Prayer was central to religious life in the late medieval and early modern period. Despite growing scholarly interest in religious texts, devotional practices, and spirituality, prayer and prayer books remain comparatively understudied. Prayer could take on a multitude of forms and occur in a range of spaces, from public to secluded and private; from monastic, liturgical prayer to short, indulgenced invocations and meditative prayers that evoked a rich scala of emotions and mental images.  

To pray, devotees – whether clerical or lay – often took a book to hand. Prayer books played a vital role during many moments in a person’s life in the performance of prayer and prayer-related practices. While the act of prayer is inherently transient, the books held or touched by late medieval and early modern devotees form codified and material evidence of the practices in which they engaged. Still extant in large numbers and containing a vast variety of textual and visual materials, these books – through both content and appearance – reflect the diversity of prayer practices as well as developments in book production. Taking the book as the central artefact for the study of prayer allows for an analysis that encompasses all aspects and components of prayer books, along with the actors involved in their production and use. This, in turn, enables us to chart the ‘cultural ecosystem’ in which prayer books were produced, circulated, and used. 

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.  

We particularly welcome proposals for 20-minute papers (in English) on the following topics: 

• The material book as instrument in prayer practice 

• The nature of prayer books and prayer texts; prayer books as miscellanies, repositories 

• Co-transmission of prayer texts across manuscripts and/or printed books; dynamics within cycles or series of texts 

• The language(s) of prayer books; vernacular, Latin, and multilingual prayer 

• Social functions of prayer; communities of prayer and the role of the book 

• Customization and personification of prayer and prayer books 

• Multisensory experience of prayer as elicited by prayer books and their material context, including the function of mental and pictorial images (in- and external to the book), music, space, light etc. 

• Connections and overlaps between private forms of prayer and liturgy, and between lay and professional prayer  

• Production (centers) of handwritten and/or printed prayer books; how do changes in production process affect prayer books in terms of content and appearance? 

• Methodological reflections on the study of late medieval and early modern prayer books, including digital and computational approaches 

We also welcome alternative formats, such as – but not limited to – roundtable discussions. Additionally, we could potentially organize on-site presentations that incorporate manuscripts or printed books from Leiden University Libraries or other nearby collections, thereby fostering direct engagement with primary source materials. 

Please submit an abstract (max. 300 words) and short biography (max. 100 words) to prayer@hum.leidenuniv.nl by 1 October 2025. We aim to inform our speakers by 1 November 2025. 

A selection of revised contributions, pending double peer-review, will be published in an edited volume in Brill’s series Intersections: Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture (https://brill.com/display/serial/INTE). 

The conference organizers will cover all conference costs, including lunches and the conference dinner, but will unfortunately be unable to reimburse travel and accommodation costs. A limited number of bursaries will be available to support (early career) researchers without access to adequate institutional funding. If you wish to be considered for a bursary, please note this with your proposal and explain why. 

Organizing Committee:  

Anna Dlabačová 

Irene Van Eldere 

Susanne de Jong 

Lieke Smits

This conference is part of an ERC Starting Grant Project (PRAYER, no. 101041517) 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.