Prayer Practices in the Late Medieval and Early Modern World

Prayer was – and remains – a central devotional practice and a key form of communication in Christian life. Despite its prominent place in the history of Western Christianity, our understanding of prayer, particularly during the late medieval and early modern periods, remains hitherto limited. This lecture series seeks to address that gap by focusing on the material dimension of prayer.

Although Christian Europe in the later Middle Ages is often perceived as religiously unified, historical prayer practices were anything but uniform. Far from being a universal or static experience, prayer was expressed in a wide variety of forms shaped by local, social, and personal contexts. It could be public or private, communal or individual, domestic or (para)liturgical, and ranged from the spontaneous to the meticulously prescribed. Across all these forms, prayer was deeply embedded in the social and material fabric of its time. Yet prayer has often been overlooked in historical scholarship, in part because it is perceived as ordinary or self-evident. The term “Latin Christianity,” for instance, misleadingly implies a standardized religious practice. In reality, the development of urbanization, literacy, vernacular languages, and movements such as the Devotio Moderna or Observant reforms contributed to the growing diversity of Christian prayer across Europe from c. 1200 onward.

As Breitenstein and Schmidt (2019) have noted, drawing on Mauss, prayer is a “total social phenomenon”—a participatory act rooted in society and mediated through a wide range of material and textual forms. These include (memorized) texts, books, images (both mental and material), and devotional objects such as rosary beads, ex-votos, and relics. Prayer was not passively consumed; it was actively performed, felt, and experienced. This online lecture series aims to explore the diverse and embodied dimensions of Christian prayer in the pre-modern Western world—through the lens of objects.