A report on the Working Group 3 online video workshop
Online workshop · 15 May 2026 · Dominika Ruszkiewicz & Lieke Smits
Immersive prayer practices of the past – the focus of Prayticipate Working Group 3: Immersive Realities of Prayer – can be studied through the texts, images, and objects that have survived throughout the centuries. But these do not tell the entire story of how prayer was practiced. The performance of prayer involved bodily performances such as postures, gestures, and speech, the sensory experience of handling objects or leaving through books, and spatial settings that allowed for certain movements, acoustics, and other sensory impressions.
In order to understand the role of gesture and performativity in premodern immersive prayer practices, participants of the online workshop Staging Prayer were invited to experiment with the performance of their sources through the creation of a video. Handling objects, reading or singing texts out loud, or moving through a historical space can lead to new insight into the actions and experiences that these sources afford.
Is it possible to retrieve performances of the past? The aim of our video workshop was not to reconstruct the historical prayer experience, but to experimentally enrich our perspective and to think about different ways of generating knowledge.
The two videos in our first session featured bodily prayer postures. Lukas Bickel recorded a performance of a Pater noster exercise, based on the instructions for kneeling, prostration and other postures included in a fifteenth-century manuscript. Sorin Bora’s video traces the history of one of the oldest gestures of faith: the raising of hands in prayer. We discussed the rhythm of the body repeating the postures, how breathing narrows in prostration, producing a kind of anxiety, and how this anxiety is overcome when the penitent stands up, while raised arms widen the chest and deepen the breath. Changing the postures prevents monotony, and the experience of the performance is affected by the time of the day, weather, and other conditions.
The second session focused on song and inner performance. Kathryne Beebe’s video is about the Dominican Felix Fabri (d. 1502) and his guide for a virtual pilgrimage acted out in the imagination, which includes directions for singing. The video features a musical performance. Maria Ivanova recorded the performance of a terirem (kratema), a form of Byzantine chant based on repeated syllables. We discussed the difference between reconstruction and experimentation, the possible emotional impact of prayer and music, and the relationship between time perception, music listening, and subjective experiences.
The closing discussions focused on the question: what kind of knowledge are we generating when we experiment with our sources? Do we come close to a historical experience, or are we creating a new one? While the workshop did not lead to definitive answers, we discussed possible avenues for approaching this question: Jungian psychology, empathy, relationality, and rhetoric, among others. We invite everyone to watch the videos and, above all, to try a historical gesture or song and see where it leads.
Further reading
Laura Weigert, “Performance.” Studies in Iconography, 33, 2012, pp. 61–72.
Bissera V. Pentcheva, “Optical and Acoustic Aura in the Medieval Image: The Golden Retable of the Pentecost at Stavelot,” Material Religion 16 (2020): 9–40.
Lauren Mancia, Embodied Epistemology as Rigorous Historical Method (Cambridge University Press, 2025).