Research project
Pages of Prayer: The Ecosystem of Vernacular Prayer Books in the Late Medieval Low Countries, c. 1380-1550 [PRAYER]
This project investigates the full ecosystem of Middle Dutch prayerbooks in order to answer questions about their role in – and impact on – religion, culture, and society in the late medieval Low Countries.
- Duration
- 2023 - 2028
- Contact
- Anna Dlabacova
- Funding
-
European Research Council (ERC)
Funding statement
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
Abstract
Vernacular prayer books were by far the most commonly read book in the late medieval Low Countries. The mainstay of this vast corpus is the Book of Hours in the translation by Geert Grote (c. 850 manuscripts and c. 30 printed editions), founder one of the period’s most powerful religious reform movements. Nowhere else outside the Netherlands do so many manuscript and printed editions of this type of prayer book survive in the vernacular. These books are fundamental for our understanding of religiosity, and of textual and visual literacy between 1380 and 1550 – a period that saw dramatic changes in the religious landscape and in book production.
‘Pages of Prayer’ sets out to conduct the first large-scale investigation of this unique corpus and vibrant phenomenon by introducing a new approach – network philology – that studies all aspects of vernacular prayer books in their mutual interdependence. The project aims to chart the entire ecosystem of Dutch-language prayer books – including manuscripts, printed books, texts, images, producers, owners, patrons, places, devotions, and the interconnections between all of these aspects – over a long period of time by combining network analysis with qualitative analysis to reach meaningful interpretations of the data.
The nature of the material requires this research to be tackled within an interdisciplinary project. The first step toward network philology is the set-up of a data model specifically designed to study relationships within the corpus. All team members will subsequently contribute to the acquisition of data and the digital network analysis. Sections of the ecosystem will be further analyzed in work-packages that focus on the production and reception of manuscripts, the poetics of prayer, the function of images, and changes and continuities in relation to religious movements and the advent of print. The project aims to yield an integrative understanding of the role of prayer books in the late medieval Low Countries on the threshold of the medieval and early modern era.
Conference: 'Bound for Devotion: The Prayer Book as Object and Practice, 1300–1800'
This three-day international conference, hosted at Leiden University by the PRAYER project (ERC Starting Grant), with keynotes by Walter S. Melion (Emory University) and Kathryn M. Rudy (University of St Andrews), aims to bring together researchers working on books that were (intended to be) used in any form of prayer practice in the late medieval and early modern era (up to the eighteenth century). This conference aims to shed new light on prayer across late medieval and early modern Europe by exploring the broader ecosystem of prayer books. This includes a wide range of interactions between the material book, texts and images disseminated through it (and their connections to other types of objects, such as rosaries, small pipe clay figures, and single-sheet prints), the devotions inspired by these texts and images, the producers and buyers/readers of the books, and the communities they belonged to.
More information on the conference.
Call for papers
Please refer to the Call for Papers (PDF) for more information on how to send in proposals. The deadline for sending in proposals is 1 October 2025.
