GoodCatholics atPrayer 367
this interpenetration of sacred power and worldly need is a vernacular Holy
Week devotion from a fourteenth-century nun’s prayer book.^120 Here, in a
more cloistered environment, devotion skirts the edges of theological propri-
ety. The devotion consists of a series of prayers, one for each day of Holy
Week, not for meditation or reflection on the Passion, but to obtain ‘‘any
benefit’’ (per avere qualunche grazia). For each day, the devotion prescribes a
different posture: standing on Palm Sunday, and then, on the following days
of Holy Week, kneeling, prostrate, standing, kneeling, standing, and stand-
ing. Numbers of Paters and Aves were to be recited each day: 12 on Palm
Sunday, and 32 , 48 , 23 , 22 , 50 , and 14 on the following days. There seems to
be no special logic for the numbers and postures. After the Paters and Aves
of each day, the supplicant recited a one-sentence invocation in the vernacu-
lar to request the desiredgrazia.These invocations focus on those present at
the crucifixion: Mary Magdalene, the good thief, the Jews, John the Evange-
list, and the Blessed Virgin, with each of whom the user associates or disasso-
ciates herself. The Triduum’s verses recall Christ’s last words, his cross, and
his death. Only in those invocations did the rich affective piety seen in the
prayers examined earlier make itself felt. The devotion closes, now wholly in
Latin, on Easter Sunday with the psalm ‘‘Benedictus Deus’’ and a collect.
This seemingly mechanical and somewhat self-interested exercise reflects the
same union of the liturgical time and gesture, the centrality of the Pater and
Ave, and the Christocentric piety that characterize communal devotional
collections generally. It also joins that most central Christian mystery of the
cross to concrete day-to-day needs.
More typical in manuscripts of devotion are prayers that associate the
Incarnation and Christ’s triumph over evil with the daily experience of the
Eucharist. About 1300 , one north Italian, perhaps a Franciscan, copied an
extraordinary vernacular prayer of this type into his devotional miscellany:
Divine Wisdom who concealed
in human flesh the highest God,
by this concealment you destroyed
the one who teaches us sin by deceit.
The pure humanity that you took on
has put to death his wickedness.
We ought to praise your great goodness,
which for me put this evil so far off;
we will see our flesh assumed to God.
You made man in your own likeness;
we adore it, that creation,
in the Host made your own body.^121- Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale,msPalat. 150 (earlyxivcent.), fol. 29 v.
- Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria,ms 1563, fol. 17 v: ‘‘Divina sapientia ke celasti, so carne humana
lalta Deitate,con quella celamentu debellasti kilui ke impari na offese a falzitate.La pura humanitate