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| The title, Hortulus anime, with an elaborate first initial |
The Little Garden of the Soul stands as one of the central prayerbooks of the 16th century, printed and reprinted, translated, and circulated not only in print but also in manuscript. It had first appeared in its Latin guise in 1498, and the German version emerged in 1501. We know it in its German form mostly by the title – Seelengärtlein – taken from a manuscript version (Cod. bibl. pal. Vindob. 2706), which Friedrich Dörnhöffer issued as one of the significant facsimiles of the 20th century. Published in 1911 as a 3-volume set, that facsimile is the standard “footnote me” work for early modern German prayer, famous for its art and for its extensive historical introduction.
But, alas, I did not happen to buy a 3-volume book printed more than 50 years before I was born. Neither, alack and alas, did my University library. And though the book is out of copyright, it’s not readily available in places I have looked.
What to do? Nerd out, of course! My goal as a practical person back in the day was to find a digital reproduction of one of the many early modern prints of the prayer collection. Finding relevant incunabula often has the added advantage of having woodcuts to help with navigation. And who doesn’t love a picture book?
FINDING PRINTS
For the world I inhabit – German language prints pre-1600 – working on such things means consulting the Verzeichnis der Drucke 16. Jahrhundert, also known as VD16 (Register of printed works of the 16th century)
http://www.gateway-bayern.de/index_vd16.html
Normally, I would have also gone to the ISTC (Incunabula Short Title Catalogue) – and I did, when I initially worked on this project. But ISTC is a British Library resource and thus was knocked out by the October 2023 cyber-attack. Still, it should come back some day:
https://www.bl.uk/catalogues/istc/
Then there’s the GW (Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke), the complete catalog of incunabula, but I find it much easier to go there with a printer, place, or year in mind.
https://www.gesamtkatalogderwiegendrucke.de/
To be honest, the format of the VD16 is the easiest for me to navigate, especially since its display supports clicking through to the full text of the items I’m most curious about.
SEARCHING CREATIVELY
If you search “Hortulus” on VD16, and then ask for the results in chronologically ascending order, you’ll see just how many editions there were! (Of course, you have to weed out the Hortulus elegantiarum and the Hortulus Musices if you’re looking for editions of the prayer book.)
The Peter Schöffer d.J. edition of 1513 confirms the German name, though with a suitably creative period spelling:
Hortulus anime.|| Zů teütsch genant der || selen g#[ae]rtlin.||
Hortulus animae. In German, known as the “Selen Gärtlin.”
But a remarkable number of the editions are either listed solely by the Latin title (and may in fact be the Latin edition, of course) or just give the Latin title and then say “in German.” But, using the spelling that Schöffer used, “Selen” (for modern-German “Seelen,” Souls), up pop a number of other versions – though the Seelengärtlein, our “Little Garden,” is not to be confused with the Selen Wurzgarten (The soul’s herb-garden), a book which starts with a dramatic picture of a hell-mouth with the devils descending thither:
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| München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek -- 2 P.lat. 1766 Der Seelen Wurzgarten Augsburg 1504, VD16 S 5276 |
It’s dramatic, but it isn’t prayers; the Wurzgarten is narrative, and features an awful lot of devils.
Our
prayerbook version – the regular garden, not the herb one – can be
found in a German translation by Brant, published in Straßburg in 1501
by Johann Wähinger (VD16 H 5078) and again in 1502 (VD16 ZV 8229). In
that 1501 version, Brant stakes a strong claim to authorship:
Ortulus anĩe. Der selen gärtlin wurd ich genent ... || Zu Straßburg in sym vatterlant || Hat mich Sebastianus Brant || Besehen vnd vast corrigiert || Zum tütschem ouch vil transferiert
[H]Ortulus anime.
I was called the selen gärtlin ... || In Strasbourg in his fatherland
|| Sebastianus Brant || Inspected me and corrected me a lot || Also
transferred to the German.
Brant inspected and corrected –
extensively, he claims! –
and “transferred” it into German. It’s a big
project, so perhaps his over-the-top claims are warranted.
And
from there, as we have seen, the prints spread and spread. There are a
lot of them, and one could spend years comparing them all. But that
isn’t my particular rabbit hole.
ACCESSING THE PRAYERS OF THE SEELENGÄRTLEIN
Because
I was interested in accessing the prayer-texts themselves, and not just
the digitized version, I worked through the list of editions on VD16
for one that had an OCR version as well as an online visual
representation. During pandemic times (back in 2020), I settled on
Johannes Knoblouch’s edition of the Seelengärtlein (Hortulus animae)
from Straßburg, 1507 [VD16 H 5082]. That version was available in two
ways:
1) directly from the BSB: urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb00009026-0 –
use the URN resolver: https://nbn-resolving.org/gui/urn to navigate there
2) from Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=AdhCMsIz-jkC.
With
both copies in hand, and time hanging heavy on my hands, I indexed the
volume. The index was built starting from the volume’s Register (found
on fols. 243v-247v), and adopts the foliation conventions from the BSB
copy. Since Knoblouch himself used a combination of signature (Sig) and
folio (fol) in the register in order to show location within the
gathering structure of the volume, I preserve them in columns 2 and 3 of
the index.
Overall, I decided that the subsections of prayers –
sections which might spin out and be transmitted independently or might
migrate into another prayer complex – needed to be included, but I
greyed out all but the first section, so one can readily see which is
the starting prayer (white) and which the subsections (grey) in a
multi-partite prayer.
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| A sample from the index -- the rubric is in red, the first segment is white, and the subsequent sections are greyed out |
To round out my work, I
gave brief descriptions of the 73 woodcuts from the perspective of
navigating the volume. Thus, I list St Gertrude, but not her cats -- or are those the mice that she banished? None of the animals made my description, for it is St Gertrude herself who is the navigational marker, setting the reader up for the next prayer "Seyest gegrůßt heilige iungfraw sant Gerdrut die du geboren bist von königlichem stammen..." [Hail, holy virgin Saint Gertrude, born of royal descent].
For those who are intrigued, I have made the index available through google sheets:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14UgeWOq9iPZ88uQiWw6a0PnPCrADabp5YqrGazk6Tuk/edit?usp=sharing
You too can play with the index by sorting columns this way and that way, and use it to navigate within the digital covers of the book itself.
AND IN CONCLUSION:
The
Seelengärtlein may have begun as a 16th-century prayerbook, but its
history is one of persistence, adaptation, and circulation across
languages, formats, and centuries. My deep dive into its
editions—navigating catalogs, parsing digital copies, and building an
index—reflects the same impulse that shaped its transmission: the desire
to make these prayers accessible, ordered, and usable. Whether in
manuscript, print, or digital form, the Seelengärtlein continues to
grow, much like the metaphorical garden it evokes.
