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.

The Verbal Vocative: Change-Ringing Patterns of Marian Address in Der Herr ist mit dir

Imagine a prayer that goes on and on (and on and on), praising Mary in every imaginable way – her virtues, her role in salvation, her intercessory power – layered up with both Latin and the vernacular. That’s exactly what a sister of the women’s convent of Thalbach in Bregenz copied into her Prayerbook during the Counter-Reformation. This prayer isn’t merely words on a page. It's designed to be a rhythmic, repetitive, almost musical meditation intended to draw the devotee into an intimate encounter with Mary. Short vocative lines pile up while the regular Latin refrains echo repeatedly, creating a devotional experience that teaches both prayer-giver and her audience by the shaping of affect – through rhythm, phrasing, and structural repetition. What follows is a closer look at how this multi-section Marian prayer works, how it structures attention, and how it combines reflection, rhythm, and affect to bring the devotee closer to the Virgin.

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In the last third of the Thalbach Prayerbook (Bregenz VLB Hs 17), there are ten folios devoted to a single multi-section prayer to the Virgin (fol. 237–247). It’s a rosary prayer, centered on eleven (!) recitations of ten statements each of the Ave Maria, plus another dozen at the very beginning, so by the end, the devotee will have spoken 122 of them.

In between, the compiler provides “meditations” in strophes of seven to ten lines, each offering anaphoristic variants of Mary’s virtues. Strophes 1–4 establish Mary’s status and role in salvation history (Queen, Virgin, New Covenant); strophes 5–9 emphasize her participatory suffering and intercessory power, and the collect at the end pivots to a direct intercessory “ask.” Thus, like many rosary prayers, the sequence of strophes adopted here creates a pedagogical rhythm. First the devotee experiences awe, then empathy, then personal petition, with the culmination in the Collect with its request for personal salvation.

To my ear, the framing of the prayer is much like a litany, in which the call-out to each of the saints ends each and every time with an “ora pro nobis,” pray for us. But here, instead of the “pray for us,” an ask, the prayerful punctuation at the end of each line serves as a reminder to Maria of her connected status with the divine. The phrase – adopted and repeated 84 times (plus another 122 times in the refrain) – comes from the Ave Maria itself, as Gabriel reveals to her that “the Lord is with thee” (der her[r] ist mit dir):

o kaiseryn und ain künigin aler künig der her ist mit dir

o du lob aler gelobiger sohn der her ist mit dir

o du aler übertreffenlichste künigin der himel der her ist mit dir

o aler tůgenden vol der her ist mit dir...

O empress and a queen of all rulers [kunig], the Lord is with you

O you tribute of the praiseworthy son, the Lord is with you

O you exquisite queen of heaven, the Lord is with you

O you who are full of all virtues, the Lord is with you...

In that first strophe, notice that the devotee repeatedly addresses Mary with the intimate “du” form; this is a Mary seen in deeply personal terms as an intimate of the prayer-giver. Moreover, the similar beginnings and endings of lines make for an almost meditative incantation. As we see further down, the prayer consists of slight variations on a set of common themes. One or perhaps two lines per stanza might vary the form, but once a stanza establishes a pattern, the other lines tend to reinforce it. (See Table 1, below)

The effect is like change-ringing in a bell tower, where a set of fixed patterns is subtly shifted with each repetition to create movement and variation within a strict structure. Each line both mirrors and modifies the last, so that the rhythm feels familiar yet never static, drawing the devotee’s attention deeper into the text. This interplay of repetition and variation turns the prayer into a dynamic, almost musical experience, in which the voice, the mind, and the imagination are guided through the nuances of Mary’s virtues and roles.

Table 1: Marian Attributes and Repetition Patterns in Der Herr ist mit dir (Thalbach Prayerbook, fol. 237ff)

As Table 1 shows, the various strophes work their way through elements of the Virgin’s importance. First, she is important and highly placed, serving as empress, queen, intermediary (Strophe 1). She became so as a Virgin (Strophe 2). Her presence was predicted by the prophets, and can be analogized to the good things that sustain human existence – house, city, garden, fountain, fruit (Strophe 3). She is the beginning of the new covenant, as witnessed by the announcement of the Angel Gabriel (Strophe 4).

Here, the devotee is asked to pause and meditate on what that announcement of Gabriel meant. To support that contemplative moment, the vernacular translation of the Ave Maria is provided.

bis gegrußet vol genad der her ist mit dir / du bist gesegnet ob aler frowen und gesegnet ist die frucht dines lieb Jhesus cristus.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. / Blessed art thou among women, / and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus Christ

That becomes a moment of sectional pause as well, while the devotee recites two decades of Ave Marias, ten in Latin and another ten recapitulating the vernacular version.

Then the latter part of the prayer picks up Mary’s story with her role as mother (Strophe 5) and as co-sufferer or “Mitleiden” with Christ with implications for her salvific role (Strophe 6). She is that “Veritable Virgin” who witnessed the stages of Christ’s suffering, with his flogging, thorns, and crucifixion iterated each in a single line (Strophe 7). Plus, she is the mother who had to handle her own son’s body, who attended to its anointing and then was consoled through recognition of him as arisen again (Strophe 8), Thus, she is the veritable mother of the recognized Christ, positioned through events to intercede in his judgment (Strophe 9).

Having laid out the whys of Mary’s existence – her special status as Virgin, as new covenant with God, as enduring mother who walked the road of the Passion with her son – the devotee is now prepared for the Collect.

The collect, as expected, pivots to the intercessory ask: “ that you will shield me and protect me from the pain of eternal damnation and make me to be conveyed into the eternal joy of eternal bliss.” But before that, it amps up the rhythm of repetition with fifteen very short apostrophe lines:

o du gebenedieste / o du aler süsseste / o du aler tugenhaffigiste / o du aler erwirdigiste / o du aler senffmütigeste / o d[u] aler edleste / o du aler kostbariste… junckfrow maria

o you most blessed / o you all sweet / o you all-virtuous / o you all knowledgeable / o you all gentle / o you all noblest / o you all precious… Virgin Mary.

These short vocative lines, stacked one after another, build a kind of rhythmic crescendo, until at last Mary is called upon as “the giver of God now” and at the time of judgment, hence her capacity for intercession.

ASSESSMENT:

The use of vernacular alongside the familiar Latin refrain suggests a teaching and contemplative function for the Thalbach prayer. It seems designed to help the devotee internalize not only the words but also their meaning, a practice encouraged in late medieval lay devotion. Moreover, the prayer repeatedly reveals Mary as full of enumerated virtues, unfolding them in a rhythmic sequence that combines intimacy of address with theological weight. The prayer must also have been fun to write; one can imagine dreaming up lists of closely-related concepts about Mary and then sliding them around in the structure until they fit nicely.

Structurally, the prayer resonates with rosary practice while also standing apart from it in somewhat quirky ways. The eleven recitations of ten statements resemble the praying of multiple decades, though the Thalbach version is unusually elaborate, and yields 122 invocations in total. More striking still, the prayer suddenly shifts the devotee into the vernacular for part of her Hail Marys, only to return again to the standard Latin. This bilingual pivot is not typical of the rosary prayers I’ve seen, and it hints at a distinctive local or pedagogical aim.

Similarly, the alternation between Mary’s virtues and her life events recalls the early Dominican “Psalter of the Virgin,” in which repeated Hail Marys were paired with meditative reflection on her life (Winston-Allen). Yet the Thalbach prayer differs in its form: nearly every line concludes with “the Lord is with you,” creating a cumulative effect more akin to a litany than to a conventional rosary decade. The proliferation of epithets, brief apostrophe lines that acclaim Mary in superlative terms, further intensifies its litany-like quality. We hear nearly the same thing over and over and over again.

I see this prayer as a hybrid devotional tool. To my eye, the prayer functions both as rosary AND as vernacular meditation. Its repetition works on several levels. It reinforces memory, so that the words lodge themselves in the mind. It shapes affect, drawing the devotee into contemplative intimacy with the Virgin (du...du...du). And it creates an important verbal rhythm, guiding voice and body into patterned devotion, one which speeds up like an orchestral codetta at the end.

This prayer from the Thalbach Prayerbook thus reveals how rhythm, repetition, and affect interwove in late medieval piety. Prayer practice, as exemplified here, is more than a recitation of words. Instead, it employs rhythmic and formal structures to shape the voice, the mind, and the heart toward a more intimate knowledge of Mary and her intercessory power.

NOTE ON TRANSCRIPTION:

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

RESOURCES:

Der Herr ist mit dir [INC: o kaiseryn und ain künigin aler künig der her ist mit dir EXPL: von dinem lieben sun Jhesu criste der da regirett mit got dem vatter und mit got dem hailigen gaist und du Junckfrow maria mit ym yn der ewigen glory amen.], from the Thalbach Prayerbook, Bregenz, Vorarlberger Landesbibliothek Hs 17, fol. 237–247.

Anne Winston-Allen, Stories of the Rose: The Making of the Rosary in the Middle Ages, Penn State UP, 1997.

Why illustrate a prayerbook?

Woodcuts from Vorarlberger Landesbibliothek Handschrift 17

So there she was, my scribe. She’d put all this effort into copying out all those individual prayers. In a manuscript of more than 300 folios, that’s a lot of writing time. And then, before binding the manuscript, she – or one of her sisters? Or the binder himself? -- ran through the visual images available and plopped in two woodcuts, one an image of Mary with child (derived, as it happens, from a plague image), and one a Mary as Mother of the Seven Swords.

I’ve written about both prayerbook images (Cyrus, 2020), but have been thinking more about their purpose, and found it helpful to put the Thalbach tradition of using devotional images into dialog with a non-Western practice of the same period.

To do so, I’ve read Jahnabi Barooah Chanchani’s “Text, Image and Devotion,” (2018), looking at a Sanskrit devotional fragment, “two illustrated folios from a dispersed late 15th-century manuscript of the Bālagopālastuti (BGS) in the collection of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.” I was drawn to the use of color in her fragments – so much more fun than mere woodcuts – but I was also drawn to her argument, which I put in dialog with my own material below.

In both cases, text and image work in tandem not to narrate a story literally, but to prompt affective and imaginative engagement. Each pulls its weight in its own way; and bundled together – literally! – word and illustration open up multiple pathways to the divine.

1) Chanchani tells us that in Sanskrit realms, looking at images “was a vital component of the devotional praxis…. The verses and paintings complement each other in helping a devotee envision” their target divine figure.

The same is true for the sisters at Thalbach – or for those at any of a host of women’s houses in late-medieval German lands. For Chanchani’s text, the reader cogitates on Kṛṣṇa,in the Thalbach prayerbook, it’s the suffering Mary of the Seven Swords. In both cases, the role of reader presumably toggles with that of viewer. Each act of engagement informs those that follow, so that meaning is additive across the multiple media being consumed.

2) Chanchani’s manuscript fragments are part of an illustrated “picture-book of songs,” drawing on familiar texts. Nevertheless, as she points out, the paintings don’t directly illustrate the verses. In the images of the first folio, for example, no flute appears, and the extra women of the songs are missing.

Likewise, in the Thalbach prayerbook, Mary’s suffering is represented as a totality; all seven swords piercing her at once, whereas other rendition of Mary’s sorrows become composites, with rondels to narrate the details of her individual sorrows, as Carol Schuler articulates. In the prayers that follow, we instead dwell on details of Mary’s losses. The images in both cases are weirdly both summative – here is a divine personage in the midst of activities – and reductive, in that we are faced with a reduced single-moment capture of that experience.

3) Chanchani explicates that darśan, the process of exchanging gazes with divinity, is at the heart of Hindu devotional practice. Seeing, as she articulates it, is a form of knowing.

For sisters in a monastic environment, the same could very often be true. Jeffrey Hamburger in particular has explored the ways in which images serve as vehicles of inspiration. “Images,” as he establishes, can “serve not as props, but as the principal protagonists” in ceremonies, for instance.(Hamburger, 429). Images could spark visions and other personalized experiences of the divine; many instances can be found among the Nonnenvitae in convent chronicles. Given their status as launching-points for individuated faith experiences, Hamburger argues, images called out for control, duly provided through regulation and admonitions over the later medieval period.

And yet, sisters continued to incorporate images into their worship practices, saying particular prayers at specific altars, gazing on their precious pages in the choir stalls. The two devotional pictures found during archaeological excavation at Wienhausen (Appuhn) are a case in point; worship and gaze are intertwined as practice.

4) Why? Why intermingle imagery and text? I think here Chanchani’s observations are apt. As she explains, reading and looking are (both) imaginative acts. They invite readers to hold multiple aspects of the God-reference in mind. For Chanchani’s text, it is Kṛṣṇa; for the Thalbach sisters it is Mary, apostrophized in multiple metaphors as a signal of the complexity inherent to the divine

Illustrating a prayerbook, then, is not a matter of ornament – instead, it’s about amplification. Just as Chanchani’s manuscript invites the devotee into a multisensory encounter with Kṛṣṇa, so too do the Thalbach images summon a similarly layered engagement with Mary -- not to explain the prayers, but to deepen the contemplative practice surrounding them. Read, look, think, intuit: the praxis of devotional reading is more, so much more, than just working through the words.

In other words, in both Hindu and Christian-monastic tradition image and text operate not merely in service to each another, but work instead through a process of dynamic tension, for each pushes the devotee toward a more expansive and imaginative apprehension of the divine.

WORKS CITED

Appuhn, Horst. Der Fund im Nonnenchor. Kloster Wienhausen, Bd 4. [Wienhausen]: Kloster Wienhausen, 1973.

Chanchani, Jahnabi Barooah. “Text, Image and Devotion in a 15th Century Western Indian Manuscript.” Aziatische Kunst 48/1 (2018): 42–53. Academia link.

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

Hamburger, Jeffrey. The Visual and the Visionary. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998.

Schuler, Carol M. “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.

The Seelengärtlein (Hortulus animae)

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:

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.

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.