply cutting up a worn-out theological volume and using the pieces where they were structurally useful. What survives in the binding is therefore not a single continuous page, but two scraps from different leaves of the same discarded book. I can live with that.

Once the identification clicked, the rest of the puzzle fell into place. The typography matches what we would expect for an incunable or very early sixteenth-century printing of Nider’s work: dense two-column Gothic type, heavy abbreviations, and just enough typographic cues – An autem, Dubitat – to guide the reader through the scholastic argument. What had looked at first like an anonymous piece of dense Latin suddenly resolved itself into a recognizable voice from the late medieval Dominican-orbit classroom.

WHAT’S THIS DOING AT THALBACH?

Identifying the fragment raises the question: who was Johannes Nider, and what would a book like this have meant in the world around Thalbach?

Johannes Nider (c. 1380–1438) was a Dominican reformer, university teacher, and prolific writer. His works circulated widely across fifteenth-century Europe, and – importantly – had an influence outside of the Dominican Order. In the present day, he’s most famous for the Formicarius, since witch trials are an evergreen source of fascination. (For the record, the Praeceptorium is NOT about witches! And I suspect Nider might be disappointed that “witch trials” rather than “intellectual breadth and prowess” became his claim to fame, but maybe that’s just me.)

Nider taught theology at Vienna and Basel and was closely connected to the reform movements within the Dominican Order and, by extension, with the broader currents of ecclesiastical reform in the decades surrounding the Council of Basel. His writings were practical as well as intellectual, meant to help clergy and religious communities think clearly about the moral and pastoral problems of Christian life.

The Praeceptorium divinae legis belongs squarely in that world of applied theology. It is organized as an exposition of the Ten Commandments, and within each commandment Nider develops a sequence of scholastic questions: what constitutes sin, what causes moral harm, when ignorance excuses responsibility, when it does not. The text is deeply shaped by the theological tradition of Thomas Aquinas, but its purpose is not simply academic commentary. Works like this functioned as teaching tools, helping preachers, confessors, and monastics in general reason through the moral complexities they encountered in pastoral care.

In other words, this was not a devotional book for private reading. It was a working manual for theological thinking – the sort of book used in classrooms, study circles, or by clergy preparing sermons and confessional guidance.

That context makes the fragment especially interesting for Thalbach. The library there, as far as we can reconstruct it, leaned heavily toward vernacular devotional literature: prayerbooks, saints’ lives, sermons, and spiritual reflections. A dense Latin scholastic folio like Nider’s stands somewhat apart from that landscape. It represents the learned theological infrastructure that supported the devotional world we see more clearly in the surviving books.

In practice, a text like the Praeceptorium could have been used by the clerical figures connected with the community – chaplains, confessors, visiting preachers – or perhaps even educated members of the religious house itself, since the sisters read enough to acquire a quite respectable-sized library. The sisters of Thalbach did not live in an intellectual vacuum; their devotional life was shaped by pastoral instruction, preaching, and sacramental guidance that drew on exactly this kind of moral theology. To the sisters, Nider’s discussions of scandal, ignorance, and responsibility would not have been abstract puzzles. Rather, they represent attempts to map the moral terrain of everyday Christian life: how one’s actions affect others, when a mistake becomes a sin, how responsibility is understood.

Moreover, thanks to the always-helpful Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke, we know from surviving incunables that Nider’s Praeceptorium was owned by at least fourteen Franciscan houses, so Thalbach’s connection to the book is not an anomaly, but rather part of a broader pattern in the circulation of Nider’s ideas. (https://www.gesamtkatalogderwiegendrucke.de/, known familiarly as GW.)

Seen from that perspective, the fragment becomes more than a curiosity tucked into a binding. It offers a small glimpse of the intellectual toolkit of a late-medieval religious community.

NERDS WANT TO KNOW

You aren’t really done with an incunable identification, of course, until you know when and where the item was published. Here’s where a bit of brute force comes in. Since the typeface looked early (all those angles, and the heavy abbreviation), I was pretty sure the copy was late 15^th century. For that, the GW is the place to start. Look up the author, click through to the list of published works, and then just plow through the printed candidates until you get a match. I decided to use the front fly (Praeceptum Nonum, chapter III) simply because it was close enough to the volume’s end to make navigating relatively easy. Yes, it meant I was checking bottom-of-page and end-of-line, but that’s just as good as beginnings when you’re looking for a typographical match. I made myself a quick cheat-sheet card with the text for the bottom of the two columns and clicked through editions. It’s easy to eliminate the single-column printings, and eventually (TAH-DAH!) I found it. My Thalbach fragments (and they are mine, now that I’ve spent this much time on them!) turn out to be pages from the Basel printing of 1481: M26911 Nider, Johannes: Praeceptorium divinae legis. Basel: [Johann Amerbach], 1481. 2°:

Comparison 1 of Darmstadt and Thalbach copies of Nider's Praeceporium

Starts and ends of lines match; the larger type for “Dubitat'” is a confirmation; the marginal I/J is there. The Darmstadt copy got some rubricating that the Thalbach version lacks, but those kinds of differences are post-production. Confirmation of the shared identity comes with the back flyleaves:

Comparison 2 of Darmstadt and Thalbach copies of Nider's Praeceporium

Again, larger type for “An autem”; a shared marginal letter; starts and ends of lines align; abbreviations are shared: BING BING BING we have a match!

WHY IN THE FLY?

And then, of course, we need to grapple with the afterlife of the book itself. By the sixteenth century, works like Nider’s were gradually superseded by newer theological manuals. Not only do Nider editions drop off precipitously at the turn of the 16^th century, the large scholastic folio volumes also seem to go out of style. Thus, these “old fashioned” volumes became expendable, especially in smaller libraries. It’s a case of “use then re-use”: when binders needed sturdy paper to reinforce a book’s spine or flyleaves, an old theological volume provided excellent raw material. The leaves that once carried Nider’s careful distinctions about scandal and ignorance were cut up, pasted into a binding, and sat around as structural supports for a quite different text doing structural work for centuries.

The fragments from Nider’s book now serve as the pastedown flyleaves of a much smaller devotional work: Ludwig Moser’s Bereitung zum heiligen Sakrament, printed in Basel around 1493 by Michael Furter. This little octavo book offers preparation, in German, for receiving the Eucharist—the kind of spiritual guidance meant for personal devotion and practical religious life. Different in language, different in audience, and physically different too: Nider’s work circulated in large folio volumes, while Moser’s book is a compact octavo, designed to be handled and read easily. The two texts almost illustrate a miniature map of late-medieval religious culture. On the one hand, we find the scholastic theology of the university and the religious orders, where moral problems are dissected through carefully structured questions and distinctions. On the other hand, we have the vernacular devotional literature that translated those theological concerns into forms accessible to a wider religious readership.

Perhaps this should serve as a cautionary tale. We tend to look at Thalbach’s intellectual world from the perspective of the inventory of its book collection upon dissolution in 1783 (Fechter, Neuhauser). Of course, the books listed there do provide a wonderful glimpse into the interests and intellectual habits of the sisters. But those are the books that made it through and survived.

Piecing together a history that includes the books that “didn’t make it” – those carved up into flyleaf fragments, those mentioned only in archival records, those cut into tiny binding scraps to hold other books together – adds important details to the Thalbach story. It shows us that intellectual tastes change: that changes of liturgical practice or scholastic habits could render books obsolete. But those fragments also tell us that once-upon-a-time, Thalbach readers too were interested in the world of scholastic considerations of how best to live a moral life.

As resources such as the GW and https://fragmentarium.ms/ have made obvious, fragments are not merely accidents of survival. They serve as valuable witnesses to the circulation of texts and ideas. In other words, even a hard-to-decipher bit of Latin text on a flyleaf can tell us something important about the intellectual worlds of the past.

WORKS CITED

GNM 22273: Nürnberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Inc. 22273: Ludwig Moser: Bereitung zum heiligen Sakrament. [Basel: Michael Furter, um 1493]. 8°. https://dlib.gnm.de/item/8Inc22273. A Thalbach incunable.

GW M26911: Nider, Johannes: Praeceptorium divinae legis. Basel: [Johann Amerbach], 1481. 2° (Darmstadt exemplar inc-iv-420, http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:tuda-tudigit-23203)

Fechter, Walter. “Inkunabeln aus Thalbacher Besitz.” Biblos 25 (1976): 233–42.

Fechter, Walter. “Eine Thalbacher Handschrift mit Eckhart-Predigten, Exzerpten aus Seuse, dem ps.-albertischen 'Paradisus animae' und anderem in Pavia,” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum 103 (1974): 311–33.

Fechter, Walter. “Thalbacher Handschriften im Ferdinandeum Innsbruck.” Codices manuscripti 2 (1976): 113-117

Neuhauser, Walter. “Der Thalbacher Übergabekatalog von 1783.” In: Gedenkschrift Eberhard Tiefenthaler, ed. by Helmut Meusburger, Thomas Feurstein. Graz: Neugebauer 1996, pp. 88-117; rpt: In libris: Beiträge zur Buch- und Bibliotheksgeschichte Tirols von Walter Neuhauser, ed. Claudia Schretter and Peter Zerlauth. Innsbruck: Universitätsverlag Wagner, 2010, pp. 311-341.[The Thalbach transfer catalog from 1783 = inventory at the Aufhebung.]

Threefold Illumination: A Nun’s Prayer After Communion

The spiritual quest for three-fold illumination -- knowledge of self; knowledge of God’s love; and knowledge of (and surrender to) God’s will -- is mapped out in the most ornate of the Thalbach Prayerbooks, ÖNB Cod. 11750, at the very end of a long mass prayer cycle. This prayer is seated firmly within a Franciscan orbit with its characteristic affective spirituality, reflective of late 16th-century habits of thought. The text is staunchly Catholic in perspective, for it assumes a very concrete Eucharistic theology: grace is mediated through the sacrament itself (durch krafft dis Sacraments), not just through prayer. Here we see a Catholic woman at the conclusion of a Catholic liturgy, participating in deeply rooted and very specifically Catholic devotional practices.We are anchored here to faith.

The prayer starts with a kind of self-abasement which may read as uncomfortable to modern eyes. The abnegations pile up: wickedness, vileness, worthlessness, ingratitude, insult, shame: through such self-knowledge (!) she asks to come to humility, repentance, and sorrow for my sins. Seeing the bad in order to correct her faults is strategic, a spiritual confession that moves toward the relief of forgiveness. This is classic penitential piety shaping belief and practice in practical, implementable ways. Yet for our modern eyes, the absence of positive self-knowledge is a gap here; this first illumination only tangentially touches on love and forgiveness, making it harder for the passage to resonate with in a more self-affirming age.

The second illumination focuses on love (liebe), used five times in as many lines, matching it with her heart, which must be enlightened, wounded, filled, and then come to thirst. Thus, God’s love toward “us” becomes her love towards God, loved “at all times, in all things, and above all things.” This is lyricism at its finest, repetitiveness deployed as a metaphor of spiritual growth on a properly chosen model. Very Franciscan, and with echoes of Thomas à Kempis or pseudo-Bonaventure in its patternings:

O God, my Lord, I beg you once again through your tender mercy, enlighten my heart to recognize and love your goodness and love for us. I beg you, wound my heart with the purest, most faithful, and fervent love towards us, O sweet Jesus, fill my heart with your most perfect, fervent, and unquenchable love, so that I may always thirst for you with all my heart, and that I may love you at all times, in all things, and above all things.

The enlightened heart, then, comes to fulfill the third illumination: self-denial and self-surrender, a self-rededication to the monastic calling from which she prays. She wants strengthened the scope of her devotion to encompass “all the actions and powers” of both body and soul. By moving from abnegation through love to action, she is transforming herself here at this moment, repurposing her spirit to accomplish God’s ends.

The sacrament, then, has accomplished its function. It does not merely forgive sin; it illuminates the mind, reshapes the affections, and reorders the will toward God’s action, serving as an agent of interior transformation. In this brief prayer we see how sacramental devotion worked in practice: not as a single moment of absolution, but as an ongoing process of spiritual formation rooted in Franciscan ideals of humility, love, and surrender.

---

“O Ewiger liebhabender barmhertziger Gott erleucht mein hertz,” Thalbach Prayerbook, ÖNB Cod. 11750, fol. 47v-48v, Transcription and Translation CC-BY-NC Cynthia J. Cyrus

Du magſt auch bitten vmb dreifaltige erleichtung/ dz dir ſolche / durch krafft dis Sacraments mitgetailt werde.

[3-line initial] O Ewiger liebhabender barmhertziger Gott erleucht mein hertz/ Dz ich meīn aigne bossheit ſchnödigkeit nichtigkeith vnnd vndanckbarkeit moͤg erkennen/ also dz ich ab ſolchem ein geburenden mÿsfallenn hab • Laß mich erkennen. O Guettiger Jeſu wie ich ſo gar nichts bin noch kan, vnd dz ich mich ſelbs veracht. Gib mir aüch, dz ich von hertzen von der Welt beger uerarcht zu werdenn, dz ich wünsch diemüettig zu sein: vnd vnbild vnd schmach zu leiden mich erfrewe. Eya du mein guettigſter herr Jhesu, geůſin mich ware erkantnus meiner ſelbſt auch volkomne demůott, rew vnd laid v̈ber meine begangne Sünnd.

O Gott mein herr ich bitte dich abermals durch dem Jimierliche barmhertzigkeit erleüchte mein hertz dem guettigkeit vnnd liebe gegen vns zu erkennen vnd zu lieben Jch bitte verwunde mein hertz mit keuschister getrewester vnd inbrünstiger liebe gegen vns O ſueſſer Jeſu, erfulle mein hertz mit deiner volkomesten, inbrünstigen vnd vnauſloͤſchkichen liebe / damit mich allzeit vongantzem hertzenn nach dür dürste, vnd dz ich dich ieder zeit in allem vnd vber alles liebe /

O Guettigster Jhesu, mein Gott vnnd alles in allem / Ich bitte dich / erleicht mein hertz/ deinen wolgefallen zu erkennen, zu lieben vnd volbrüngen. Gib mir vollkomesten erlaugnüng vnd aufergebüng meiner ſelbſt / darmit ich mich, selbs aüff Alle weiSS uerlaSS / aus mir gehe / vnd mich auffer gebe zuallem deinē wolgefallenn, Gib mir / dz ich mich ganz vnd gar deiner für ſehüng vertrawe / alle ding von deiner Hannd mit dancksagung annemmen vnd in allem dich lob vnd benedeÿe. Verschaffe O guettiger Gott/dz ich all mein leben alle zeit alles thunvnnd krefften meiner leibs vnd meiner Seelen und alles wz ich bin vnd vermag zu deinem lob Lieb vnd wolgefallen darraiche vnnd dargebe, Amen.

You may also ask for threefold illumination, that this may be imparted to you through the power of this sacrament.

O eternal, loving, merciful God, enlighten my heart, that I may recognize my own wickedness, vileness, worthlessness, and ingratitude, so that I may have a proper displeasure at it. Let me recognize, O good Jesus, how completely I am nothing and can do nothing, and that I may hold myself in contempt. Grant me also that I may wholeheartedly desire to be despised by the world, that I may wish to be humble, and that I may rejoice in suffering insult and shame. O my most gracious Lord Jesus, grant me true knowledge of myself, also perfect humility, repentance, and sorrow for my sins.

O God, my Lord, I beg you once again through your tender mercy, enlighten my heart to recognize and love your goodness and love for us. I beg you, wound my heart with the purest, most faithful, and fervent love towards us, O sweet Jesus, fill my heart with your most perfect, fervent, and unquenchable love, so that I may always thirst for you with all my heart, and that I may love you at all times, in all things, and above all things.

O most gracious Jesus, my God and all in all, I beg you, enlighten my heart to recognize, love, and carry out your good pleasure. Grant me perfect self-denial and self-surrender, so that I may completely abandon myself in every way, go out of myself, and surrender myself to all your good pleasure. Grant me that I may completely trust in your providence, receiving all things from your Hand; Receive all things from your hand with thanksgiving, and praise and bless you in all things. Grant, O gracious God, that all my life, at all times, I may dedicate and offer all the actions and powers of my body and soul, and all that I am and can do, to your praise, honor, and good pleasure. Amen.

Practicing Death: The “Seven Last Words” at Thalbach

The back-end of the Thalbach prayerbook (ÖNB Cod. 11750, 56v-60r) provides an early modern devotional adaptation of the “Seven Last Words” (Sieben Worte Christi am Kreuz), transformed into a death-bed meditation cycle. This is a localized, pastoralized, and affectively expanded version of a common text-type, rather than a “standard” translation of a single printed source. They all start from the biblical sequence (Luke, John, Matthew) but are freely paraphrased and expanded.

The tradition itself was extremely widespread. As a genre, the Seven Last Words meditation typos predates the Reformation and survives confessionalization pretty well intact, growing and adapting to local belief and its needs. The genre draws on at least three major late medieval/early modern currents. Like much of the Passion meditation literature in general, it promotes imaginative participation in a visually re-enacted passion scene, along with the attached emotional identification and afirst-person response that sees oneself as part of that broader narrative. It fits in too with other ars moriendi texts, in that it emphasizes a readiness for death along with a renunciation of “zeitliche” things. The penitent soul submits to God will, echoing--through an act of will--the Passion as a model (“into your hands I commend myself”). And, it fits with its late 16^th century ethos, a time when structured death prayers and affective piety intermingled as a way of coaching the devout toward a particular kind of religiosity.

The Thalbach version—copied as an addition to the manuscript in a dubious scribal hand and bearing several signs of amateur copying (from letter forms to transcription errors)—is interesting for several reasons. (I give a provisional transcription of the Seventh Word at the end of this post for those interested.)

BIBLICAL ALLUSION: It is typical of post-1500 vernacular adaptations of this sort, in that it boasts a kind of biblical in-fill with a number of loose biblical quotations shaping its language and approach. For instance, the text integrates not just passion narrative, but scriptural allusion. For example, the end of the fifth word brings in the deer of Psalm 42:

• darumb durstet mein Seel nach dir, dem Leben: unnd Gleich wie ein Zürsche eilet, Zu den Wasser brunen, Also Blomiget mein Seel nach dir, das du sie trenkhe mit dem siirssen kranckh de mer ewigen khlarheit, vnd sie behrtest vor dem hellischen durß in Ewigkheit, Amen

• therefore my soul thirsts for you, the living word, and just as a deer hastens to the water springs, so my soul longs for you, that you may quench its thirst with the sweet drink of your eternal clarity, and preserve it from the hellish thirst in eternity. Amen.

• (Psalm 42, NIV: As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God. 2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God? 3 My tears have been my food day and night, while people say to me all day long, “Where is your God?”)

This text lives in a world shaped by the Psalm’s echo, a strong framing for affective contemplation. Such biblical saturation suggests a deeply grounded reader, someone who could “get” the allusions without citation or further prompting. To my eye, that speaks to Thalbach educational practices; sisters of whatever level were expected to know their psalter intimately.

FIRST PERSON FRAMING ON THE DEATHBED: The text, divided into seven parts, with each part on its own page-or-two, serves as a bit of a how-to guide to walk you through the final hours of life. That process demands a kind of penitential self-examination, common to early modern Catholicism. There is a strong first-person presence in this version of the Seven Last Words, and that is shaped around the actual act of dying, not just a meditation-on-death.

Death is a consistent presence: “meines Todts… Sterben… mein Leiden… meiner Seele… bereit zu sterben” (my death... dying... my suffering... my soul... ready to die). In case the text itself wasn’t a good enough pointer (and it clearly is), the rubric tells us so: den Sterbenden mensch Trostlich (Comforting the dying person). This is devotional literature aimed at actual dying, not general piety.

INTERIORITY: Almost every section moves quickly into a confessional self-assessment: As a sinner, a poor sinner, I recognize my sins, she posits repeated. This is commission, the things she has done that are wrong, but also omission: “ich … wenig guets gethan, darumb ich billich ewige Straffe (I have done little good, therefore I deserve eternal punishment.)

We are seeing here an individualistic interiorization of the need for forgiveness, not a communal experience of death. There’s no collective voice, and no institutional framing. We don’t have the sisters coming to the sound of the clapper; this is death as an act of self identity through a direct encounter, God to soul. It has a lot of parallels with the shift in how Bregenz memoria were constructed, to be honest, but that’s for another (and extensive) bit of writing.

SOCIAL ETHICS OF DYING: She may be considering her interior spiritual needs, but those needs are also manifest as the things she has done to others while in the world. In the Second Word, for instance, she ask forgiveness:

die ich beleidige, zu sünden verursacht habe (whom I have offended, and caused to sin)

So death is framed as a moment of social repair, not only private salvation.

MY TAKE-AWAY:

For me, this modest, messy text is a reminder of why these prayerbooks matter so much. Its theology is not expressed in polished argument, but in repetition, hesitation, and emotional insistence. It shows how the sisters were taught to inhabit their own deaths in advance—through scripture, through penitence, through acts of reconciliation. Read alongside Thalbach’s commemorative practices and memorial networks, it suggests that preparation for death was not only something done for others, but something carefully cultivated within the self. This small addition thus opens a window onto the inner work of memoria: the quiet, disciplined labor of learning how to die well.

---

DAS SIBENT WORT / THE SEVENTH WORD:

What follows is a provisional transcription and translation of the Seventh Word, offered to illustrate the tone and structure of the text rather than as a definitive edition. I have lightly normalized the German: vnnd = und, dir außgangen = dir ausgegangen; schopffung = Schöpfung, and so on.

60r das sibent wort Herr Gott vnnd Vatter, Ich bin von die außgangen, durch die schopf: fung in dise welt, Nun aber muß in alles was zeitlich ist, Er lasse vnnd widr zu die komen in dem ewigs reich, denn es nachet die Stundt, vnd ist kost auß mit meinem ellenden vergenkhlich Leben, Doch bin vnuerzogt, den mene seeligkheit stehet in deiner handt, darein ich dir auch mein Armen seel treulich wil be- folchen haben Vnd bin berait zu Sterben, Darumb Laß mich dir aller Liebster vatter, Zu aller Zeit beuolchen sein, vnd wie ich dir utrån, er weckh nich wid om Inngste, tag, mit denen Ausser wollen dich ewigkhlich zu Loben

The Seventh Word Lord God and Father, I have come forth from you through creation into this world. Now, however, I must leave behind everything that is temporal and return to you in the eternal kingdom. For the hour draws near, and my wretched, perishable life is soon at an end. Yet I am not afraid, for my salvation rests in your hand, into which I faithfully commend my poor soul. And I am ready to die. Therefore, let me, most beloved Father, remain entrusted to you at all times. And just as I place my trust in you, do not raise me up again on the Last Day among those who are rejected, but among those who are chosen to praise you eternally.

Happy January from the Teutsch Römisch Breuier (1535): Of Calendars, Convent Books, and the Lives They Touched

It is the first day of the second quarter of the 21st Century, and thus a time for a fresh new start. I’ll begin here with a bit of material from a sixteenth century print – an interesting one for my current chapter-segment. This is the top of the January entry from its calendar:

Top of January Calendar entry with poem & images (pouring from pitcher, taking medicine [?]; roasting on a spit on the hearth)

Multimedia, sixteenth-century style, right? Pictures and poetry, and calendar instructions, and the start of the daily list of feasts and saints. So many things to look at! 

Take the short ditty that starts our page-reading:

Im Jenner man nit lassen soll. Warin feucht speyss die thut dir wol. Auff warm bad magstu haben acht. Meyd artzney ob du magst

In January, one shouldn't let things run unchecked. Warm food will do you good. Be careful with hot baths. Take medicine if you like.

Warm food, don’t take a chill, take two tablets and call me if that hangover doesn’t get better: it’s like your mom is welcoming you into the new year. Well, greetings to us all from this new century-quartile; I’m sure we all have wishes for how it will turn out. May the good ones come true!

The Teutsch Römisch Breuier of 1535

And now a bit about the book itself:

I found myself down an interesting rabbit hole as I was expanding a discussion in my current chapter. As it happens, I was curious about the circulation of memorial prayers (well, the chapter does need finishing), which took me on a brief excursus to the realm of early print. For vernacular-centric tertiary sisters of the period, there are an awful lot of liturgy-adjacent books to choose from.

This particular book interested me because the Teutsch Römisch Breuier is the first translation of the Roman Rite to circulate in regions central to my work. It is also, delightfully, a nuntastic find: the title makes explicit that it is aimed at monastic women (Klosterfrawen). Also, as the title promises, it provides a gute verteütschung, a good German translation—not only of the liturgical texts themselves, but also of the rubrics that govern their use. 

In other words, it is a practical book for navigating liturgical life in the generation immediately before the edicts of the Council of Trent, when many convents were compelled to return to exclusive use of the Latin rite.

Title page of Teutsch Römisch Breuier in red and black

It's a lovely and quite informative long-format title:

Teutsch Römisch Breuier vast nutzlich vnd trostlich: Nämlich den klosterfrawen, die nach dem lateinischen Römischen breuier, als die clarisserin vn[d] ander, jre tagzeit bezalen: Auch der priesterschafft weltlich vnd ordenßleüt, die Römisch breuier brauchen, so yetlicher ding der Collecte[n], Capitel, Responsen, Antiphen, vn[d] der gleich, gute verteütschung auch zu[m] gotswort dienstlich, begerte[n] … Augsburg: Alexander Weyssenhorn [=Weissenhorn], 1535. VD16 B 8092.

German Roman Breviary, very useful and comforting: Namely for the monastic women who recite their daily prayers according to the Latin Roman Breviary, such as the Poor Clares and others; also for the secular and regular clergy who use the Roman Breviary, as it contains good German translations of all matters relating to the collect, chapters, responses, antiphons, and the like, which is also useful for the service of God's word

Not only is the content of interest, so are the copies themselves. You see, both surviving copies reflect the target audience: monastic sisters! First, a bibliographic orientation:

BRIEF BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR THE TEUTSCH RÖMISCH BREUIER (1535): Here is the VD16 entry. (VD16 is the standardized census of all known sixteenth-century printed works produced in the German-speaking lands. VERY handy when you life at the edge of the early printing world). And the two surviving exemplars are München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek -- 4 Liturg. 123 d (Munich exemplar) Regensburg, Staatliche Bibliothek -- 999 IE/4Liturg.18 (Regensburg exemplar)

The Munich exemplar comes from a sister of the Pütrichhaus, Susanna Gartnerin, as she says on the flyleaf:

Das pryfier [= brevier] Jst gewessen S susa / anna gartnerin jn der pitterich / reyehaus got der almachtig / pegnadt Jr hie vnd thort / ewigklich amen

This breviery belonged to Susanna Gärtner in Pitterich Regelhaus, may God Almighty bless her here and there forever, amen.

Susanna Gartnerin is an interesting case; she was a scribe and book owner (Kramer Scriptores), served the convent as librarian, and eventually became “Oberin” of the tertiary house. So she was both book- owning and book-loving, and hereby provisioned with a vernacular breviary that she could use and follow. Not a bad model for our happiest of New Years!

The Regensburg copy also was passed from sister to “mit sch[wester]” – I only wish I knew of which convent! A chain of ownership unfolds in the flyleaf area:

We actually have two different inscriptions here. The first: 

Anno 1538 an sant Mathias tag hat mir mein / lieber brueder Hanns Langawi disen brevier geschickt

In the year 1538, on St. Matthias's Day, my / dear brother Hanns Langawi sent me this breviary.

And then, with a change of ink:

Jryet [=Ihr gehört?] der Barbara Sedlmaierin hatt / mirs mein liebe mit sch Richila ^obsinerin^ im Jar / 1590 den 7 Junius geschencken gott / geb mir vnd alle den Jenigen ge / nadt die es Brauche vnd eines des / ander vmb gottes wile darbey ge / denokhe mit ainen pn nr / und Ave

It belongs to Barbara Sedlmaier, and was given to me by my beloved co-sister [mitschwester] Richila Obsinerin in the year 1590 on June 7th. May God grant grace to me and to all those who use it, and may we remember one another for God’s sake with a Pater Noster and an Ave [Maria].

What we’re getting here is a chain of ownership, common to convent books. The brother of one of the sisters sent this book when it was just three years old in 1538 – practically new! -- and it passed first to Richila, and then to Barbara by 1590.

Hanns Langawi > Sister X > Richila [Richildis] Obsinerin > Barbara Sedlmaier

And along the way, how many prayers were offered, and how many different Januaries did those convent women look at the January calendar and think about the meat roasting on a spit by the fire?

Happy New Year!

---

RESOURCES

• Sigrid Krämer, Scriptores possessoresque codicum medii aevi (database, Augsburg: ERV, 2003–2025).
• VD16 entry: https://gateway-bayern.de/VD16+B+8092