Protect and Survive: the Pursuit of Salvation and the Role of the Body in Fifteenth-Century Flemish Prayerbooks

The chapter examines manuscript 72/175, preserved in the Grootseminarie of Bruges, demonstrating how it consistently involved its owner’s physicality within the context of individual devotion aimed at obtaining both earthly protection and eternal salvation. The small book, containing two full-page miniatures and a great variety of prayers in Middle Dutch, was likely crafted in Bruges during the early fifteenth century. The devotee’s sensory involvement is explored here through three main aspects of the codex: the first concerns the miniatures and their different degrees of degradation, analysed in relation to the texts contained in the manuscript and the religious context of the time; the second considers the content of several specific prayers found in the book, arguing that they conferred an amuletic power on this; the last analyses sections of the text that instruct the devotee on the actions to be taken to perform the devotional rite correctly. The analysis carried out combines an art historical method with the study of the texts and the investigation of the book’s materiality, all within the framework of the latest approach to sensory and cognitive studies in the humanities.