Praying Before the Image of Mary: Nuns’ Prayerbooks and the Mapping of Sacred Space

Abstract

This study examines the performative, spatial, and affective dimensions of Marian devotion in two early modern women’s prayerbooks from Vorarlberg: the Valduna Prayerbook (Freiburg i. Br., UB Hs. 1500,30) and the Thalbach Prayerbook (Bregenz, VLB Hs. 17). Both manuscripts demonstrate that prayer was not a purely mental act but a choreographed devotional performance shaped by posture, gesture, and gaze. Rubrics repeatedly direct the devotee to pray before an image of the Virgin, transforming the image into a locus of embodied interaction that engaged sight, movement, and emotion. Analysis of sixteen such image-based prayers reveals how spatial instructions, somatic cues, and affective language converge to produce a physically enacted piety. Quantitative assessment of affective vocabulary shows that gaze-based prayers concentrate emotional language—especially of joy, sorrow, and distress—at twice the density of other texts in the same manuscripts, underscoring their heightened emotional charge. These prayerbooks thus construct a devotional choreography in which the devotee’s body becomes both instrument and interpreter of spiritual meaning. By situating image, word, and motion within the convent environment, the study reveals how female religious communities enacted Marian devotion as lived performance, where space, gesture, and affect generated spiritual presence.

1. The Performative Nature of Devotion

Prayer in early modern convents was not only a private or mental activity. It unfolded through gesture, posture, and emotional expression. In this way, inner devotion became visible as a socially legible act in defined and sometimes prescribed space. This performative dimension of prayer is especially evident in Marian devotion, where manuscripts often direct the devotee to pray before an image, orchestrating posture, gesture, and emotional attention. In this way, prayer takes shape as a carefully choreographed devotional encounter. Falque (2024) reminds us that “image-based meditation and devotion were thoroughly entangled with other cultural practices,” urging attention to “the texts of specific prayers that could be associated with paintings.” This study follows that call, beginning with the prayerbooks themselves. Like Rudy (2017), I see prayerbook rubrics as more than just paratexts; they shape prayer as an embodied experience in which kinetic and space-bounded elements were central. By instructing the reader to pray before a specific image, the compiler also seeks to situate her within a defined devotional space. I explore this situatedness using the concept of “performative reading” (van der Laan 2020) in which the reader envisions the narrative as if witnessing it firsthand. These prayerbooks, I argue, construct sacred space neither as a fixed nor a symbolic landscape, but rather as one actively mapped through the reader’s physical and imaginative engagement with place

Two prayerbooks from Vorarlberg convents—the Valduna Prayerbook (Freiburg i. Breisgau, Universitätsbibliothek, Hs. 1500,30, assessed in Buschbeck and Serif 2012–2013; Serif 2018) and the Thalbach Prayerbook (Bregenz, Austria, Vorarlberger Landesbibliothek, Hs. 17, described briefly in Tiefenthaler (1988) and Scheffknecht (1990))—illustrate these embodied Marian practices. Both manuscripts juxtapose extensive Marian texts with visual elements that structure the devotional experience. The Valduna Prayerbook includes parchment images cut from a 14th-century manuscript, featuring at least three Marian images (Buschbeck and Serif 2012–2013). The Thalbach Prayerbook includes two Marian woodcuts—one placed adjacent to a Marian prayer and another, depicting Mary as Mother of the Seven Sorrows, affixed as a pastedown on the inner front cover (Cyrus 2020). Additionally, rubrics in both manuscripts direct the reader to pray in front of an image of the Virgin, linking text, image, and gesture in a cohesive devotional encounter. By situating the devotee before Mary’s image, the prayerbooks call for the very interplay of sight, movement, and feeling that studies increasingly identify as central to devotional practice. Falque (2024) highlights the devotional and performative dimensions of gazing upon religious images. She urges us to consider the viewer’s interaction with devotional images—not only what viewers projected onto the image, but also what they received from it. She emphasizes the “entanglement” of image-based meditation with broader cultural practices and points to a shift in art historical discourse toward treating devotional images as “instruments,” “tools,” and “devices.” Lentes (2006) likewise argues that images were not simply representations but “places of prayer,” linking the material and spiritual realms. Gazing alone, however, was not enough; the efficacy of prayer was tied to the proper use of gestures and bodily comportment before the image. Polkowski (2023) builds on this idea, proposing that images—such as Mary at the foot of the cross—served as invitations to share in Mary’s perspective and become co-witnesses to sacred events, engaging the devotee in a form of “virtual witnessing” through embodied, affective, and visual cues. Together, these studies illuminate how devotional practice was not purely internal but enacted through the body as it engaged with the combination of text and image.

Building on these insights, the current study draws on sixteen image-based prayers and devotional exercises from the Valduna and Thalbach prayerbooks, focusing on how rubrics direct such bodily engagement. In fourteen cases, rubrics explicitly instruct the devotee to recite the prayer “before” an image of Our Lady, while another two provide the Virgin’s image directly, creating occasions for structured bodily and affective interaction. Close reading of texts and paratexts reveals that such prayers intermix spatial and bodily instructions, visual attention, and affective language. Instructions also guide the devotees’ movements through space, mirroring convent-based pilgrimage practices and reflecting theories of performative reading. Posture, gesture, and emotion functioned as crucial interpretive tools in the devotional experience.

When rubrics ask a devotee to pray “before” an image of Our Lady, they are serving as pointers to the intermingled tactile, kinetic and spatial experiences of worship in late medieval culture (Rudy 2017). Indeed, a host of prayer types invite the devotee to move location to enhance their prayer experience (Mecham 2006; Ehrenschwendtner 2009). This phenomenon has been explored extensively in studies of virtual pilgrimage, which show how the image could serve as a stand-in for an external location and how the tactile and experiential elements of “traveling”—mapping a convent journey onto the contemplated pilgrimage to Rome or Jerusalem—were designed to reinforce the devotee’s experience (van Asperen 2014; Rudy 2011). Indeed, as Beebe (2014) has shown, the ideal devotee would internalize her journey so much that she might experience seasickness as she contemplated the boat journey. Images and texts became guides to the transformational power of travel. Indeed, Rudy (2011) argues that pilgrimage was a mental habit that informed viewers’ responses to all devotional art. So when our devotee finds herself instructed in the prayerbook rubric to pray in front of an image, she is participating in a common practice of using an external image as leverage for her more intimate understanding of textual content.

The act of viewing, in other words, is not an isolated practice but entangled with spatial awareness and bodily movement that can be made manifest in a number of ways. Amsler (2001) discusses “somatic technologies” of reading—gestures with hands or eyes, the tactile act of running one’s finger along the page, and the coordination of voice and sight when reading aloud. But the prayer rubrics in these manuscripts go further: they prescribe physical actions—standing, kneeling, making the sign of the cross—integrating bodily motion directly into the devotional encounter. McNeill (2005) proposes that gesture and thought are not separate but intertwined, “different sides of a single mental/brain/action process”; devotional action and contemplation, in this view, are mutually reinforcing. Specific postures, such as genuflection, invited the devotee to inhabit a culturally legible script of humility and reverence, reinforcing an appropriate devotional attitude (Mrozowski 1993). These gestures functioned as “communicative acts” that were socially intelligible, particularly in the way they signaled asymmetrical relationships of power and piety (Zakharine 2013). Indeed, Harkins (2012) argues that such “embodiment language” generates subjectivity: the devotee’s body becomes the medium through which religious experience is not only expressed but produced. In this sense, the body can be read as a kind of text or sign, socially coded and interpretable on the one hand, and on the other, as an agent of memory and a catalyst for action (Roodenburg 2004). In other words, by adopting prescribed gestures and poses, devotees do more than follow instructions. Their visible movements are designed to activate the devotional encounter, allowing the body itself to respond to and interact with sacred presence. In this interplay, bodily actions and the images’ visual cues mutually shape and reinforce the devotional experience. Scholars have increasingly emphasized that images were not static objects of contemplation but dynamic agents of religious experience. Bino (2017) suggests that such devotional images were “almost alive bodies,” capable of acting as if truly present. She frames viewing as inherently performative, arguing that “seeing the icon is doing something which involves, physically, the viewer, as if he came into a scene and became an actor.” Similarly, van der Laan (2020) finds that devotional readers oscillated between the roles of spectator and participant, embodying the scenes they encountered through a “carefully arranged choreography” of posture, gesture, and emotional display that “bridged the experiential gap.” This performative reading, she argues, relied on bodily cues recognizable from lived experience—“details, gestures, postures and movements observable in other bodies”—which the devotee internalized and reproduced. Lipton (2005) shows that the interpretation of such cues can be guided by the narrator, who at times can even choose to read an image against the grain. Harkins (2012) sharpens this focus on the textual dimension, coining the term “embodiment language” to describe the ways in which narrative detail generates subjectivity and religious experience. Such language functions “instrumentally,” she argues, by crafting perceptions of spatial experience and interior transformation—enabling the reader to move from text to affective encounter, from observer to participant. Ehrstine (2012) concurs; as he shows, early modern German vernacular treatises suggest that meditation is at its most effective when one maps the content of the text onto one’s own body. These scholars point to a mode of reading and viewing that is not only immersive but also activating, one in which the devotee’s body becomes the medium through which sacred presence is enacted.

If viewing and imagined viewing are already active, bodily, and affectively charged practices, then attention to emotion becomes the next logical step; understanding how these enacted responses are cognitively processed and socially shaped helps explain how affect is cultivated, guided, and displayed in devotional experience. Rosenwein (2010) argues that emotions are “fruitfully understood as kinds of cognitions—unreflective, and therefore immediate, assessments of a state of affairs or an object as good or inimical to oneself.” She urges us to interrogate how emotions function in a text. Unlike Oschema (2006), who sees emotion as ritualized and institutionalized through repetition, Rosenwein sides with White (1998), who views emotion as scripts rather than rituals—acted out, staged, and on display. She invites us to consider what forms of emotional expression a medieval audience might “expect, encourage, tolerate, and deplore.” Similarly, Denissen (2018) shifts the question from what emotions are to what emotions do. The affectual language of these prayers, coupled with the kinetic and contemplative work they require, does not merely reflect inner feeling but actively shapes it—guiding the devotee toward a cultivated interiority. This interiority, however, is not purely personal; it is socially legible and performatively enacted through gesture, posture, and emotional cueing embedded in devotional scripts.

Taken together, these strands of scholarship emphasize that devotional viewing was neither passive nor a solely visual act, but one entangled with gesture, spatial orientation, and emotional display. The Vorarlberg prayerbooks, in particular, show how manuscripts could actively orchestrate a mode of Marian devotion that is at once spatially situated, kinetically choreographed, and affectively scripted. This study therefore asks what medieval devotees were actually doing when they prayed before an image of Mary: how their bodies moved, how their gestures signified, and how affective cues mediated spiritual presence. Understanding how bodies, gestures, and affect were mobilized in prayer illuminates the significance of where Marian images were situated, revealing the convent itself as a stage for devotional performance.

2. Experiencing Mary in Image, Action, and Word

2.1. Access to Marian Images

Several strands of evidence illustrate the different forms of access to Marian images available to the sisters of Thalbach and Valduna. Rubrics in their prayerbooks indicate when images were to accompany specific devotions, sometimes specifying particular scenes from Mary’s life. In other cases, the presence of an images itself, provided as woodcut or paste-in, invites gaze-based devotion. Additional sources, including convent inventories and local religious sites, further illuminate the broader visual context of the sisters’ devotional practices.

The Thalbach Prayerbook shows that the prayer-giver might call upon a range of Marian images. Seven rubrics leave the choice of image open, instructing the devotee simply to pray “before an image of Our Lady,” while others specify particular episodes from Mary’s life. We have calls for an image of Mary with child (fol. 142), Mary offered in the temple (fol. 235), Mary “in whom a child was born,” so perhaps the pregnant Mary of the Visitation (fol. 236), and the Vesperbilt—the Pietà—before which a candle was to be lit (fol. 251). But we also have physical woodcuts included in the volume. The first of these shows Mary as Mother of the Seven Swords and is found as a pastedown on the inside cover of the volume. The second re-purposes an image of the Madonna, seated with child, bestowing a crown on a knight and worshiped by two women—an adapted syphilis/plague image from the title page to a volume of Paulus Niavis, Latinum ydeoma pro parvulis, as I have shown elsewhere (Cyrus 2020).

The image of Mary and beneficent child warding against illness might have been more appropriately placed a few folios before, accompanying the Marian prayer against pestilence to be said before her image (fol. 247–9). Instead, this second woodcut faces a different prayer, the “vi Ruf[e],” a longer meditative text that elaborates on Mary’s maternal sorrow at the foot of the cross, deepening the emotional and theological resonance of the Pietà image. Its rubric here instructs the reader to pray “in front of a Vesperbilt with a burning candle” [vor der vesper bilt und brend dar zu ain leicht]. Thalbach’s vi Ruf[e] shares both vocabulary and theme with the more common—and much shorter—“Sechs Rufe unter dem Kreuz” (O eingebornes kint, troeste dîne einige muoter), pointing toward the popularity of meditative texts focused on Mary’s sorrow and her role in the Passion narrative. While the placement of the image is curious, the idea of including Marian imagery in a prayerbook that leans so heavily on Marian prayers and devotions makes good sense. The devotee, finding instructions to pray before Mary’s image, could choose to look within the bounds of the book, or could seek an image from the convent or the parish church.

In addition to the internal prayerbook evidence for Thalbach, an eighteenth-century inventory of nine special images from the convent collection (Thalbach Beschreibung) offers insight into the devotional landscape shaped by material representations of Mary. Among these, four early modern images of Our Lady stood out, each imbued with significance through associated miracle stories or historical circumstances. One was listed only by proxy: the hand of a Marian statue known as the Gnadenmutter, a Sedes Sapientiae figure of Mary enthroned with crown and child. This statue, gifted to the Thalbach Tertiaries by the Benedictines of Mehrerau in 1592, served as recompense for the sisters’ assistance during a pestilence outbreak that same year. Another image, a miraculous Vesperbild, had survived being consigned to the fire in the shop of a Lutheran baker and was brought to the convent in 1588 alongside the six-year-old postulant Catharina Heidenhoferin. A third, described as a “small image of the gracious Mary,” was housed in the choir and brought by Euphrosina Danschöttin in 1581; it became the site of a private mystical experience in which Meisterin Regula Weissin (d. 1597) was said to have exchanged “fiery rays” (feürige Strahlen) with the Virgin during prayer. A final image, kept in the dormitory, likely entered the convent later, but was already linked to miraculous signs by 1632, when it reportedly changed color and facial expression in the upper parish church of Menge—an event interpreted in light of the active Swedish invasion of Bavaria. Although the inventory makes no mention of a Visitation image or of Mary’s presentation in the Temple, the devotional use of these four images shows the sisters drawing deeply on established tropes from the Virgin’s life and investing their sacred objects with immediate, lived significance.

A comparable, though more limited, pattern of Marian image use emerges in the case of the Valduna convent. The Valduna Prayerbook has only a pair of rubrics suggesting an image-based devotion (111v–112r and 112v–113r), but it too had space for a Marian image adjacent to an indulgence prayer to Mary sometimes attributed to Sixtus IV, but likely by Johannes Hauser (181v–182r). Buschbeck and Serif (2012–2013) have shown that a half-a-dozen parchment cuttings were integrated into the Valduna Prayerbook as pastedowns, and in her more detailed investigation of the manuscript, Serif posits that a large image of Mary may have been pasted in facing the Sixtus/Hauser prayer and subsequently removed (Serif 2018). The presence of an additional Marian image within the manuscript would be unsurprising. Though enclosed, the Valduna sisters focused their devotional life around the “mother of God.” They had chosen to begin their enclosed life on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, 8 December, in 1394, and already in those early years, dedicated the high altar to Our Lady. As Ludewig (1922) put it, “the miraculous image of the Madonna in the monastery was venerated with firm trust in God and with living faith.” The sisters’ devotional enthusiasm, reflected in an early convent prayerbook (ca. 1400), continued unabated through the sixteenth century, when the convent Prioress, Maria Magdalena von Hummelberg, wrote a Marian devotional treatise which Ina Serif has shown has a number of thematic parallels with the Valduna prayers of the same generation (Serif 2018).

The evidence thus suggests that both Thalbach and Valduna fostered image-based Marian devotion. In each case, sisters were guided to gaze-based practices through a combination of textual instructions, visual elements both within and beyond their prayerbooks, and the devotional culture of their communities. While for Valduna we lack contemporaneous book or treasure inventories, the 1782 patent of dissolution confirms that the sisters kept images, books, and other devotional objects in their private cells (Ludewig 1922). Any Valduna sister drawn to particular Marian devotions might have procured her own image(s) for contemplation in a process familiar to modern audiences from investigations at Wienhausen and elsewhere (Hamburger 1998; Mecham 2006; Mecham 2014; Jones 2017). At Thalbach, the situation was somewhat different, since unlike their Clarissan counterparts, the Thalbach sisters were not enclosed and could visit whatever icons suited them. By the end of the fifteenth century, the adjacent parish church of St Gall had two Marian altars, one “under the hunger cloth,” with an endowed chaplaincy from 1444, and another in the St Nicholas Chapel, established by 1485. Also in town there were significant Lady Altars in the Chapel am See, established in 1450, and at the Sondersiechen, the infirmary chapel established in 1406, as well as the many small shrines and corner statues along Bregenz’s streets (Rapp 1896).

In sum, both Thalbach and Valduna offered their sisters meaningful access to Marian imagery, but through contrasting channels as shaped by their institutional contexts. While Valduna’s enclosed setting fostered internal, manuscript-based devotions and personal images, Thalbach’s more open structure allowed for both book-based contemplation and engagement with a broader network of Marian sites. These distinct models highlight the flexibility and adaptability of image-based Marian devotion in early modern female religious life.

2.2. The Kinetics of Marian Prayer

Given that the sisters of both Thalbach and Valduna were guided to gaze upon a material image of Mary, we might ask what else their devotional practices asked them to do. They may have had to move to situate themselves before an appropriate image; Regula Weissin’s special devotion to a particular icon, for instance, would have taken her into the choir. But the rubrics for these prayers also frequently ask for other actions, making movement a key element of local prayer practices.

The Valduna Prayerbook (112v), for instance, guides the devotee praying the German text of the 72 Names of Mary (72 Namen Marias) to “want to experience the prayer” on her knees in front of Our Lady’s image—or where she can (wil er lept uf sinen knüen vor vnser froen bild oder wo er kan). Rubrics call for genuflection in seven of the seventeen prayers considered here, making it one of the common signals of devotion in practice. Moreover, the Valduna rubric conjoins the action with the intentionality: it is both her “want”—her desire—and her movement—her kneeling—that are attached to the prayers’ actions. Kneeling is important, but so is standing; four rubrics suggest that the devotee stand before an image. This is significant since none of the rubrics specify sitting; the attitude or stance for prayer requires active muscular engagement with the prayer activity. Arms and necks can be called upon too; rubrics for Stant auf (Thalbach Prayerbook, fol. 142) suggest that the devotee sign a cross, and several other Thalbach prayers, including the Golden Crown rosary (fols. 161–70) and the Three-day Prayer to the Virgin (O junckfrow maria ain künigin der himel und der erden, fol. 216) give the symbol for a cross in red ink. We know from elsewhere that bowing one’s head in humility is an important prayer gesture (Zakharine 2013; Rudy 2017), but rubrics in these two prayerbooks do not make that explicit.

In addition to personal and somatic action, the sisters are asked to adopt proper attitudes. One should pray devotedly (andachigklich) to ensure efficacy. One should remember that (s)he has not sinned unto death and should well and truly repent. One should contemplate this scene or that one: the 60 h that Christ was gone before he greeted Mary again (Thalbach Prayerbook, fol. 161); Christ’s suffering and your [Mary’s] motherly compassion, to be considered “with thanksgiving” (Thalbach Prayerbook, fol. 253); “the pity and the suffering you [Mary] had” during the stages of the Passion (Thalbach Prayerbook, fol. 252). But one should equally consider Mary’s joys (Thalbach Prayerbook, fols. 133, 236). The point, claims the rubric, is to turn to God and Mary, who can answer any need (Thalbach Prayerbook, fol. 133). One should also invest consumable goods in the form of wax, for half-a-dozen of these gaze-based prayers call for lights to be lit as part of devotional practice.

Perhaps the most interesting of the kinetic realities of prayer in these Marian devotions is the extent to which actions might be scripted. Four of the prayers offer instructions that are almost choreographic in nature. First stand and do this; then kneel and say that. The untitled rosary with contemplations on Mary’s life provides particularly rich instructions. For fourteen days, the devotee is to speak 15 Ave Marias, then kneel and say 50 more. She shifts to standing to recite the Magnificat, then kneels again for 5 more Ave Marias, contemplating all the while “the honor and the joys from the beginning, as she [Mary] was born into life, until the day she entered the temple” (den eren und aler fröden an ab laid als sy in libes kind gebor bis an den tag als sy in den tempel mug…). A middle section is performed kneeling before Our Lady’s image, considering God’s plan. As the rosary intensifies toward its conclusion, the devotee is to speak ten Ave Marias standing, just as “she” [Mary] stood under the cross, and ten kneeling as she heard the hammer bang with which one nailed her beloved child’s hand and feet to the cross. (x do sy under dem crutz stund x knüwet als sy hord die horen hamer schelg de mit man ir hertz liebes kindes hend und füss an dem crutz naglet). The rosary ends with the devotee reciting a final ten Ave Marias considering how dear that child was to Mary. The acts of standing and kneeling parallel the rhythms of Mary’s own sorrow and strength, allowing the devotee to enter, bodily, into the drama of salvation history.

These choreographed devotions, with their deliberate movements, emotional cues, and visual anchors, show that Marian prayer in these convents was not merely a matter of inward piety or spoken word. It was a fully embodied performance—muscular, affective, and intentional—that engaged the whole person in a reciprocal relationship with Mary. Through postures of humility and strength, the devotee quite literally enacted her devotion, making the body a crucial site of spiritual labor, constructing each prayer’s meaning in deliberate, thoughtful ways.

2.3. The Affectual Vocabulary of Gaze-Based Prayer

As the devotee gazes on the image and moves her body to intensify the impact of a given prayer, she is also reading prayers that have a particular emotional resonance. A close reading of the sixteen gaze-based prayer texts from Thalbach and Valduna shows a pattern not just of strong emotionally charged scenes—the passion, Mary’s joys in motherhood, her own presentation in the temple—but also of emotionally explicit language. These texts contain both emotion-label vocabulary that directly names feelings (e.g., joy, regret) and emotion-laden vocabulary that implicitly evokes them (e.g., death, bitterness) (Tang et al. 2023). This matters because such affective language is not merely descriptive; it is embodied. As Betancourt et al. (2024) argue, “understanding is grounded in emotion simulation.” In other words, by engaging with this emotional vocabulary, the sisters were not just reading about emotions, they were affectively and sensorily engaging with them, internalizing emotional states through the embodied practices of prayer and reflection.

A focused study of Thalbach’s gaze-based prayers shows that all twelve prayers, with the exception of the shortest, use vocabulary from both the positive and negative affect areas. While the use of local dialect and a lack of consistent spelling complicate digital assessment, the reading of the prayers demonstrates a surprising consistency in approach. (The vocabulary appears here in order of descending frequency within the Thalbach Prayerbook.) On the positive side, variants of fröd* (joy, joyful; standard German Freude) and/or süss* (sweet, sweetness) are found in all twelve prayers. On the darker side of the spectrum, rüw* (regret, standard German Reue), schmerz* (pain), angst* (fear), not*/nöt* (distress or need), bittr*/bitter* (bitterness, standard German bitterkeit), and hertzl*/herzl* (heartache, standard German herzeleid) are also found in 11 of the twelve prayers. That is, the prayers seem to be designed to draw on the full spectrum of affective experience, intentionally blending sweetness and sorrow to guide the devotee through a devotional arc that is both emotionally immersive and spiritually productive. This affective layering deepens the impact of gaze-based prayer by encouraging not just visual or physical engagement, but also a felt participation in Mary’s joy and suffering. In doing so, these prayers construct an emotional pedagogy—teaching the devotee how to feel in prayer, and how to orient those feelings toward empathetic connection with Mary and, through her, with Christ.

That these gaze-based prayers are doing something distinctive becomes clearer when we widen the lens to compare affective vocabulary in image-focused prayers to patterns in the rest of the manuscript (See

Table 1. Affective Vocabulary in the Thalbach Prayerbook.

Affective Vocabulary	Total Manuscript Pages Containing Term(s)	Subset of Pages from Image-Based Prayers	Percent of Term Usage by Image-Based Prayers
Total manuscript pages containing one or more term	229	36	16%
fröd* (joy)	95	15	16%
süss* (sweet, sweetness)	64	9	14%
rüw* (regret	47	9	19%
schmerz* (pain)	46	7	15%
angst* (fear)	42	10	24%
not*/nöt* (distress or need)	38	10	26%
bittr*/bitter* (bitterness)	23	4	17%
hertzl*/herzl* (heartache)	24	4	16%

). Because the Thalbach Prayerbook shows significant orthographic and dialectal variation, affective vocabulary was identified manually through truncated keyword stems, capturing both explicit terms (such as “sorrow” or “joy”) and affect-laden expressions. Pages were recorded as containing a term if it appeared anywhere, and the proportion of pages with affective vocabulary was compared between the full manuscript—the complete devotional collection—and the subset devoted to gaze-based prayers to assess their relative share of emotional language.

In total, 229 pages include some form of emotive vocabulary, 36 of which belong to gaze-based prayers. Strikingly, the share of affective vocabulary found in image-based prayers consistently exceeds their proportional representation: although these prayers make up only 8% of the prayerbook, they account for around 16% of total affective term usage. This overrepresentation is even more pronounced for the terms angst and not/nöt, where image-based prayers account for 25% of the pages containing these words, far exceeding their 8% share of the manuscript and underscoring the heightened emotional intensity of these gaze-based texts. These findings suggest that gaze-based prayers not only integrate affect more densely, concentrating affective language at a markedly higher rate than the manuscript as a whole, but may be purposely designed to heighten emotional engagement through a fusion of image, word, and embodied practice.

3. Spatial, Somatic, and Affective Dimensions of Marian Prayer

By calling for prayers to be recited before an icon of Our Lady, these prayerbooks foreground the spatial dimensions of devotional practice—both external and internal. Spatiality here operates in two registers: the external setting of the image, including its physical location and conditions for its visibility, and the internal or imagined space constructed through devotional engagement. The placement and visibility of the image—its externalities—shape how the devotee encounters it. As Lentes (2006) reminds us, factors such as distance and lighting affect what can be discerned in an image and how clearly it can be perceived. This may help explain the frequent rubricated instructions for lighting in connection with image-based prayers: illumination enhances visual access and intensifies devotional focus.

Within the convents of Thalbach and Valduna, we have seen that images of Our Lady were both plentiful and narratively rich, an array which represents multiple moments from Mary’s life. Some of the gaze-based prayers in these books correspond explicitly to such episodes, suggesting an intentional alignment between image and text. At Thalbach, such devotional encounters were not confined to the convent walls; tertiary sisters had access to Marian images in nearby chapels and the parish church, all within walking distance—extending the devotional geography of image-centered prayer.

This local spatial practice parallels broader observations in pilgrimage studies, where scholars have explored how stationary images can structure imagined devotional journeys, particularly within women’s convents. Rudy (2011), for instance, emphasizes the importance of physically moving to sites of visual representation, arguing that such images guide the devotee through prayer and meditation. In this sense, our Vorarlberg sisters participate in a comparable practice: they traverse short distances within or just beyond their conventual orbit to engage a specific image, selected for its devotional resonance. Through the combined use of text and image, the sisters internalize the affective and theological content of the prayer. Moreover, the emphasis on kinetic and embodied forms of prayer—gestures, prostrations, or genuflections—further supports an interiorized response shaped by sensory, emotional, and cognitive engagement.

The interior narratives activated through spoken prayer, visual contemplation, and kinetic, embodied gesture are shared across the spatial and devotional contexts described above. The gaze-based prayers to Our Lady in these books repeatedly employ vivid, sensorial, and affect-laden imagery to guide the devotee into a deep affective participation. In one such prayer, Mary is portrayed in tender maternal intimacy: she suckles, bathes, and kisses her child (Thalbach Prayerbook, fol. 133). In another, the devotee stands beside Mary at the Passion, invoking a full sensorium—hearing Christ’s “loud voice,” tasting the vinegar, seeing him hang on the cross (fols. 123–128). In a parallel text, Mary hears his final cry, feels the sword pierce her own heart, and again sees his crucified body (fols. 265–271). As Harkins (2012) has noted, such graphic, sensory detail enables a shift from mere observation to immersive religious participation by evoking what she terms the “phenomenal aspects of lived experience.”

The meditations for the Golden Crown rosary (fols. 161–170) exemplify this sensorial-devotional mode. This set of prayers—distinct from the earlier “Guldin kron” in the same manuscript—is designed for Wednesdays, with instructions for the devotee to kneel before an illuminated image of Our Lady and meditate on Mary’s sorrows during the 60 h following Christ’s death, before his resurrection. The prayer is long and complex, structured around six exhortations (Ermanen) and six petitions (Bittnung), using parts of the body as mnemonic and meditative focal points. The devotee is invited to visualize Mary’s rose-colored mouth now pale from motherly pity, to feel her wince with cringing feet, and to listen with the “holy ears” that heard her son’s final words. The prayer concludes with an identification between Mary’s sorrow and the devotee’s own, as the petitioner likens Mary’s loss of her beloved child to her own parting from dear friends—transforming personal grief into sacred imitation.

Such prayers are designed not merely to be read, but to be enacted in front of an image—to put seeing, speaking, and imagining on equal devotional footing. Indeed, Bino (2017) interprets seeing as a “synaesthetic” encounter, a multi-sensorial experience in which the viewer can come into a scene as an actor. In doing so, the devotee enters a mode of contemplative empathy, where gazing at the image of Mary becomes a means of imaginatively inhabiting her somatic experiences of sorrow. Through this devotional mechanism, the external gaze upon Mary’s icon becomes the entry point to an interior, affective pilgrimage, one that passes not only through her suffering body but also through her rejoicing wonder in the miracle of Christ’s redemptive victory.

While synaesthetic engagement highlights the significance of embodied empathy, these prayers also cultivate positive affect alongside the depiction of suffering. In a scholarly landscape often dominated by analyses of Passion-centered piety, it is therefore crucial to underscore the positive valence present in these icon-based prayers. Falque (2024) suggests that in the Meditationsbild interpretive tradition, such devotional images map the pain of the Passion into the register of inner turmoil. Van der Laan likewise connects Passion imagery to the physical and mental suffering of the devotee. But in this framework, where is the capacity for joy, for sweetness, for the blessings of motherhood, resurrection, and heavenly reward? Where is Mary’s compassion that encourages her role as mediatrix, capable of interceding for “the whole Christian community” and for “all believing souls”? The density of positive-valence vocabulary not only in these image-based prayers but in the Vorarlberg prayerbooks overall should remind us that hope was as central as the ideas of suffering in this early modern environment.

Polkowski (2023) rightly argues that Mary functions as a focalizer in Passion scenes, offering a mediated, “virtual witnessing” experience for the devotee through controlled access to sensory detail and visual cues. I agree that such focalization helps the devotee transition from text to affect, using vivid detail and guided imagination to draw the reader into participation. However, I diverge from Polkowski’s emphasis on negative affect—suffering, grief, and anxiety—as the defining trajectory of this devotional mode. The prayerbooks themselves suggest a more complex affective structure, in which negative emotions serve as a passage toward more positive states. The somber is juxtaposed with the joyful, the painful with the redemptive. Mary’s loss, as contemplated in the darkness of Christ’s death, becomes meaningful precisely because it leads the devotee toward hope, catharsis, and anticipatory joy.

The structural features of these Marian prayers support such a reading. Their narrative complexity, often organized as multi-episode meditations, encourages the devotee to trace the arc of Mary’s (and Christ’s) story rather than fixating on a single, emotionally charged scene. Moreover, the incorporation of refrains—Paternosters and Ave Marias, the Magnificat or the Salve Regina, even the Gloria Patri—provides a structured pause, inviting the devotee to move between meditative absorption and liturgical familiarity. These refrains, often cued by rubrics, also mark the transitions in physical posture from standing to kneeling and back. Such bodily movement reinforces the affective shift already enacted by the text and image.

Most significantly, these image-based prayers are presented frequently as multi-day cycles: to be repeated on a Friday and Saturday (fols. 138–141); to be recited seven times a day for seven days (fol. 142); to be repeated for thirty days consecutively (fols. 251–253; 265–71), and so on. This emphasis on repetition extends beyond words to encompass gesture, posture, and gaze. To repeat the prayer is also to repeat the approach to the icon, to reenact the somatic engagement with both image and text. Through this devotional rhythm, the devotee’s focused gaze is not a one-time event but a cumulative practice—one that integrates bodily discipline, emotional memory, and spiritual intention in pursuit of an efficacious outcome.

As Caviness (2019) reminds us, material objects—such as the images of Our Lady embedded in these prayerbooks—are deeply implicated in local ritual and belief systems. Their meanings are not inherent but constructed within specific viewing contexts. The prayers we have examined here, composed for and used by the sisters of Vorarlberg in the early modern period, are embedded in such contexts. They draw on cultural conventions of movement, gaze, and narrative to guide the reader into a devotional experience that is both performative and situated. By instructing the devotee to pray before a specific image, the compiler locates her within a defined devotional space—one that is not merely symbolic or fixed, but actively constructed through physical presence and imaginative engagement.

This is a form of performative reading, in which the devotee envisions the narrative as if witnessing it firsthand. Sacred space emerges not from abstraction but from the devotee’s embodied interaction with text, image, and place. As Roodenburg (2004) argues, the body itself becomes a sign within a socially coded devotional milieu. The sister who glimpsed Regula Weissin at prayer would have recognized, through gesture and posture, the depth of her immersive devotion. But the body is more than a sign: it is also a devotional agent—an instigator of memory, affect, and sacred action. Through repeated acts of reading, gazing, and moving, the sisters did not merely perform Marian devotion; they materialized it. The physical manifestations of Marian worship—anchored in icon, text, and bodily discipline—were the very means by which these women internalized, enacted, and sustained their relationship to the divine.

Thus, spatial and somatic practices converge with the affective and material dimensions of prayer, suggesting a model in which devotion in early modern women’s convents was structured not only by affective content but by the sustained interplay of image, text, and embodied action. Through this lens, sacred reading emerges as a performative and materially situated act, in which the devotee internalizes devotion through an external and legible choreography of sight, movement, and imagination. By instructing the devotee to pray before a specific image, the complier locates her within a defined devotional space, one that is actively constructed both through her physical presence and her imaginative engagement. Ultimately, the various images of Mary function not simply as visual aids, but as material anchors of devotion, mediating between physical space, ritual gesture, and interior experience.