When I opened the prayerbook, it was the gore that drew my attention first, as I mentioned in a previous post. That is hardly surprising. In Innsbruck FB 1118, Christ is bound, beaten, scourged, pierced, bloodied, abandoned, and repeatedly made to suffer in language vivid enough to provoke a modern “eww” reflex.
But once I stepped back from the most graphic passages and looked at the manuscript’s vocabulary as a whole, a different picture emerged. Blood appears forty-three times. Wound appears thirty-three times. Bitter appears thirty-one times. Yet the most common substantive words in this fifteenth-century Passion-centric prayerbook are not, in fact, words of violence. They are Lord, love, God, holy, heart, soul, eternal, and mercy.
That matters because in my view, frequency reveals something different from intensity. Graphic details may dominate the reader’s memory precisely because they are unusual, concrete, and difficult to ignore. But they do not necessarily dominate the manuscript’s devotional world. Love appears 117 times, far more often than blood, wound, or even sin. Mercy appears eighty-one times; grace fifty; peace forty-five; good forty-four; life forty-three; and joy thirty-one. The manuscript’s most startling images are embedded in a vocabulary of divine generosity, intimacy, and hope.
The same is true of the prayerbook’s anthropology. The body matters—body appears fifty times—but it is not treated as a prison or merely as a site of punishment. The heart appears ninety-eight times, the soul eighty-four, the mind forty-five, and the spirit forty-four. Such terms suggest an integrated devotional person: bodily, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually engaged all at the same time. The prayers do not simply ask the reader to contemplate Christ’s damaged flesh. They ask that her heart be changed, that her soul be released, that her mind be directed, and that her spirit join more closely to God. They ask, in other words, that she be acted upon to increase her own faith.
Even the vocabulary of suffering is usually oriented toward a particular outcome. Death appears eighty-seven times and suffer sixty-four, but redeem appears twenty-seven times, forgive thirty-four, grant forty-one, and offer forty-seven. Christ’s suffering, gruesome as it is, is not presented as pain for pain’s sake. It is repeatedly converted into mercy, pardon, protection, intercession, and transformation. The structure of the prayers makes that logic explicit: because Christ endured, the speaker asks that God now forgive; because Christ shed blood, a soul may be released; because Christ offered himself, the reader may offer herself in return.
The vocabulary of relationship is equally prominent. Father and Jesus each appear seventy-one times; beloved fifty-eight; Son forty-two; Mother twenty-nine; child twenty-five. This is not an emotionally bleak religious world populated only by sin, punishment, and fear. It is a familial and relational one. God is invoked as Father, Christ as beloved Lord and Son, Mary as mother, and the praying subject as one seeking incorporation into a sacred network of care. Even the repeated appeals to Christ’s Passion operate within this language of attachment. The prayers are gruesome, yes, but they are also intimate.
Word counts cannot by themselves tell us what a manuscript means. They flatten context, treat every occurrence as equivalent, and cannot distinguish a dominant theological concept from a repeated grammatical formula. Still, they offer a useful corrective to selective attention. The blood caught my eye, but upon deeper consideration love structures the manuscript more deeply. FB 1118 presents suffering as real, prolonged, and bodily; yet equally and importantly, it also insists that suffering will eventually open out toward mercy, grace, peace, life, and joy. Taken as a whole, this is not a faith obsessed with pain. It is a positive Catholic faith confident that pain can be remembered, offered, and ultimately transformed.
METHOD:
A complete transcription of Innsbruck FB 1118—including prayers, rubrics, reflections, and short treatises—was rendered into English with the assistance of Google Translate in July 2026. Passages central to my analysis were subsequently checked against the German transcription and revised as needed by the author.
The resulting English text served as the basis for this exploratory vocabulary assessment, in part because machine translation regularizes variant spellings of the Alemannic original. To be clear, the frequencies reported here describe the vocabulary of the translated text rather than providing a precise lexical analysis of the German original.
The translated text was uploaded to the word-cloud generator WordArt, with common stop words excluded. Word frequencies were then reviewed manually, with particular attention to emotionally charged vocabulary and to the relative prominence of words associated with suffering, sin, mercy, love, grace, peace, and joy. The results are intended as a broad indication of the manuscript’s devotional emphasis, not as a statistically rigorous linguistic analysis. As a rough cross-check, however, I also reviewed frequencies in the German transcription after consolidating obvious spelling variants; this produced the same broad pattern, with vocabulary of love, relationship, petition, salvation, and interior life appearing prominently alongside terms for suffering and death.
RELATED POSTS
Seven Times a Day: Prayer as Humane Practice:What did medieval prayerbooks actually ask their readers to do? This post explores repeated daily prayer in the Thalbach sisters' prayerbook and argues that devotion was built through small, regular acts of return rather than extraordinary spiritual experiences. A perfect companion to this look at the vocabulary of prayer.
Counting Drop Caps: What a Prayerbook's Initials Reveal about the Divine Office Words are only one way a prayerbook communicates. Here I examine how large initials, layout, and page design quietly reveal the devotional priorities of a medieval community, showing that manuscripts guide prayer visually as well as verbally.
Sooner or Later It All Gets Done: How History Emerges from Small Details Why spend so much time counting words, tracing tabs, or studying repeated prayers? This reflection explains how seemingly insignificant details accumulate into meaningful historical evidence—and why patient, close attention often changes what we think we know about the medieval past.
