Das Andachtsbüchlein aus der Sammlung Bouhier

In the seventeenth century a small-size parchment manuscript with German text, illustrated throughout with coloured pen-and-ink-drawings, entered the book collection of the Bouhier family in Dijon. This manuscript (of which 48 folios are still extant), presumably produced in the second quarter of the fourteenth century in eastern central Germany, is without parallel with regard to its structure: A first part (not completely preserved) displays on each page an image relating to a gospel pericope; above the image a German text indicates the occasion for the reading, followed by a partial paraphrase of the content of the pericope, sometimes breaking off in the middle of a sentence. This section is followed by a festival calendar with pictorial abbreviations. The sequence closes with a passion cycle without any textual elements. The provenance of this unique manuscript cannot be traced back beyond its cataloguing in Dijon; information about its origin and the context for its use can only be inferred from the object itself.

This publication presents the first edition and detailed study of this manuscript, including a determination of its function ('Andachtsbüchlein' - 'devotional booklet') and the evaluation of its role within the history of piety. Among other aspects, the analysis covers codicological and palaeographical questions, the liturgical context, the structure of the text and the iconography. The findings are contextualized and set in a larger frameworks, such as the increasing spread of German-language pericopes in the late Middle Ages. The accompanying edition offering a complete reproduction of all pages of the manuscript in colour with adjacent commentary enables the immediate verification of the individual observations.

In the context of German studies the exploration of the manuscript text leads to new insights, since it expands the existing picture of how pericopes in German language were dealt with. The fact that the paraphrases regularly break