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

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.