A Day In the Life of a Carpenter Fellow at HMML

Post amended 10/17/26 to add the Johanna kiln firing of 10/16/26. 

The Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML) is a treasure-trove of medieval materials – much of which is on microfilm, part of their long-term mission to preserve our written past. It is, for nerds like me, a fabulous place to do research. In a single day I can compare things from Italy, France, Germany, and Austria without getting on an airplane or having to worry about figuring out how to manage dinner after a full day’s work. I’m lucky to be here in Collegeville, Minnesota as a Carpenter Fellow, with housing, meals, and research support that let me concentrate on a project that draws on HMML’s collections.

HMML is not just European, of course – a couple of days ago I got a whiff of the “Smelly Book,” an Ethiopian Psalter from the 17th century which has had some haaaaard history, blackened as it is by fire– and HMML is consciously working in various places where the written record is under threat. Syriac, Armenian, Lao: there is an abundance – literally hundreds of thousands – of things in languages I don’t speak or read.

But, as I indicated, I’m here because HMML lets me put manuscripts from different places into conversation as I work on my book about Franciscan sisters. I’m currently looking at the rules that shaped their daily lives – and getting happily sidetracked by the words women spoke when they made their vows, their “profession formulae.” After all, these women were Franciscan Tertiaries, whose religious life could take several forms. There’s a tension between “we’re not nuns” reality of their Tertiary status and “we live in community following rules” that’s an interesting space for my book project to live.

For example, here’s one difference that caught my attention (and ate my mid-week): a profession formula from Solothurn, published by Brigitte Degler, explicitly makes room for a woman who might later feel called to a more rigorous monastic life. The Freiburg versions I’m working on instead have her promise “for all the days of my life.” That sounds like a minor difference, but it opens up a big question: how did these women understand the commitment they were making, and what possibilities did they imagine beyond it?

This is the kind of question that gets me to my (standing) desk in the morning. And HMML makes a Latin Editing Before Lunch kind of lifestyle possible, letting a scholar dive deep into a project while leaving the dishes and laundry back home.

So here’s a bit of what a day here at HMML looks like for a scholar in residence, the pictorial version:

walking with a book in the Emmaus residence basement, with coffee and tea, and more coffee

 

small but comfortable housing; 3 meals a day in the refectory

beautiful campus – with a glimpse of the lake on the way to work

The most visually arresting campus image: the abbey church

“My cell”: microfilm reader, computer, notebook, coffee -- all the fun stuff!

Working on bibliography in the Alcuin library

 

walking campus trails: lake-side, arboretum; last week’s step-count was 106,529 steps, or 50.4 miles!

(Okay, okay, regarding step-count: I did go backpacking over the weekend – here’s a couple of pictures of bears, all three, including mama bear playing peekaboo. Those were from off campus, though – up at the Paul Bunyan State Forest on the North Country trail...)

For the adventurous: Walking to St Joe’s via the Lake Wobegon trail. (One could bike, if one biked. It’s 6 miles, each way, so plan enough time. Weekends can be well-spent!) I recommend Flour & Flower for the baked goods.

Late-breaking addition -- I attended the Johanna Kiln firing on Oct 16th

Progress!

So, what does progress mean to me? Well, at this point, it's:

• 23 tabs open across three browsers. 
• 19 footnotes on a working edition that will be the basis for discussion of “lived life” in Chapter Zero, the book’s introduction.
• 88 files of notes, bibliography, and outlines for the middle section of Chapter One.
• 28 pages of handwritten notes.
• An outline of the book’s opening gesture – often the hardest part to figure out. Yay, I have a hook! (It’s still a secret, but I’m having such fun with it! And I figured it out while walking at lunchtime looking at the leaves change color.) 

The way I treat HMML is as an almost frenetic immersion in my material. The goal here isn’t to produce prose, it’s to produce the knowledge that will inform my prose when it comes time to write. There’s a great deal to be said for having the time to follow a question past the “here’s a footnote” stage until it actually becomes interesting – and then keep following it. Here, I can do that, take a walk by the lake, and arrive at dinner without having had to plan it. For this Carpenter Fellow, that’s a very good day.

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YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN:

Sooner or Later It All Gets Done: How History Emerges from Small Details: A repeated phrase, a payment, a candle at a grave: small details can answer questions earlier readers never thought to ask. This post explores how patient attention to familiar sources builds new historical knowledge.

Using Research Questions – Defeat data-hoarding and discard the chaff!: There’s always another source to read and another detail to collect. Here’s how research questions help give that collecting a purpose – and help you decide what belongs in the project.

Vacation work… not an oxymoron: Ideas have remarkably little respect for office hours. A reflection on downtime, scribbling, and the long simmer that lets new connections emerge without turning every thought into another task.

Guarding the Mouth: Speech and Silence in Thalbach’s 1479 Statutes

I started reading a set of Thalbach’s convent statutes and discovered that their late-fifteenth-century Provincial, Heinrich Karrer, was remarkably worried about women talking.

That’s perhaps an unfair way to put it—but not entirely unfair.

In 1479 Karrer, Provincial of the Upper German Franciscan province and Visitator General of the brothers and sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis, issued a new set of statutes for the women living at Thalbach in Bregenz. An earlier set of regulations had apparently not worked entirely as intended, so Karrer replaced it with something he considered more useful.

What caught my attention was what these new statutes regulate—and what they (mostly) do not.

There is very little here about reading. Nothing about study. Almost nothing about household labor. Prayer itself receives surprisingly little detailed attention. 

Instead, again and again, the statutes return to speech: when the sisters should be silent, what kinds of conversation they should avoid, what they may say to outsiders, how they may speak to one another, and what happens when words damage the peace or reputation of the house.

First,silence

The statutes begin predictably enough with worship. The sisters are to attend divine service diligently, especially Mass and preaching, unless illness or necessary work prevents them. Then Karrer moves almost immediately to silence:

Let all the sisters observe silence diligently in the morning, in the evening, and at the table. (Und das alle swesteren ir schwigen mörgens und öbendes und ob tische flißenklich haltent; und welche das an nottorft bricht, die sol vor tische sitzen.)

Break that silence without necessity and there’s a consequence: the offender must sit apart at table.

But this is not really a rule demanding silence all the time. The next provision makes that clearer. The sisters are to be prudent in “speech and conduct,” both inside and outside the house, and to avoid idle talk. Anyone who fails must confess not simply that she talked, but how often, in what way, and about what. The Mother then decides on a suitable penance.

And the regulation is communal. A sister who hears another breaking the rule and fails to report it receives the same punishment.

That last bit recurs often enough to matter. This is by prescript a self-regulating community. You’d better tattle if you see things going wrong.

Good sound, dangerous sound

To my eye (or ear), the contrast is not between sound and silence so much as between kinds of sound.

The very first sounds mentioned in the statutes are good ones: Mass and the preaching of God’s Word. The sisters should be there to hear them. Dangerous sounds come afterward: idle talk, private conversations, insults, accusations, gossip, contradiction.

That distinction makes sense within the broader Franciscan tradition.

The Third Order rule confirmed by Nicholas IV in Supra montem in 1289 imagined a religious life structured in part through hearing and speaking.

Let each strive, while the office of Mass is being celebrated and the word of preaching is being offered, to observe silence and to be intent upon prayer and the office.… (Studeat quilibet, dum Missae celebratur officium, et praedicationis verbum proponitur, servare silentium; orationi et officio sit intentus...

Brothers and sisters were to say the canonical Hours—or substitute Pater nosters if they could not—and attend Mass when possible. They were to hear preaching and exhortation. But during Mass and the homily they were also to observe silence and attend to prayer. The rule even warns about careless oaths made in ordinary speech, noting rather ruefully that slips happen when one talks a lot.

Silence, in other words, was not simply the absence of religious sound. It helped distinguish useful speech from useless speech, attentive hearing from distraction. Francesca Sbardella makes a related point in her study of silence in Catholic cloistered life: silence is not an empty space left when speech stops. It is a practiced condition through which speech, behavior, relationships, and religious identity are organized. And the rule thinks so too: unfortunate things tend to happen in much speaking (prout contingere in multiloqui consuevit).

That seems especially useful for Thalbach.

What words can do

Karrer seems intensely aware that words have consequences.

No sister is to have unauthorized “familiarity, conversation, or private interaction” with anyone, priest or layperson.

Furthermore, no sister shall have any familiarity, conversation, or private dealings with anyone, whether priest or layperson.… (Item und will auch daz keyne schwester kaynerlay fruntschaft noch gesprech noch haymlich mit nyemands hab, er sy priester oder lay..)

(Again, a sister who knows about such behavior and does not report it shares in the punishment. Self-regulating!)

Inside the house, the stakes rise further.

If one sister were to attack another’s honor—accusing her of theft or sexual misconduct, insulting her, calling her a liar, or cursing her—she must confess publicly before the Mother and the community, ask the injured sister’s forgiveness, and eat her next meal on the floor. (Shaming and visual set-asides reinforce speech rules, but no corporeal punishment is ever mentioned, except for food deprivation, which is mentioned for unauthorized jaunts outside of the convent and as part of the increasingly severe penalties for sowing discord within the convent community.)

Words directed upward are dangerous too. Insolent speech against the Mother receives a doubled penance. And speech does not need to stay inside the convent to cause harm. A sister who speaks maliciously to outsiders in a way that damages another sister or the reputation of the house is to be called to account and punished according to the harm—or even the potential harm—her words have caused. Once again, anyone who hears and conceals such speech may receive the same penalty.

The underlying concern is not difficult to see. Words can disrupt peace within the house. They can injure another sister’s honor. They can create suspicion around a woman’s relationships with men. And they can move beyond the convent walls, damaging the reputation of the community itself.

Speech travels.

Guard your mouth AND your ears

There is a wonderful late-medieval image that gives visual form to some of these anxieties.

[IMAGE: “The Crucified Monk,” Wellcome Collection, WMS 49, photo L0029361. CC BY.]

Almuth Seebohm discussed this image in her study “The Crucified Monk.” Around the figure are texts concerned with disciplining the senses and the body. One set of verses instructs the religious to guard speech, restrain anger, and metaphorically place a lock upon the mouth and a balance upon words.

Custodi visum vehementer comprime risum
Sis custos oris et habenam stringe furoris
>Ori pone seram verbis impone stateram
Ne quid confundas ne quid sine crimine fundas

Curb the urge to laugh; be the guardian of your speech and rein in your fury. Place a lock upon your mouth; set a balance upon your words, so that you cause no confusion nor utter anything blameworthy.

The image also draws on the biblical tradition of guarding both tongue and ears: “Keep your tongue from evil” (Psalm 33:14); “I have placed a guard over my mouth” (Psalm 38:2); and even the wonderfully prickly advice from Sirach 28:28 to “Hedge in thy ears with thorns, hear not a wicked tongue, and make doors and bars to thy mouth.”

What I like about the image in relation to Thalbach is that the discipline runs in both directions. You must govern what comes out of the mouth. But you must also govern what comes into the ear.

That is very nearly what Karrer’s statutes ask the sisters to do. A woman is responsible not simply for what she herself says, but sometimes for what she hears another woman say. Listening itself creates obligation.

Governing women’s speech

And here the statutes become particularly interesting to me.

There is nothing unusual about medieval religious rules valuing silence or warning against idle talk. Benedict had done both centuries earlier. Nor is a Franciscan concern with disciplined speech surprising. But at Thalbach, the issue becomes unusually concrete.

These statutes regulate women speaking to one another, women speaking to outsiders, women speaking privately to men, women insulting one another, women talking back to authority, women spreading damaging information, and women listening to one another’s prohibited speech.

It would be easy to turn that into a simple story about male authorities silencing women. Karrer was, after all, a male provincial laying down rules for a female community. Yet the statutes are more complicated than that – more nuanced, and more reflective of women’s own exercise of authority.

The Mother is repeatedly given discretion to judge offenses and assign punishment. Sisters are expected to admonish one another. They are responsible for noticing breaches and maintaining communal discipline. The system certainly governs women’s voices, but women themselves are also part of that governance.

Nor is the object silence for silence’s sake.

The convent was not imagined as acoustically empty. It contained Mass, preaching, prayer, confession, admonition, correction, and ordinary communication. Some speech was necessary. Some was holy. Some sustained communal life. The question was which words belonged.

Reading the statutes this way makes silence look less like the opposite of sound than one means of organizing a religious soundscape. What mattered was not simply whether a Thalbach sister spoke, but what she said, to whom, where, when, who heard it, and what her words might do.

That is a surprisingly large burden for a few spoken words to carry.

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Sources

Gerold Fussenegger, “Das Frauenkloster Thalbach bei Bregenz,” Alemania Franciscana Antiqua 9 (1963): 93–140; pp. 108-112 includes a transcription of the Thalbach statutes of 1479 that have been the basis for my assessment.

Nicholas IV, Supra montem (1289), Rule of the Brothers and Sisters of Penance. (This is a blog post; I used online copies today: a Latin text https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Supra_montem and the English translation from https://ofsgb.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Supra-Montem-1289-exNAFRA.pdf.)

Francesca Sbardella, “Embodying Silence: The Resilient Action of the Unspoken in Catholic Cloistered Life,” Studi e materiali di storia delle religioni 88/2 (2022): 494ff.

Almuth Seebohm, “The Crucified Monk,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 59 (1996), 61ff.

Translation note: Translations of the Thalbach statutes quoted above are mine, based on Fussenegger’s published transcription and checked against the original German wording.

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YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN:

Supple Rules for Prayer: Daston’s Ideas Meet the 16thc Prayerbook: Another look at how written rules shaped women’s devotional practice at Thalbach—this time through prayerbook rubrics rather than house statutes.

Building for the Ear (from Chaco Canyon to Medieval Vorarlberg): A broader meditation on how religious communities organized sound and listening—useful context for thinking about silence, speech, and the convent soundscape.

Diligent Devotion: Maria Euphrosina Vöglin’s Leadership at Thalbach: A later example of women exercising authority within the Thalbach community, complementing the 1479 statutes’ emphasis on discipline, oversight, and communal order.

The Vorarlberg Chapel I Wasn’t Looking For

I was in Vorarlberg, Austria (on the Bodensee) for research as part of a large summer archival trip – thanks to the Fyfe Faculty Excellence fund. Mostly, that was museum, or library, or archive, or street-front, or church, or chapel, or waystation.

And then there was the day I set off to see if I could hike to the Hirschberg.

This wasn’t a random destination, though it was definitely research-adjacent. You see, once upon a time the Franciscans (MY Franciscans if you’ll permit me an ownership-by-affection) were gathered up at the convent of Thalbach in Bregenz. That initial foundation happened in the 14^th century (if you believe the Sisters’ Chronicle) or 15^th century (if you tie yourself to actual documents like a true historian, sigh).

And they lived at Thalbach for centuries. And they became Franciscan-affiliated formally in the period after the Council of Trent, living as Tertiaries.

And time went on.

And then, AND THEN, closure happened. During the Aufhebung, when Emperor Joseph decided that contemplative work was at odds with state productivity needs, the convents of Thalbach and of St Anne’s in Bregenz were both closed (in 1782), the sisters dispersed, and the innards were sold or burned as useless.

So the building sat empty.

And sat empty some more.

But, BUT. One of the nearby surviving sisterhoods – a Dominican group – had, once upon a time, been living in community on the Hirschberg near Bregenz. And then the storms came through. Bad storms. Zapzapzap of lightning. Poof, their convent went up in flames. 1462 was a bad year. And you know what? So was 1463, when lightning struck again. Yikes!

So the sisters moved to Hirschthal bei Kennelbach. Yay, happy endings! For a while, that is. But the Kennelbach convent was vulnerable, too, and in 1796, their not-on-a-hillside convent was destroyed in yet another fire on the night of January 1–2, 1796. In the middle of winter. The fear was fierce. Could they survive?

The answer lay in an empty building. One even commissioned and, in part, built by nuns through the labor of their own hands, as it happens. Thalbach had been sitting around, just aging (as buildings do) for sixteen years. One of the Hirschberg (aka Kennelbach aka Hirschtal) sisters had a great idea: ask the city council for some building-based charity. And it worked! They were able to move in! And within six months, on 22 April 1979, they bought the “verwiaste Kloster Thalbach” from the city outright – for 4700 gulden, on the condition that they provide free schooling for girls in Bregenz.

And now Thalbach, which had been built for Franciscan Tertiaries, became, after that chronological gap, a home to Dominican sisters. And thus it stayed until 1983, when declining vocations and an economically disadvantageous environment meant another closure. This time, the building went to another Catholic spiritual group, Das Werk, and they still inhabit the convent now.

My chosen task on a Sunday, then, was to wander my way up to the Hirschberg. Because I can. Because it’s there. Because it’s easier to hike somewhere than just to hike when you want to plan your day.

It’s a longish hike from Bregenz, and I knew enough of my own capacities to plan for the bus-ride back in advance of my adventure. So I set off as one does, with water-bottle and snacks and hiking kit and phone charger, and went exploring uphill in the mountains.

It was splendid.

Hiking in Vorarlberg is easy (well, except for the hiking part). I use a combination of Waldfinder (the Vorarlberg hiking app) and AllTrails (which gives decent trail-dotted lines) and Google maps (which gives names, yay), and just zig and zag on the dotted trail indicators as mood takes me (and as the various trail signs indicate). I started by hiking up the Gebhardsberg to the former site of a Bregenz chaplaincy in the mountains, though the buildings there reflect the impact of the Swedish invasion – rebuilding in sacred spaces is certainly a “thing.”

GEBHARDSBERG

Uphill, yup: hiking up to the Gebhardsberg

Classic ruins

Inside the reconstituted chapel, set for someone's wedding

And then up and over hillsides, past lovely streams, in and out of shade, through various towns (Langen bei Bregenz being the most notable), and up and across 

VORARLBERG COUNTRYSIDE 

Shrub and hill-view

St. Wendelin at Fluh; founded in 1666, and rebuilt 1846–47; served as pilgrimage chapel and then in 1872 as Parish church; St Wendelin of Trier is patron of country folk and herdsmen.

Glorious roads and paths...

And stunning hillside views

A small waterfall

A parade of old cars

Lovely plantings -- the yellow blossoms were full of bees!

Yes, I was having a good time. Meadow and trees and a bit too much sun!

until I got up to the trail on up ….

The chapel of Maria Heimsuchung -- the Visitation -- at Hirschbergsau: a cute rural chapel dating from 1893, built over the grounds of a previous chapel. Contains a bell dated 1619, cast by Johann Baptist Ernst.

Another view of the Hirschbergsau chapel

...to the wrong Marian chapel. Yes, It seems that I went to the Maria Heimsuchung Kapelle (The Visitation chapel) in the Hirschbergsau -- the meadow part -- instead of the Marienkapelle (The Marian Chapel) at the mountain peak on the other side of the mountain. In other words, coming up from Langen, I chose the wrong fork in the trail, and went about 90 minutes out of my way. Whoopsies!

YELLOW GOAL / RED DESTINATION

Two Marian chapels, both in the mountains above Langen...

The day already being a long one, however, I took it as a signal that hiking is about the journey, not the destination, and instead of adding another two hours to my weary legs, I took my photos of the chapel that greeted me at MY destination, and put “hike to the Hirschberg Marienkapelle” onto my list for some future adventure.

And then I hiked back down and caught my bus back, and had a lovely beer and a quiet evening, and got ready for a scholarly week by list-making (as one does).

About all of this I have several reflections:

1) Wherever you are, that’s the adventure you’re having.
2) Hiking in Vorarlberg is among the most lovely things one can do in all of this wide world.
3) A sunny day of hiking is NEVER a mistake.
4) Always double-check your destination. If you care. Do you really care?
5) History gives us connections, but the hand-off isn’t always smooth.
6) Be interested in what’s around you; that can be as joyous as the thing you think you’re working on.
7) When in doubt, your next destination is probably uphill. Be ready for that.
8) Wrong turns still take us places. Sometimes they even have chapels.
9) Maps are excellent tools. Users can be excellent fools. You have permission to enjoy that gap!
10) Go for it. Take water, a sun hat and bus fare (or a bus app), but go for it.

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Resources

• Go here, not there: My goal was actually supposed to be THIS Marian chapel. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marienkapelle_(Langen_bei_Bregenz)

• Vorarlberg app for hiking: https://waldfinder.at/

• Vorarlberg app for managing bus / train routes: The Verkehrsverbund Vorarlberg route planner is available as the app “cleVVVer Mobil” for Android and for iPhone.

  • https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.hafas.android.vvv&hl=de_AT

  • https://apps.apple.com/at/app/clevvver-mobil/id533107345

• Pay for your bus with ease using the Fairtiq app, which calculates your fare based on check-in (when you get on the bus) and check-out (when you step off), and will calculate your day’s maximum fare for you without having to think about it. Easy peasy!

You might also be interested in…

• The Thalbach building campaign: Long before Hirschthal’s Dominicans moved into Thalbach, their prioress had helped support its building. This post gives a glimpse of the regional networks linking women’s religious houses.

• How Thalbach remembered its own beginnings: How old was Thalbach, really? The convent Chronicle had answers—and wanted you to know that they drew on documents!

• Why everything church-like seems to be uphill in Vorarlberg: Why are Vorarlberg’s sacred places so often uphill? Elevation could be inconvenient for walkers precisely because it was useful for bells.

The Blood Caught My Eye, But Love Dominated: The Prayer Vocabulary of Innsbruck FB 1118

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. 

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. 

 

How Long Is a Long Prayer? Innsbruck FB 1118

(Image from Walters Ms. W.438, text from Innsbruck FB 1118, fol. 60v)

The first thing I noticed about Innsbruck FB 1118 this second time through was its sheer devotional bulk. I’d met the manuscript in person, and that’s always more fun, so maybe the downer of transcription duties shaped my mood. But transcriber me just felt like this book was *endless.* Prayer follows prayer across the manuscript in a tangle of different genres: Hours of the Passion, confession prayers, devotional instruction, invocations of saints, a mystical treatise, thirty-three Miserere, further appeals based on Christ’s suffering, and finally an incomplete Marian prayer. The effect is cumulative. Page after page returns to Christ’s body in graphic and often discomforting details: blows, spitting, binding, scourging, wounds, blood. Even before pausing to distinguish the separate texts, the manuscript feels long.

But “long” is a slippery word here. It may describe the number of folios, a density of the language, the repeated return to the same scenes, or simply the fatigue of the modern reader who is transcribing and translating everything in sequence. FB 1118, copied (at least in part) in 1489, certainly contains prayers that take up substantial space. Yet my first impression—that these were extraordinarily long prayers—began to seem less obvious once I took a step back and stopped treating the manuscript as though someone were expected to read it straight through.

For the women who eventually used this book at Thalbach, prayer was not leisure squeezed into the edges of a working day. It was part of the work itself: distributed across hours, occasions, intentions, and repeated devotional routines. The more useful question, then, is not simply how many pages a prayer occupies. It is what kind of time the prayer asks its users to create.

The manuscript’s first major prayer sequence makes that distinction especially clear. The Tagzeiten zum Leiden Christi occupies more than twenty-five folios. That’s formidable when described as a single work. But it is organized according to the Hours. Matins begins one part of the Passion narrative, and then Prime, Terce, Sext, None, and the later Hours take up succeeding moments. The codex gathers these prayers into a single extended sequence, while the devotional schedule breaks that sequence apart.

What looks long in the manuscript, then, may have been experienced as a series of smaller appointments with the Passion. A user did not necessarily begin at folio 1r and continue until folio 27r. She returned to the book as the day advanced, taking up the next prayer when its hour arrived. The manuscript preserves the whole arc at once, but prayer-as-practice distributes it across time.

That difference matters because modern reading habits make the codex look more expansive than it may have felt in use. Transcription encourages continuous reading. So does scholarly description: “folios 1r–27r” turns a sequence of separate observances into a single block. But the Hours are designed precisely to resist continuous consumption. They interrupt the day and ask the reader to re-enter the Passion repeatedly, not to complete it in one sitting.

FB 1118 is therefore “long” in one sense and yet carefully portioned in another. Its textual scale reflects the number of occasions it serves. The better analogy may not be a very long prayer, but a full calendar or work schedule: substantial when viewed as an undifferentiated whole, manageable because no one performs all of it at once.

Repetition intensifies that impression of length. FB 1118 returns again and again to the same scenes out of the Passion: Christ is bound, struck, spat upon, scourged, stripped, pierced, mocked, abandoned, and made to bleed. From a modern reading perspective, this can feel less like progression than accumulation. The manuscript does not move efficiently from one event to the next. It circles back, retells, and enlarges.

But repetition here is not simply redundancy. Each return gives the reader another point of entry. One prayer may dwell upon Christ’s bodily pain; another upon his obedience to the Father; another upon Mary’s grief beneath the Cross; another upon the salvific value of a particular wound or word. The Passion remains the same story, but the devotional action changes. The reader is asked to pity, remember, imitate, petition, confess, or entrust a soul to mercy.

The repeated wording also creates a stable rhythm. Again and again, the prayer addresses Christ, recalls a particular suffering, and turns that memory into a request. In the thirty-three Miserere, the recurring formula ich ermanen dich does not merely introduce new information. It performs the same act repeatedly: “I call this suffering to your remembrance.” The length of the sequence lies partly in that insistence. Mercy is sought not through one comprehensive summary of the Passion, but through the cumulative force of many separate reminders.

To call these prayers repetitive might therefore be accurate, but it is certainly incomplete. Repetition is one of the manuscript’s organizing tools. It slows the reader down, distributes attention across Christ’s body and story, and makes the Passion available for many different devotional purposes. What appears excessive when read straight through may have functioned in use as a series of focused acts, each familiar in structure but distinct in intention.

The thirty-three Miserere make this distinction unusually explicit. Despite occupying more than forty folios in FB 1118, the prayer-sequence rubric introduces its individual manungen as being written mit kurczen Worten—“in brief words” (FB 1118, fol. 59v) Such brevity, however, is only textual. The reader is instructed to think further upon those words and to recall whatever good matter they might generate, because the more “deeply” one follows Christ’s Passion, the more “unfathomable” it becomes.

This is almost a miniature theory of prayer length supplied by the manuscript itself. What the rubricator is saying is that a prayer is not complete when the written words have been pronounced. Rather, the words are prompts, openings into a larger act of recollection. A short ermanung may name one moment—the Last Supper, the prayer in the garden, Mary beneath the Cross, Christ’s final cry—but the user is expected to expand that moment inwardly. She is to supply remembered narrative, imagined detail, emotion, and petition.

The manuscript therefore distinguishes between the length of a text and the duration of the devotional action it initiates. A compact formula such as ich ermanen dich can open into a sustained (and to modern taste overly-vivid) reconstruction of Christ’s suffering. The reader does not merely remind Christ of an event; she must first make that event sufficiently present to herself to use it as the basis of her appeal.

This helps explain the peculiar combination of brevity and excess in the Miserere. The structure is highly repetitive and the individual premises of each miniature Passion scene can be stated quickly. Yet each one invites the reader to linger—to descend further into a Passion that the manuscript describes as effectively without bottom. The prayers are short in wording but deliberately long in attention.

From a modern reader’s perspective, FB 1118 can still feel enormous. Transcription encourages us to move continuously through the manuscript, measuring prayers by folios, words, and the time required to finish them. But it’s important to remember that the book’s original users were unlikely to experience the book in quite that way. For the sisters at Thalbach, the prayers were distributed across different temporal frameworks: the Hours of a single day, the eight days of the concluding Marian prayer, Easter and successive Sundays in the prayer to St. Erasmus, and the thirty-four days prescribed for the thirty-three Miserere. The manuscript does not simply contain a great deal of prayer. It organizes prayer across time.

That does not make the prayers easy or brief. Before beginning the Miserere, the user is instructed to put aside worldly concerns and drive idle thoughts from the heart: Wenn der mesch daz gebett wil sprechen so sol er sich alles zittlichs geschafftes abtun vnd alle uppigen gedenck vß sinem herczen (fol. 59r). The work of prayer included preparation, concentration, recollection, and endurance—not merely the pronunciation of the words on the page.

So transcriber me was not wrong: FB 1118 really is endless. But it was not meant to be finished in the way I was trying to finish it. Its prayers spill beyond their written boundaries—into the next Hour, the next Sunday, the next day of an eight- or thirty-four-day sequence, and into the meditation generated by a few “brief words.” For the women of Thalbach, that was not a design flaw. Prayer was the work, and for them, the point was not to get to the end, but rather to get to the end of suffering.

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MANUSCRIPT CITED:

Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, Cod. FB 1118, Gebete und Betrachtungen, copied (in part) in 1489.

Why associate this manuscript with the Franciscan Tertiaries of Thalbach?

• a Thalbach ownership statement dated 1727

• the feminine self-designation Sünderin in the prayer on the Name of Jesus (fol. 37v)

• the presence of the scribe Jörg Wittlinger, who also wrote in another Thalbach manuscript, ÖNB Cod. 2837, fol. 204v

• and the copying of the thirty-three Ermahnungen or Miserere by Heinrich Beck, chaplain of the nearby—and Bregenz-dependent—St. Nicholas Chapel in Wolfurt.

FB 1118 may not have been copied specifically for Thalbach, but it was certainly used there, although exactly when it entered the sisters’ hands remains uncertain. I like to imagine Heinrich Beck working on their behalf as he labored over the copying of those 33 passion meditations in the Ermanung section. That remains speculation, of course—but a later Thalbach prayerbook, Bregenz VLB Hs. 17, makes one thing quite clear: the sisters really, really, really appreciated collections of Ermahnungen.