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

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.

A 16thc Segen for the Mass, Pt 2

The Thalbach Segen for the Mass

The first half of this Segen – which I posted about last week – establishes its logic through enclosure, accumulation, and analogy: the devotee commends herself into sacred realities, borrows the authority of the Mass, and maps Christ’s body onto her own as a form of protection. Part 2 intensifies this same logic, shifting from verbal placement to embodied action. What was established through words is now reinforced through gesture, orientation, and repetition, as the sign of the cross is deployed to surround the body, bind danger, and authorize protection in motion. 

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PART TWO OF THE SEGEN, "HErr ich bevilch mich dir in alle die heillige wortt die alle Priieſter ſprech"  ÖNB Cod. 11750, fols. 21r-22v (Part 1 is transcribed and translated here). Division into segments reflects editorial assessments; bold is added to highlight structural repetition. Transcription and translation are CC-BY Cynthia Cyrus.

Beth ein vatter vnser vn̅ ein Aue mar[ia] 

           Pray an Our Father and a Hail Mary.

Das heïllig Gottes Creütz [REDCROSS] Jhesu christi seẏ heutt vor mir. [REDCROSS] Vnsers herrn creutz seẏ heutt hinder mir. Vnſers herrn creutz. [REDCROSS] ſei ob mir Vnſers herrn creutz [REDCROSS] sey heut zuͦ den ſeittenn neben mir. Ach Gott gesegne mich heut vnd Jmer bei dem heilligenn fron [REDCROSS] Creütz dagott die marter an leidt durch mich vund aller Chriſtenhait ·

The holy cross of God [REDCROSS] of Jesus Christ be before me today. [REDCROSS] Our Lord's cross be behind me today. Our Lord's cross [REDCROSS] be above me. Our Lord's cross [REDCROSS] be on my sides next to me today. Oh God, bless me today and forever by the holy [REDCROSS] cross, where God endured the suffering for me and all of Christendom.

Nur můs ich als wol geſegnet ſein als der Kelch unnd der wein den ein ieder Priester muß es das er die mass volbringen kan. [REDCROSS] Nur můs ich als war gesegnet sein, als des gutten hern Tobias ſun, do er in frembden landenn was [REDCROSS] Nur mus ich als war geſegnet sein, als dir heillige drei nagell / die Gott durch hend vnnd füess würden geſchlagen

I must be as well blessed as the chalice and the wine that every priest must have so that he can perform the Mass. I must be as truly blessed as the son of the good Lord Tobias, when he was in foreign lands. I must be as truly blessed as the three holy nails that God was struck with through his hands and feet.

Ich beüilch mich in die krafft vnd in die krafft wortt / da gott mensch inn ward. Ich beüilch mich in die fliessende bach vnd schwayss vnnd bluts, so vnnser lieber herr vergossenn hat. Ich beuil mich heut in die seligkeit ich armer sunder, vnd durch die krafft seines Lebendigen Sons gebe nedeiten tods. / Ich beuilch mich heutt in die seligkeit seines heilligen sacraments Ich fleuch heut vnder den schult vnnd vnder den frid, vnnd vnder dz heillig Creitz [22r] Das ſelber durch mich vnnd alle menſchen zuͦ einem Creutz gemacht hat Jch beuil mich heüt vnd allweg in die heillige Driualtigkeit vnſers herrnn Jeſu chriſti vnd in die heilige Senfftmuettigkeit Barmhertzigteit keuschheitt vnser lieben frawen Maria, vnd in die gemainſame aller heiligen.

I commend myself to the power and the word in which God became man. I commend myself to the flowing stream of sweat and blood that our dear Lord shed. I commend myself today to salvation, I poor sinner, and through the power of his living Son, grant me a blessed death. I commend myself today to the salvation of his holy sacrament. I flee today under the protection and under the peace, and under the holy cross which he himself has made into a cross for me and all people. I commend myself today and always to the Holy Trinity of our Lord Jesus Christ and to the holy gentleness, mercy, and chastity of our dear Lady Mary, and to the communion of all saints.

Dz creutz [REDCROSS] vnſers herrn Jeſu chriſti ſei heut mit mir Das [REDCROSS] Creutz vnsers lieben herrn verbind mir aller meiner feinden ſchwert. Das [REDCROSS] Creutz vnsers herrn eroffne mir alles güts Dz [REDCROSS] Creutz vnsers herrn neme von mir alles vbell vnd alle pein des ewigen tods. Nur [REDCROSS] geſegne mich der heillig ſegenn den gott vber sich ynnd alle menschen hatt gebem da gott ſelbs inn beſchaffenn wz.

The cross of our Lord Jesus Christ be with me today. The cross of our dear Lord bind the sword of all my enemies. The cross of our Lord open to me all good things. The cross of our Lord take from me all evil and all the pain of eternal death. May the holy blessing that God gave over himself and all people, in which God himself was created, bless me.

Ich beuil mich heut in die ſiben wort, die gott selbs ſprach an dem heilligen creütz. Ich beuil mich heut in den heilligen frid vnſers hern gesuchristi, der sei mir heut ein anfang vnd einausgang in allen meinen nötten, wo ich Jn der Welltt hinkör

I commend myself today to the seven words that God himself spoke on the holy cross. I commend myself today to the holy peace of our Lord Jesus Christ, may it be for me today a beginning and an end in all my needs, wherever I go in the world.

Nur gelegne mich heut der lieb herr Sannt Johannes in ſeiner keussigheitt. Nur geſegne mich der gut ſant Benedict vor Zauberei, diſe zwen haben gebet vnſern herrn Jeſum chriſtum, Welcher man oder fraw ſchmertzen hat, dz in ſeinem verdiennſt er geſundt werd. O Schmertz dich zerſtrew gott der Sun. O ſchmertz dich zerstrew gott der Heillig Gayſt. Jn dem Namenn gott des Vatters vnnd des Süns vnnd des heilligen Geists. Amen.

May the dear Lord Saint John bless me today in his chastity. May the good Saint Benedict bless me against sorcery; these two prayed to our Lord Jesus Christ, that whoever, man or woman, has pain, may be healed through his merit. O pain, may God the Son scatter you. O pain, may God the Holy Spirit scatter you. In the name of God the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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ASSESSMENT

Part 2 opens with formulaic prayer – an Our Father and a Hail Mary – and then immediately shifts register. The prayer stops asking and starts placing. What follows is no longer a petition addressed upward, but a sequence of directional statements that actively organize space around the speaker. Repeated invocations of “Das heilig Gottes Creutz … sey heut vor mir / hinder mir / ob mir / zu den seiten neben mir” (before me, behind me, above me, and to my sides) construct a six-directional enclosure, situating the devotee within a protective field defined by the cross.

This language is not metaphorical. It performs a spatial act. The cross is placed before and behind the body, above it, and on both sides; it creates a perimeter that surrounds rather than adorns. The red crosses marked in the manuscript are not ornamental flourishes, but operative cues. They prompt gesture, orientation, and repetition. They invite the speaker to action -- to trace the cross repeatedly in space, turning the prayer into enacted words that produce protection through kinetic movement.

In this sense, Part 2 takes up and extends the work already begun at the end of the first half of the prayer. There, the speaker mapped herself onto Christ’s body as a way of securing protection; here, that logic is expanded outward. Protection is no longer only anatomical or analogical but locational. The body is not simply aligned with Christ’s wounds or limbs, but physically enclosed within the sign of the cross itself, now rendered as a mobile defensive geometry.

This is characteristic Segen practice. Rather than cultivating inward reassurance, the prayer re-positions the body in sacred space. Safety is achieved not through reflection but through placement – through saying, marking, and standing within a configuration that has been declared protective. Like prayers before the image of Mary, the actions of the praying sister are integral to the prayer itself.

AUTHORIZATION THROUGH ANALOGY AND EQUIVALENCE

The prayer then pivots to a striking rhetorical strategy, signaled by the repeated formula “Nur muß ich als wol gesegnet sein als …” Rather than petitioning for blessing, the speaker asserts a claim to it through a series of carefully chosen comparisons. What follows is not metaphor but equivalence: the devotee aligns herself with persons and objects whose efficacy is already established.

Three such alignments structure this section. First, the speaker claims to be as well blessed as the chalice and the wine required for the priest to complete the Mass. Here, efficacy is functional and liturgical: these objects are blessed not because they are morally exemplary, but because without them the sacramental action cannot occur. Second, she likens herself to Tobias’ son, protected by the Angel Raphael while traveling in foreign lands. This comparison draws on narrative precedent, invoking a scriptural story in which divine protection accompanies movement, risk, and vulnerability. Third, she claims the blessing of the three holy nails of the Crucifixion, instruments rendered powerful through direct contact with Christ’s suffering body.

Taken together, these comparisons establish a logic of borrowed authority. The speaker does not present herself as worthy in her own right, nor does she wait for blessing to be conferred. Instead, she places herself on the same plane as liturgical vessels, biblical travelers, and relic-like instruments – things and figures already known to work. In doing so, the prayer authorizes lay access to protective power by grounding it in recognized sites of efficacy. Blessing here is not requested but claimed, secured through alignment with what has already proven capable of bearing and transmitting divine force.

SALVIC THINGS

The long middle section (Ich beüilch mich…) is a catalog of efficacious media:

• the wort of the Incarnation
• sweat, blood, and flowing fluids
• the sacrament
• peace
• the cross
• the Trinity
• Marian virtues
• the community of saints

This is not redundant piety. It is strategic stacking. Each item is something that:

• has already worked (historically or liturgically)
• can be entered or taken refuge under
• and can be carried by the speaker.

The repeated ich bevilch mich performs self-placement again and again. The speaker repeatedly moves themselves into zones of protection, as though tightening a net. Part one of the prayer set up her spiritual safety; her active remembrance of these holy things thus reinforces that zone.

The cross, of course, has a special status, and the next unit of the Segen re-activates it, showing its kinetic and temporal power through verb choice. It:

• binds enemies’ swords
• opens all good
• removes evil and eternal death

The cross operates metaphorically as weapon, key, and filter. This is apotropaic language in its strongest form: harm is actively restrained, not merely avoided.

COMPLETENESS IN TIME AND IN BINARIES

By invoking the seven last words spoken from the cross, peace as both Anfang and Ausgang (beginning and end), and movement “wherever I go in the world,” the prayer works deliberately to close all remaining gaps. Time is framed from beginning to end, speech is completed in silence, motion is paired with rest, pain with healing, and present vulnerability is extended forward to encompass future death. These paired terms are not incidental but systematic: the Segen seeks to leave no interval, condition, or threshold unguarded. What emerges is a prayer oriented toward completeness rather than intensity, one that aims not at a single moment of relief but at comprehensive coverage across the temporal and existential spectrum.

To this, she adds the saints as targeted intercessors. John, whose chastity aligns with bodily integrity; Benedict, who provides protection against sorcery, mark her world as one of pragmatic sanctity. Saints are invoked for what they do, not who they are. The direct address to pain (O Schmertz…) completes the transition from prayer to command. Pain is not asked to leave. It is told to disperse – twice, under Trinitarian authority.

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THE SEGEN AS PRAYER ACT

Taken together, the second half of this prayer is neither contemplative nor primarily petitionary. It is not oriented toward extended reflection or interior cultivation, but toward use. The prayer functions instead as a ritual technology of protection, assembled from spatial enclosure, authorized comparison, accumulated salvific matter, spoken command, and repeated acts of self-placement. What gives it force is not doctrinal exposition but correct enactment: familiar words spoken in the right order, gestures traced in space, and authoritative figures and objects invoked because they are already known to work.

Read in this way, the prayer aligns closely with recent scholarship that emphasizes the everyday, practice-oriented character of Segen. Ulrike Wagner-Rau, writing in Segen, characterizes blessings as rituals that are “unverbrüchlich angesehen” not because they offer explanation, but because they provide reliable ways of navigating ordinary life through repeated action. Christopher Spehr’s contribution to the same volume likewise underscores the diversity and adaptability of late medieval blessing practices, situating Segen firmly within lived religious routines rather than at the margins of official devotion. To make the point more directly: for our Thalbach sister to be enacting her Segen during and in the presence of the Mass is every bit as standard a sacred and parallel act as is the spoken delivery of requiem masses at a side altar underneath the Fronmass. Simultaneity has its own kind of sacred power.

Although he deals with an earlier 12^th to 14^th century repertoire of such Segen, Derek A. Rivard’s Blessing the World helps clarify what is at stake. His study shows that blessings were shaped by lay needs and aspirations and that their protective focus complemented the Mass’s role in sustaining communal order and integrity. I would argue that the Thalbach Segen operates in precisely this register. Drawing on familiar narratives, liturgical forms, and bodily practices, it translates shared Christian knowledge into ritual action calibrated for vulnerability – illness, danger, movement, and the prospect of death.

What emerges, then, is not an alternative to theology, but a way of living it. This Segen does not seek to explain suffering or risk; it offers a means of addressing them through repeated, embodied practice. Anchored in the Mass yet usable beyond it, the prayer extends ecclesial protection into the rhythms of everyday life. For the Thalbach sisters, and for others who prayed in similar ways, safety was not a matter of abstract belief but of learned habit: something done, enacted, and carried forward through words and gestures that had already proven their worth. At Thalbach, such habits were cultivated collectively – through shared prayerbooks, repeated attendance at the parish Mass, and the parallel rhythms of memoria and devotion – so that protection was not merely personal, but explicitly embedded in the sisters’ communal practice.

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WORKS CITED

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

Martin Leuenberger (ed.) Segen. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015.

See especially Ulrike Wagner-Rau and her discussion of everyday rituals, “Unverbrüchlich angesehen – Der Segen in praktisch-theologischer Perspektive,” 187-210, here p. 194.

In the same volume, Christopher Spehr addresses the diversity of blessings in late medieval practice, and their re-evaluation in the Reformation; “Sengespraxis und Segenstheologie in der Christentumsgeschickte,” 135-164.

Derek A. Rivard, Blessing the World: Ritual and Lay Piety in Medieval Religion (Washington DC: Catholic U of America Press, 2009)

Note: This post presents a working transcription, translation, and preliminary analysis in advance of a planned journal article.

A Sixteenth-Century Segen for the Mass, Pt 1

A “Segen” is a prayer genre that combines words, gestures, and formulas to bring about a positive end such as divine grace, desired happiness, or protection from harm. Commonly translated as “blessing,” it is more than just cheery words or good wishes. It exists as a multi-dimensional “act” that can create good. Each element – words said, gesture properly performed, and multiple iterations – contributes to its successful deployment. A Segen is effficacious through utterance when properly performed. I always think of them as “an active saying”: something that calls on a human agent to take on its power. It is a speech act with material consequences.

PRAYER TYPE

A Segen differs from a Collect, which belongs to the formal liturgy, and from prayers of petition (Gebet, Bitte), which structure ordinary devotional speech. It can be recognized by its formal stability – since the wording matters, variation is limited. It’s also inherently performative speech. It does something when spoken: it protects, heals, averts danger, prepares for death. If you’re traveling? There’s a Segen for that. Childbirth? Likewise. Is it time for a transition, say, to get out of bed, or go to sleep? There is a Segen that will suit your purpose. Danger, uncertainty, the evils of pestilence? The warding function of the Segen makes it a deployable ritual technology for navigating risk, transition, and moments of vulnerability. They fit into the rhythms of the everyday.

Because it is a prayer of “doing,” it is suitable for a variety of contexts, be they lay, domestic, or paraliturgical. Segen often occupy spaces later described as “folk,” since apotropaic functions and familiar protective formulas are common. Warding off evil and thereby doing good in the world: Segen were thought to do useful work. And, the prayer workers, importantly, did not need to be clerical. Lay folk could use them, and so could monastics. In memorial contexts, like the ones I’m working on, a Segen can function as a spoken intervention on behalf of souls, even when no mass is present.

One of the reasons I’m drawn to Segen as a category is that they have a devotional logic that prioritizes outcome over explanation. They show a world in which prayer is not only expressive but operative. In other words: a Segen is not just a blessing, but a technology of care and control, especially potent in contexts of illness, death, and remembrance.

THE SEGEN ITSELF

To take up a specific case, here is “A Protective Segen anchored in the Mass,” as its label tells us, this one a sixteenth century prayer from a Thalbach prayerbook, ÖNB Cod. 11750, fols. 20v-21r.

Line numbers are for ease of reference; bold is to highlight the formulaic elements of the prayer. This is the first half of a two-part prayer.

Ein schoner segenn bei der heilligen Mäß

1. HErr ich bevilch mich dir in alle die

2. heillige wortt die alle Priieſter ſprech

3. enn von dem da du in verwanndlet haſt vorrden

4. brott in fleiſch vnnd in blutt. Herr ich beuilch

5. mich heut vnd allweg in die heillige gottheitt

6. vnd in die heillige menſchhait vnnd in die heil

7. lige Drÿfalltigkeitt vnnd in dem heillige seel

8. deinem leib / Jn dein heillige gegenwertigkeit

9. in deinem heilligenn fronleichnam deinem

10. heilligen fleisch deinem heilligen blutt beuilch

11. ich mich mit flaiſch vnnd blut mit leib vnd ſeel

12. mit zeittlicher eher vnnd allen meinen gelider

13. in deinen heilligenn frid / dz du mich beſchur⸗

14. meſt vnd behuetest vor allem ybel vor waffen

15. vor gefenckhnüs vor gesigung [=Geißigung] vor werffenn

16. Schüessenn vor waſſer vor Zauberey ehren

17. abſchneidenn vor feur / vor allem dem dz du er⸗

18. inneſt in deiner weiſzheit dz mir ſchaden mag

19. an leibvnnd seel an allen zeittlichenn dingen

20. vnd ehren: Behuetest mich herr durch dein

21. grundlose barmhertzigkeit, durch dein manig

22. faltige erbernd Guettiger herr ich bürg mich

23. in die verborgne tugent, als sich die hoche gott,

24. heitt verbarg indte krancke menſchheut vnd

25. als du dich uerbirgeſt in des Pruësters hennd

26. indem ſchein des brotts warer gott vnnd mēſch

27. Herr ich bürg mich heüt vnnd Jmer in deine

28. heillige fünnff wunden / trennck mich mitt

29. deinem roſen farbenn blutt: dein heillige dri-

30. ualltigkeit ſei mir ein ſchüllt vnnd ſchürm,

31. vor allem meinenn feinden / deine heillige

32. hennd seÿenn heütt v̈ber mich/ deine heillige

33. füess seind heut vor mir dein heilliger mund

34. beſcharme mich heütt / fruſch vnnd geſünd

35. vnnd vor allem vnglückh. Amen.

This is a protective, performative Segen that anchors itself in the Mass in order to borrow its power. The Mass is the source of authority, but the Segen is the mechanism by which the devout sister will deploy it. Flesh, blood, body; body, blood, flesh: this is God made man to act as armor. He can protect her without being consumed.

A TRANSLATION

1 Lord I commend myself to you in all the 2 holy words that all priests speak 3 from that moment, when you transformed it, 4 the bread turned into flesh and blood. Lord, I commend 5 myself today and always in the holy Godhead 6 and in the holy humanity and in the holy 7 Trinity and in the holy soul 8 of your body / In your holy presence 9 in your holy body, your 10 holy flesh, your holy blood, I commend 11 myself with flesh and blood, with body and soul, 12 with temporal honor and all my limbs 13 in your holy peace, that you may protect 14 and guard me from all evil, from weapons, 15 from imprisonment, from defeat, from throwing [=missiles] 16 and shooting, from water, from sorcery, from 17 dishonor, from fire, from everything that you 18 know in your wisdom that may harm me 19 in body and soul, in all temporal things 20 and honors: Protect me, Lord, through your 21 boundless mercy, through the many and 22 manifold compassionate goodness, O gracious Lord, I entrust myself 23 to the hidden virtue, as the high God 24 hid himself in frail humanity and 25 as you hide yourself in the priest's hands 26 in the appearance of bread, true God and man. 27 Lord, I entrust myself today and forever to your 28 holy five wounds; refresh me with 29 your rose-colored blood: may your holy 30 Trinity be my shield and protection, 31 from all my enemies; may your holy 32 hands be over me today; may your holy 33 feet be before me today; may your holy mouth 34 protect me today, fresh and healthy, 35 and from all misfortune. Amen.

HOW THE SEGEN WORKS

The Thalbach speaker who reads this prayer starts here with an act of self-enclosure (ll. 1-13): as devotee, she uses the repeated formula “ich bevilch mich” (I commend myself) to place herself inside sacred realities. The words of consecration, the reality of Christ’s body and blood, the Trinity, the holy peace: these are the space of devout devotion that she is actively choosing to inhabit. Moreover, she treats the Eucharistic presence as protective substance, not through communion and consumption, but through observation and modeling. His embodiment (ll. 8-10) is a model for hers (ll. 11-13).

The Segen here has a broad apotropaic scope, from the abstract to the concrete (ll. 13-20). She is to be protected from evil, dishonor and defeat, and more tangibly from weapons, imprisonment, shooting. Water and fire, sorcery, and “everything that you know in your wisdom may harm me”: God’s protective shield is all-encompassing life protection: bodily, social, legal, and moral. A prayer that names Zauberey, magic, is almost never a neutral “Gebet”; it is operating in a world where spoken formulas are understood to counter spoken threats.

The Segen shifts from protection to hiddenness: the hidden virtue (die verborgne tugent), the hiddenness of Christ’s nature as frail human, and the hiding of the eucharistic wonder in the Priest’s hand. She entrusts herself to what is hidden; faith does not need to see to be lived. This is a sacramental theory of invisibility, and to my eye touches on what Maaike de Haardt terms the quotidian aspect of faith:

They [daily behaviors and spatial practices, aka the quotidian] reveal the how of belief, much more than the what of belief, the subject of the ministers of belief. Besides the ethical and political choice implicated in this approach, there is yet another important dimension, which I have called a sense of presence, or aesthetic presence, sacramental presence, or incarnational presence.

De Haardt describes the way in which sensorial abundance -- sensual knowledge of touching, tasting, smelling – become a way of being -- of inhabiting the everyday sacred. For the Thalbach sister, her presence in church, with incense and candles and ritual action observed intently, but not intimately, is sufficient to call to mind the divine.

The Segen ends by mapping Christ’s body to the speaker’s body. Hands above, feet before, mouth protecting, wounds enclosing. We have here somatic ritual geometry. The body is reoriented inside of Christ’s body, not so much improved as guarded. Through the Segen, she achieves safety.

SEGEN AS RITUAL OF PROTECTION

In articulating the segments of the prayer, the devotee generates her own ritual of protection from all ills, based on and parallel to that of the formal Mass on which it depends. By invoking the correct wording, by using the Segen in the correct ritual space (at Mass, in the presence of the host), and by invoking the correct theological anchors, she creates a sort of spiritual insurance policy that will protect her, body and soul. This shows that a Segen is not marginal or “folk-like” in opposition to theology. Rather, it is orthodox theology operationalized for protection and survival.

The first half of the Segen, then, carries the devotee on a multi-staged spiritual journey, where her act of commending herself results through transformation to her being mapped to Christ’s body, secure in the warded protection of Christ’s love:

Commend self >> Eucharist >> Protection >> Hiddenness >> Mapped to Christ’s body

As we will see in a future post, part 2 of this Segen provides a layered ritual deployment of these same themes -- protection, enclosure, and authorization remain central, but in part 2, the physicality of the prayer is reinforced through keyed moments of signing the cross.

WORK CITED:

Maaike de Haardt, “Incarnational presence: Sacramentality of everyday life and the body or: unsystematic skeptical musings on the use of a central metaphor,” in Envisioning the Cosmic Body of Christ, edited by Aurica Jax and Saskia Wendel (Routledge, 2019): 114-125.

Note: This post presents a working transcription, translation, and preliminary analysis in advance of a planned journal article.

An indulgence prayer for Mary of Swords

The Thalbach Prayerbook is not a tidy manuscript. It isn’t richly illuminated, and its pages don’t draw they eye with color and beauty the way we’ve come to expect from early modern devotional books. Instead, it is a deeply personal collection: copied mostly by a single female scribe in the late sixteenth century, filled with vernacular prayers and translated services, and clearly designed to sustain the “poor sinner” (sündarin) who gathered them together. Its very roughness makes it valuable, because it gives us a glimpse into the lived devotional practices of Bregenz during the Counter-Reformation.

One of the striking texts is the prayer to Mary as the "Schmertzensmutter"—the Mother of Sorrows (fols. 90–92). The opening strophe lingers on Simeon’s prophecy in Luke 2:25–35, where the aged prophet meets the infant Jesus in the temple. He declares that the child will be “a sign from God, but many will oppose him,” and warns Mary that “a sword will pierce your very soul.” The text imagines Mary’s dread at hearing this prediction,and repeatedly asks Mary to help the devotee share in the pain of various stages of her story of loss.

This prayer is, to my eye, particularly important in the context of the prayerbook as a whole because it echoes the woodcut chosen as paste-down at the very front of the volume: Mary’s heart being pierced by multiple swords, a visual shorthand for the Seven Sorrows. Its placement is also telling—it appears as a single but extended prayer between two Marian services, following the Advent offices and preceding the standard weekday prayers to the Virgin. In other words, we encounter it within a systematized framework of devotion. That element of ritual repetition is reinforced internally by its structure: every strophe ends with the Pater Noster and the Ave Maria.

From there, the prayer walks through key moments of Mary’s suffering: losing the child Jesus in the temple, seeing him bound and beaten, watching him hoisted on the cross, and cradling him in death. The language is tender and anguished, but it is also functional. The prayer-giver suggests in strophe 3, for instance, that just as Mary sorrowed over Jesus’s captivity as he was beaten, she can help “protect me from the wickedness and vice of the evil spirit” (behalt mich vor der boßhait und läster der bößen gaist). Because Mary’s sorrows mirror the devotee’s struggles, empathy itself becomes salvific – a way to transform suffering into protection against evil.

What’s especially interesting to me in this context is the prayer’s ending. The penultimate strophe focuses on the individual, asking Mary to intercede for my most earnest soul and to help in “all my pain”, but the final petitions widen out to the collective: “release us from all our afflictions.”

du behaltest mynaller ermeste sel / … yn alem mynen schmerzen... // ... von aller unser trübsäl erlöß uns

This shift from “me” to “us” happens frequently in the Thalbach collection—by my impression, in about a third of the prayers. It suggests to me a devotional rhythm where private petition blends into communal concern, aligning the voice of an individual sinner with her monastic responsibilities to the wider prayer community. She’s praying for herself, in other words, but that prayer also addresses the needs of her peersbe they fellow monastics, fellow residents of Bregenz, or, as sometimes specified, “all believing souls.”

This prayer reinforces that shift from the personal to the communal intervention, for it is capped by a Collect that places Mary firmly in her intercessory role. The collect appeals to her “eingebornen Sohn”—her only-begotten Son—for mercy. In this way, the swords that pierce Mary’s heart do double duty: they are emblems of her individual grief, but also reminders that suffering binds a community together. The Thalbach Prayerbook, however humble in appearance, is saturated with this kind of imagery. Mary of Sorrows emerges as both intimate companion in suffering and powerful advocate before Christ, her pierced heart a channel through which the afflictions of “me” and “us” alike might be transformed.

NOTE ON TRANSCRIPTION:

I follow the (highly) idiosyncratic spellings of the source, but supply punctuation in my translations.

RESOURCES:

• Indulgence Prayer ...von dem schwert des scharffen todes dines kind criste [INC: ge[g]rütz sÿestu ain müter Jesu crist EXPL: so befiechen mir uns verschmäch nit unser gebett yn unser nottürfigkait aber von aller unser trübsäll erlöß uns du gesegnet Junckfrow maria amen.], from the Thalbach Prayerbook, Bregenz, Vorarlberger Landesbibliothek Hs 17, fol. 90-92.
• For a review of another prayer from the Thalbach Prayerbook, see https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2025/09/the-verbal-vocative-change-ringing.html

Among the many studies of the Seven Sorrows, see:

• Cynthia J. Cyrus, “Printed Images in a Thalbach Manuscript Prayer-book of the Sixteenth Century.” Journal of the Early Book Society 23 (2020): 173–82.

• Dagmar Eichberger, “Visualizing the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin: Early Woodcuts and Engravings in the Context of Netherlandish Confraternities,” in The Seven Sorrows Confraternity of Brussels: Drama, Ceremony, and Art Patronage (16th–17th Centuries), ed. Emily Thelen, Studies in European Urban History 37 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2015), 113–143.

• Christiane Möller, Jacob Cornelisz. van Oostsanen und Doen Pietersz: Studien zur Zusammenarbeit zwischen Holzschneider und Drucker im Amsterdam des frühen 16. Jahrhunderts, Niederlande-Studien 34 (New York: Waxmann Verlag, 2005).

• Carol M. Schuler, “The Seven Sorrows of the Virgin: Popular Culture and Cultic Imagery in Pre-Reformation Europe,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 21 (1992):5–28.

• Carol M. Schuler, “The Sword of Compassion: Images of the Sorrowing Virgin in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art,” PhD diss, Columbia University, 1987.