For centuries, prayer has been central to people’s worldview, to their education and formation, their experience of religion and the Divine, to the creation of societal communities, and to structuring everyday life throughout Europe. Despite the ‘religious turn’ in the humanities, prayer is still often seen as ordinary or even self-evident. This has hitherto prevented a thorough understanding of the history of this powerful and complex phenomenon in the late medieval and early modern world. From a European perspective, this period was formative for the role of prayer in public settings and in people’s personal lives.
The phenomenon is marked by plurality and diversity and the disparate nature of research on prayer calls for a strong collaborative international research network that will move toward creating a shared framework for the study of prayer in the Latin Christianity during the late medieval and early modern period. Studying prayer as a participatory practice on several levels (as a communal or social practice, using a variety of material devices (media, objects) that can evoke a spiralling, amplifying effect in the mind of the devotee) will lead to better understanding of prayer (and with it, the history of imagination, hope, and meditation) in its plurality.