History of the Prayer Book

The History of the Prayer Book
of the Convent Sisters of Medingen

A life of contemplation and meditation, structured by daily prayer times and the constant alternation of personal and communal prayer, characterized the lives of countless religious women and men in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern era. These norms determined their daily lives after they had committed themselves to following the inspiring example of Jesus Christ, the apostles, the saints and their order founders by taking spiritual vows. The triad of ‘ora et labora et lege’[1] determined both their spiritual life and their daily work. Prayer, understood in the Christian tradition as a direct and immediate relationship with God, Jesus Christ and the saints, was of great importance to them and could hardly be overestimated.

Those in religious orders, such as the nuns of the Dominican convent of Medingen (Maria Medingen, also known as Mödingen, near Dillingen on the Donau), founded in 1246 not far from the old imperial city of Ulm, devoted themselves intensively to deepening and cultivating their faith and praying for the whole of Christendom.[2] This was their central task in life alongside other obligations. The so-called ‘prayer books’ played an important role in this. These served to support the sisters in their personal prayer and spiritual development. Among other things, the texts and prayers contained in the prayer books were intended to enable the sisters to attune themselves spiritually to communal prayer.[3] In the case of the Dominican nuns of the Medingen convent, which experienced a period of spiritual prosperity in the 14th and 15th centuries, a private prayer book has come down to us. This book, which is roughly dated to 1488, due to the nature of the material and the form of the writing — as well as a colophon of that date appearing on fol. 102v — is now in the library of the Tyrolean State Museum Ferdinandeum under the shelfmark Cod. FB 3172. It was acquired in 1903 by the Munich antiquarian bookseller Jacques Rosenthal. However, it remains unclear how it travelled from Medingen to the antiquarian bookshop in Munich and is difficult to trace.[4] 

Visually, the Medingen prayer book has a plain white leather binding and roughly comprises I + 240 + I folios. According to the codicological data of the Ferdinandeum’s descriptive manuscript catalog, the page size is 115 x 75 mm.[5] In terms of aesthetic design, it should be noted that the prayer book — apart from the last pages — is largely devoid of pictorial representations.[6] One of the few illustrations that it contains shows the story of the stable in Bethlehem and the birth of the Christ child, as described in the New Testament in Luke 2:1-20, but it is not colored.[7]

With regard to the design of the prayer book, it should be noted that prayer books (Gebetsbücher) — in contrast to the usually colorfully illuminated Books of Hours also intended for devotional prayer — were usually only simply decorated.[8] For example, the prayer book from Medingen was mainly written in black and red ink. The red ink was used mainly to introduce individual prayers. With regard to the handwriting of this Dominican prayer book, research has established that it is a small-format bastarda script, i.e. a broken script that presumably originates from several hands. There are many indications that the prayer book was produced and written in the convent by the sisters themselves, according to their needs.[9]

The Medingen prayer book is therefore representative of the boom in private prayer literature written in the vernacular that began in the 14th and 15th centuries and spread rapidly, particularly in southern Germany. This widespread distribution was largely due to the increasing literacy of broad sections of the population and the growing popularity and desire for individual, private devotion. Key proponents of this spiritual trend were the mendicant orders, such as the Dominicans.[10] With the help of the sisters’ prayer book, it is possible to reconstruct which texts and stories from the Holy Scriptures and which forms of prayer and devotion were popular with them. This gives us a more or less direct insight into the spiritual world in which the nuns lived. As the prayer book as a type was based on older, pre-existing forms of prayer literature, such as the Book of Hours or the Psalter, it is not surprising that numerous elements were adopted from them. This one contains a wide variety of different prayer texts for every time of day, as well as for numerous saints of the Church, such as St. Catherine of Siena or the founder of the Dominican order, St. Dominic.

The prayer dedicated to him once again shows the very individual character of this prayer book and that it was written by followers of St. Dominic for themselves.[11] Furthermore, as the prayer book shows, the sisters placed particular emphasis on internalizing and visualizing the suffering and passion of Jesus Christ. This was done using selected stories such as the descent of the Holy Spirit in Acts 2:1 or the resurrection of St Lazarus in John 11:41-44.[12]

One of the most remarkable texts contained in the Medingen Prayer Book is a so-called itinerary (or travelogue), which is presumably related to the Dominican friar, Felix Fabri, known for his pilgrimage reports to the Holy Land.[13] Fabri travelled to the Holy Land twice — in 1480 and 1483/1484 — which also took him Egypt and Mount Sinai.[14] The version contained in the prayer book is said to be based on Fabri’s pilgrimage narrative ‘Die Sionpilger’.[15] The Gebetsbuch itinerary in FB 3172 describes a 165-day journey to the Holy Land, starting from Medingen, with stops in Venice, Jerusalem and St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai.[16] However, this account of a pilgrimage did not serve as an actual itinerary for the nuns — after all, they rarely left their convent and were encouraged to strive less for the earthly and more for the heavenly Jerusalem.[17] Rather, it was intended to enable them to retrace the pilgrimage to the holy places from their monastery cell, like a meditation, before their inner eye and to reflect on it in the sense of deepening their faith.

Author: Elias Weißengruber

[1] The saying “ora et labora et lege” (pray, work, and read), which is usually attributed to Benedict of Nursia, is representative of the principles according to which religious women and men had to live their lives.

[2] Christian Lankes, “Mödingen,” in Klöster in Bayern,Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte, accessed 20.12.2024, https://hdbg.eu/kloster/index.php/detail/geschichte?id=KS0230.

[3] Kathrin Chlench-Priber, “Gebetsliteratur im Spätmittelalter: Ein Resümee aus literaturwissenschaftlicher Sicht, in Prayer Books and Piety in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe / Gebetbücher und Frömmigkeit in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, edited by Volker Leppin, Ulrich A. Wien, Maria Crăciun, Katalin Luffy (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2023), pp. 339–346; here, p. 341.

[4] Kurt Gärtner, “Ein bisher unbekanntes Fragment von Priester Wernhers ‘Maria’,” in Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur, edited by Kurt Ruh, v. 101 (Wiesbaden, 1972): 208–213; here, pp. 208–209.

[5] Bernhard and Hans Peter Sandbichler, Handschriftenkatalog des Museum Ferdinandeum: Die Codices des Tiroler Landesmuseums Ferdinandeum bis 1600 (Innsbruck, 1999), pp. 126–128; here, p. 126.

[6] Sandbichler, Handschriftenkatalog, pp. 126–127.

[7] Innsbruck, Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, Cod. FB 3172, endpapers.

[8] Christine Kupper, “Handschriften für das private Gebet,” in Spiegel der Seligkeit: privates Bild und Frömmigkeit im Spätmittelalter, edited by Frank Matthias Kammel (Verlag des Germanischen Nationalmuseums, 2000), pp. 117–130; here, pp. 126–127.

[9] Sandbichler, Handschriftenkatalog, p. 127.

[10] Kupper, “Handschriften für das private Gebet,” pp. 125–126.

[11] Innsbruck, Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, Cod. FB 3172, fols. 110r–111v.

[12] Sandbichler, Handschriftenkatalog, pp. 127–128.

[13] Gärtner, “Ein bisher unbekanntes Fragment,” p. 209.

[14] Andreas Klußmann, In Gottes Namen fahren wir. Die spätmittelalterlichen Pilgerberichte von Felix Fabri, Bernhard von Breydenbach und Konrad Grünemberg im Vergleich, Historica occidentalis et orientalis V.1, (Universaar, 2012), pp. 29–30.

[15] Felix Fabri, Felix Fabri, Die Sionpilger, edited by Wieland Carls, Texte de späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit 39 (Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1999).

[16] Sandbichler, Handschriftenkatalog, p. 127.

[17] Ramona Messner, “‘[…] Das heilig Grab Unnd Lanndt mit Pegrination […] besuechen.’ Eine vergleichende Analyse der spätmittelalterlichen Reiseberichte von Ulrich Brunner und Friedrich Steigerwalder,” Master’s Thesis (University of Innsbruck, 2024), pp. 15–16.