Conference: Bound for Devotion: The Prayer Book as Object and Practice, 1300–1800
Organisers: Anna Dlabačová, Irene Van Eldere and Lieke Smits, Leiden University, PRAYER project
Place: Leiden and The Hague
Date: 1–3 July 2026
Author: Carolin Gluchowski, Department of History, University of Hamburg, carolin.gluchowski@uni-hamburg.de
What does a prayer book do? The question proved more productive than any attempt to define the genre by a stable set of contents. Across three days, the international conference “Bound for Devotion: The Prayer Book as Object and Practice, 1300–1800” examined books not simply as repositories of devotional texts but as instruments that organised time, directed bodies, shaped emotions, connected communities and mediated encounters with the divine. The conference was organised at Leiden University by Anna Dlabačová, Irene Van Eldere and Lieke Smits as part of the European Research Council Starting Grant project “Pages of Prayer: The Ecosystem of Vernacular Prayer Books in the Late Medieval Low Countries, c. 1380–1550” (PRAYER; grant agreement no. 101041517), funded by the European Union.
The project’s language of an “ecosystem” supplied the conference with both an object and a method. Rather than isolating texts, images, producers, owners or institutions, contributors asked how these elements depended upon one another in practice. The exceptionally rich Middle Dutch corpus remained an important centre of gravity, but papers ranging from Iceland and Denmark to Bohemia, Ukraine, Italy and England prevented it from becoming a closed regional model. This breadth also exposed a central difficulty: “prayer book” and even the apparently familiar “Book of Hours” are modern analytical conveniences whose boundaries shift according to use, compilation and transmission.
The strongest contributions treated arrangement as a form of devotional action. In his opening keynote, WALTER S. MELION (Atlanta) analysed Alardus van Amsterdam and Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen’s Passio domini nostri (1523), in which a repurposed woodcut cycle and poems formed a coordinated sequence of spiritual exercises. Images established subjects for meditation, while the poems instructed readers how to see and respond. TILLEANE CHARAVEL (Lausanne) showed that Philip the Good’s winter and summer breviaries materially layered sacred, dynastic and biographical temporalities. JAKOV ĐORĐEVIĆ (Belgrade) demonstrated how the unusual Office of the Dead cycle in the Très Riches Heures let readers assume successive biblical and hagiographical voices. ELEANOR JACKSON (York) completed the session by examining the Wounded Good Shepherd in fifteenth-century prayer books, showing how this unusual image made Christ’s sacrificial care available to affective contemplation.
Other papers expanded the prayer book beyond the codex. BJÖRN KLAUS BUSCHBECK (Zurich) presented a bilingual prayer scroll from Colmar whose format required repeated rolling and unrolling and may have alternated between individual and collective recitation. MARCO SERGIO NARDUCCI (Turin) used prayer books connected with the siege of Turin in 1706 to show how devotion could articulate civic identity under military threat. MARIANNE RITSEMA VAN ECK (Amsterdam), STEFANIIA DEMCHUK (Kyiv) and MARTA BATTISTI (Louvain-la-Neuve) traced reciprocal relations among texts, sacred landscapes and architecture. Prayer books could prepare worshippers to encounter Franciscan sacred mountains, give portable form to the sculptural “garden of the soul” in Lviv’s Boim Chapel, or regulate movement, sight and sound on Rome’s Holy Staircase. These cases dissolved the opposition between private prayer and public ritual: books brought places into the imagination while scripting bodies within actual spaces.
The relation between books and bodily vulnerability emerged with particular clarity. CYNTHIA TURNER CAMP (Athens, Georgia) reconstructed the possible prehistory of the extensive suffrage cycle in Sir William Porter’s Book of Hours, proposing that prayers first assembled for wartime use were later transferred into a prestigious illuminated manuscript. BARBARA MÜLLER and NIKLAS VOLTMANN (Hamburg) interpreted small books from the Beguine convent near St James’s Church as instruments for preparing for death and accompanying the dying. DANIEL BENNETT PAGE (London) located Mary I’s manual of healing prayers at the intersection of liturgy, medicine and sacred kingship. Taken together, the papers showed that material form affected pace, portability and participation. They also raised an important evidentiary question: surviving codices can preserve traces of practices and lost exemplars without allowing those practices to be reconstructed with equal certainty.
Hybridity offered another route beyond fixed categories. JESKE VAN DONGEN (Nijmegen) recovered prayers embedded in Dutch songbooks, where genre depended as much on performance as on verbal form. THOR-OONA PIGNARRE-ALTERMATT (Louvain-la-Neuve) followed Gerard Leeu’s printed life, hours, rosary and miracles of St Anne into manuscript transmission, challenging the idea that print simply displaced handwritten books. FRANCESCO MELE (Rome) presented the inverse movement: hand-coloured engravings structured a manuscript picture rosary whose text was added and revised in successive campaigns. ELIZABETH SANDOVAL (Williamstown) and CLARA HUMRICH (Cologne) showed how images of books, bodies and clothing animated the codex as an image of the self. CAROLIN GLUCHOWSKI (Hamburg) examined illuminated prayer books from Neukloster Buxtehude in which cradling the Christ Child became a gendered, embodied devotional exercise. Media, genres and functions were thus repeatedly recombined.
The sessions in The Hague sharpened the conference’s methodological claims. SUZAN FOLKERTS (Deventer) combined documentary references, calendars, saints, bindings and pen flourishing to distinguish production in Deventer from better-known Zwolle groups. EYAL POLEG and NOAM LEFLER (London), together with MONIKA JAKUBEK-RACZKOWSKA and JULIUSZ RACZKOWSKI (Toruń), demonstrated what micro-computed tomography, X-ray fluorescence, multispectral imaging, microscopy and reconstruction can reveal about bindings, erasures and serial production. ANNE MARGREET AS-VIJVERS (Illuminare Scribendo) introduced Dutch Books of Hours in the first special-collections session; a second viewing led by the PRAYER project enabled participants to test arguments against manuscripts and early printed books. Technical analysis became historically meaningful when precise questions were translated into material ones. In her public keynote, KATHRYN M. RUDY (St Andrews) returned to use: fingerprints, stains, wear and dust, often dismissed as damage, can be direct evidence for touch, repetition and attachment.
The final day opened with “Books of Hours in Canada.” In “The Database Books of Hours in Canada and the Definition of the Genre,” DOROTHEA KULLMANN and ALISON MAY-KOSIEWSKI (Toronto) made classification itself an object of research. Borderline cases asked whether an office collection later adapted into a Book of Hours, or a Dutch devotional manuscript without the Hours, belonged to the genre; the database must accommodate uncertainty without erasing historically significant combinations. Their contribution made visible how cataloguing decisions shape both the corpus available for research and the questions that can be asked of it. In “Prayer Fragments: Trials and Triumphs of Studying Fragments of Books of Hours,” BRIANNA DAIGNEAULT (Toronto) addressed displaced leaves and the so-called Brearley Forgery. Although its modern illumination is deceptive, the vernacular Passion text and the fragment’s documented circulation remain evidence. Fragments require scholars to distinguish the reconstruction of a lost codex from the equally important history of the surviving leaf. DEVON SHERWOOD (Toronto), “‘Il alegera et soulagera des peines de purgatoir’: Variations in Indulgences in Four Fifteenth-Century Books of Hours,” compared the placement and attribution of indulgences. Apparent errors could reveal how scribes and owners assembled devotional efficacy for particular readers.
The session “Between Private and Communal” challenged another opposition. In “At the Empty Altar: Personal Devotion and Princely Authority in Philip the Good’s Hours,” DAFNA NISSIM (Beersheba) examined portraits culminating in the duke kneeling before an empty altar. The image modelled solitary devotion while embedding princely authority within the spiritual culture of his territories. The apparent privacy of the scene therefore depended upon a public language of rulership, representation and ritual. WYBREN SCHEEPSMA (Leiden), “Regular Canonesses of Maaseik and MS Leiden BPL 2145,” analysed a manuscript combining Latin and Middle Dutch hours, prayers and unexpected prose. It resisted distinctions between liturgical and devotional books and raised questions about its female user and the Chapter of Venlo. Its mixed contents suggested that individual reading and institutional religious life should not be treated as separate devotional spheres. In “New Insights into the Prayer Culture of the St Agnes Convent in Arnhem,” CLARCK DRIESHEN (Cambridge) identified a previously unknown convent manuscript. Inscriptions, codicology, Passion prayers and texts associated with the Evangelical Pearl and Temple of Our Souls connected Arnhem with Maaseik; an exercise by the Poor Clare Magdalena Beutler, apparently transmitted through Cologne Carthusians, exposed wider networks beneath a local prayer culture.
“Translation and Adaptation” provided a third test of stable categories. In “Not (Only) by Geert Grote: Middle Dutch Books of Hours from the Southern Part of the Low Countries,” YOURI DESPLENTER (Ghent) reconstructed layered translations combining a Brabantine Hours with a West Flemish Psalter tradition and, later, Grote’s Hours. Translation emerged as collaborative and inseparable from co-transmission and regional book culture; the resulting books cannot be explained through a single authorial or regional centre. KATEŘINA VOLEKOVÁ (Prague), “The Fifteen Oes and Their Czech Adaptations,” traced two medieval Czech versions and the wider circulation enabled by the Czech Hortulus animae of 1520. Her comparison showed adaptation operating through choices of wording, form and devotional context rather than simple linguistic substitution. In “Vernacular Prayer in Late Medieval Denmark,” SEÁN VRIELAND (Copenhagen) placed Danish prayer books within exchange with Low German and Nordic traditions, showing that “vernacular” rarely meant monolingual. EVELYNE VERHEGGEN (Antwerp), “The Dutch Book of Hours after the Reformation in the Dutch Republic, First Half of the Seventeenth Century,” analysed Leonardus Marius’s Marian Hours of 1651 for Catholic women linked to the Amsterdam Beguinage. Produced under conditions of restricted Catholic worship, the book recast a medieval form for a changed confessional environment. Continuity resulted from selection, translation and renewed use.
“Materiality of and beyond Prayer Books” demonstrated how devotional forms remained active across confessional and technological change. In “Preparing the Heart: Material Culture and Prayer Practice in Unity of the Brethren Hymnals,” VERONIKA SLADKÁ (Prague) examined hymnals printed clandestinely at Ivančice between 1564 and 1578. Two-colour printing, initials, borders and images—especially Christ in Gethsemane beside the Lord’s Prayer—prepared readers for efficacious prayer. Typography and imagery did not merely embellish texts but cultivated humility, attention and the proper affective disposition. ILIANA KANDZHA (Copenhagen), “Customising Prayer Practices in Late Medieval Denmark,” showed that localising a transnational repertoire did not depend on translation alone: rubrics attached widely transmitted prayers to local memory, as when the Adoro te prayer became associated with Christian I’s pilgrimage to Rome. Such paratexts could transform inherited material without changing the prayer itself. KATELIN MARIT PARSONS (Reykjavik), “Something Old and Something New: The Prayer Book of Helga Sigurðardóttir,” examined a composite book in which a fourteenth-century Life of St Margaret was rebound in 1689–1690 with prayers from several centuries, refreshed colours and new vellum leaves. Its use as a devotional and birthing aid demonstrated manuscript culture’s persistence through material renewal and practical relevance rather than antiquarian preservation.
The closing discussion replaced “What is a prayer book?” with “What does a prayer book do?” Genre remained necessary but unstable: songs could function as prayers, while hagiography, offices, indulgences, prose and images could coexist in volumes resistant to standard labels. Materiality, action and ritual offered another common ground. Books instructed voices and bodies, mediated sacred space, accompanied crisis and care, and preserved traces of repetition. The comparison of page and skin captured this reciprocity: both are surfaces between exterior experience and inward transformation, marked by their histories. Describing the prayer book as a devotional technology likewise stressed its capacity to act upon its user and mediate access to God.
The conference was most convincing when terminology became a hypothesis tested against objects and actions. Its breadth sometimes made sustained comparison difficult, and parallel sessions divided conversations that might have benefited from closer exchange. Yet this plurality exposed the unevenness of the evidence: a material trace may establish an intervention without identifying its agent or intention, while local adaptation can express communal distinction and transregional connection. No single definition of the prayer book emerged. The more durable conclusion was methodological: prayer books are dynamic interfaces among people, media, institutions, spaces and repeated practices. Future work will need a shared vocabulary that preserves this relational insight while enabling controlled comparison across regions, confessions and media.
Conference overview
Keynote Lecture
Walter S. Melion (Atlanta): Reflecting on Prayer in the Passio domini nostri (1523) of Alardus van Amsterdam and Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen
Session: The Multifunctionality of Prayer and Prayer Books: Narrative, Play, and Identity
Chair: Seán Vrieland (Copenhagen)
Björn Klaus Buschbeck (Zurich): Storytelling and Prayer in Late Medieval Scroll Manuscripts: The Case of Colmar, Les Dominicains, MS 832
Marco Sergio Narducci (Turin): Prayer Books and Civic Identity under Siege: Turin 1706
Session: Text and Image in Prayer Books
Chair: Renske Hoff (Utrecht)
Tilleane Charavel (Lausanne): Exploring the Temporalities of Philip the Good’s Breviaries ad usum Parisiorum pars hiemalis and pars aestivalis (Royal Library of Belgium, MSS 9511 and 9026)
Jakov Đorđević (Belgrade): To Hell and Back Again: An Unexpected Journey through Words and Images of the Office of the Dead in the Très Riches Heures
Eleanor Jackson (York): The Wounded Good Shepherd in Fifteenth-Century Prayer Books
Session: Space and Prayer
Chair: Thor-Oona Pignarre-Altermatt (Louvain-la-Neuve)
Marianne Ritsema van Eck (Amsterdam): Expanding the Ecosystem of Prayer: From Sacred Mountains to Prayer Books and Vice Versa
Stefaniia Demchuk (Kyiv): Prayer in the Garden of the Soul in Early Modern Lviv: The Boim Chapel and the Hortulus Animae Polonice (1513)
Marta Battisti (Louvain-la-Neuve): Prayer Books and Sacred Steps: A Material, Textual, and Sensory Approach to Holy Staircase Devotion in Early Modern Rome
Session: Social and Medical Functions of Prayer
Chair: Walter S. Melion (Atlanta)
Cynthia Turner Camp (Athens, Georgia): Praying in (War)Time: The Suffrages in William Porter’s Prayerbook
Barbara Müller / Niklas Voltmann (Hamburg): Prayer Books as Instruments for Dealing with Death and Dying: The Example of the Late Medieval Prayer Books from the Hamburg Convent near St James’s Church
Daniel Bennett Page (London): Queen Mary I’s Manual of Healing Prayers
Session: Hybrid Prayer Books
Chair: Youri Desplenter (Ghent)
Jeske van Dongen (Nijmegen): Prayer in Late Medieval Dutch Songbooks
Thor-Oona Pignarre-Altermatt (Louvain-la-Neuve): Hybrid Prayer Books: The Rosary of St Anne across Print and Manuscript
Francesco Mele (Rome): Images in Prayer: The Vita Christi Engravings in a Rosary Book from the Early Sixteenth Century
Session: Animation, Interaction, and Performance
Chair: Karl Enenkel (Münster)
Elizabeth Sandoval (Williamstown): The Book as Soul: Animated Codices in Margaret of York’s Fifteenth-Century Apocalypse Manuscript
Clara Humrich (Cologne): (Un)Dressing for Devotion
Carolin Gluchowski (Hamburg): Cradling Christ: Illuminated Prayer Books from the Benedictine Convent of Neukloster Buxtehude
Session: Production and Methodologies I
Chair: Carolin Gluchowski (Hamburg)
Suzan Folkerts (Deventer): Made in Deventer? Geert Grote’s Book of Hours and the Production of Prayer Books in the IJssel Region
Eyal Poleg (London): Unfolding the Materiality of Devotion: New Technologies in the Study of Prayer Books
Session: Special Collections I
Anne Margreet As-Vijvers (The Hague): Introduction to Dutch Books of Hours and Viewing Session
Session: Production and Methodologies II
Chair: Carolin Gluchowski (Hamburg)
Monika Jakubek-Raczkowska / Juliusz Raczkowski (Toruń): Netherlandish Prayer Books as Serial-Produced Artefacts: A Case Study of a Set of Manuscripts from the University Library in Toruń
Noam Lefler (London): Erasures as Evidence: A Material-Analytical Approach to Erasures in Devotional Codices
Session: Special Collections II
PRAYER Project (Leiden): Viewing Session with Manuscript and Early Printed Prayer Books
Keynote and Public Lecture
Kathryn M. Rudy (St Andrews): How Lay Book Owners Handled Devotional Manuscripts in Europe, 1300–1550
Session: Books of Hours in Canada
Chair: Irene O’Daly (Leiden)
Dorothea Kullmann / Alison May-Kosiewski (Toronto): The Database Books of Hours in Canada and the Definition of the Genre
Brianna Daigneault (Toronto): Prayer Fragments: Trials and Triumphs of Studying Fragments of Books of Hours
Devon Sherwood (Toronto): “Il alegera et soulagera des peines de purgatoir”: Variations in Indulgences in Four Fifteenth-Century Books of Hours
Session: Between Private and Communal
Chair: Irene Van Eldere (Leiden)
Dafna Nissim (Beersheba): At the Empty Altar: Personal Devotion and Princely Authority in Philip the Good’s Hours
Wybren Scheepsma (Leiden): Regular Canonesses of Maaseik and MS Leiden BPL 2145
Clarck Drieshen (Cambridge): New Insights into the Prayer Culture of the St Agnes Convent in Arnhem
Session: Translation and Adaptation
Chair: Anna Dlabačová (Leiden)
Youri Desplenter (Ghent): Not (Only) by Geert Grote: Middle Dutch Books of Hours from the Southern Part of the Low Countries
Kateřina Voleková (Prague): The Fifteen Oes and Their Czech Adaptations
Seán Vrieland (Copenhagen): Vernacular Prayer in Late Medieval Denmark
Evelyne Verheggen (Antwerp): The Dutch Book of Hours after the Reformation in the Dutch Republic, First Half of the Seventeenth Century
Session: Materiality of and beyond Prayer Books
Chair: Lieke Smits (Leiden)
Veronika Sladká (Prague): Preparing the Heart: Material Culture and Prayer Practice in Unity of the Brethren Hymnals
Iliana Kandzha (Copenhagen): Customising Prayer Practices in Late Medieval Denmark
Katelin Marit Parsons (Reykjavik): Something Old and Something New: The Prayer Book of Helga Sigurðardóttir