For centuries, prayer has played a central role in shaping worldviews, education and formation, religious experience, community life, and the organisation of everyday life across Europe. Yet, despite the “religious turn” in the humanities, prayer is still often treated as an ordinary or self-evident practice. This has limited our understanding of its complex and varied histories in the late medieval and early modern worlds. At the same time, the remarkable plurality of prayer practices is reflected in fragmented scholarship across disciplines and regions. By approaching prayer as a participatory practice, social, communal, embodied, and mediated through material objects and media, the COST Action PRAYTICIPATE, together with its strong international research network, seeks to develop a more comprehensive understanding of this widespread and multifaceted practice.

Reconsidering its vocabulary through objects

Prayer may seem immediately recognisable, yet it becomes remarkably difficult to define once historians test the word against manuscripts, images, objects, sounds, gestures and spaces. A PRAYTICIPATE workshop in Hamburg showed why the study of prayer depends on collaboration across disciplines, regions, traditions and collections.

A familiar word, a difficult research object

Most people have a working idea of prayer. It may be understood as an address or conversation directed towards God, the divine, saints or transcendence; it may be spoken, sung, whispered, written, imagined, performed or embodied. Yet this apparent familiarity is precisely what makes prayer difficult to study. When researchers try to identify it in a manuscript, image, object, sound, gesture or space, its boundaries quickly become uncertain.
Is a sacred name written on a flyleaf a pen trial, an invocation, a memory aid or an act of devotion? Is every book of hours best described as a prayer book? Does a portable altar mediate prayer only when it is used liturgically? How should we describe an object worn close to the body for protection when it contains sacred words? Such questions are not merely semantic. The words used in scholarships, catalogues and museum displays determine which evidence becomes visible, which comparisons appear possible and which histories can be told.
The older historiographical image of a unified 'Christendom' has sometimes carried with it the assumption of a correspondingly unified culture of prayer. The surviving evidence resists that assumption. Prayer practices varied across regions, languages, religious communities, institutions, genders, social settings and periods. They were shaped by local customs and theological traditions, but also by the books, images, objects, architecture
and bodily techniques through which people prayed. Even within Latin Christianity, there was no single prayer culture waiting to be described.
A network built for a shared question

COST Action PRAYTICIPATE, which stands for Participation through Prayer in the Late Medieval and Early Modern World, responds to this challenge by bringing together researchers who ordinarily encounter prayer from very different directions. Its principal focus is prayer in Latin Christianity from the late medieval to the early modern period. Comparative perspectives from other Christian traditions, Judaism and Islam help the network identify inherited assumptions and test the reach of its terminology. Three working groups examine the material, social and immersive realities of prayer.
This structure reflects a methodological necessity. Prayer does not belong to any one discipline. Philologists and literary scholars study words and genres; historians of art and material culture examine images and objects; theologians and historians of religion reconstruct concepts and institutions; musicologists attend to sound and rhythm; codicologists analyse how books were made and changed; and librarians, curators and cataloguers determine how surviving evidence is described and made discoverable. No single scholar commands all these languages, archives and methods. Collaboration is therefore not an addition to prayer studies: it is one of its conditions.

Hamburg as a collaborative laboratory

The working group Material Realities of Prayer lays this principle into practice through the workshop Reconsidering the Vocabulary of Prayer Through Objects. The process began with an online session on 29 May 2026, continued with an in-person meeting in Hamburg from 10 to 12 June, and will be followed by further collaborative work. The workshop was organised by Sara Carreño, Carolin Gluchowski, Stefan Matter and Katrin Janz-Wenig.

The method was deliberately concrete. Instead of beginning with a universal definition, participants tested familiar terms against specific evidence: manuscripts and printed books, marginal inscriptions, textiles, portable altars, a Hebrew festival prayer book, Islamic Muska and hamâil objects, meditation guides, images, voices and sensory practices. Scholars working in different regions, languages, religious traditions and periods asked where their terms clarified the evidence - and where those terms began to fail.
This approach made comparison productive without erasing difference. Jewish manuscripts and Islamic written protective objects were not treated as variants of Christian material. They served as carefully contextualised points of comparison that revealed how categories such as prayer, devotion, protection, magic, liturgy and community carry distinct histories. At the same time, their inclusion helped participants distinguish features that may be comparable to those that remain specific to tradition, place or use.

Letting objects correct our categories

The workshop showed that categories remain necessary, but must be provisional, case-sensitive and open to revision. A label such as 'book of hours' can identify a recognisable genre while concealing the modular, composite or personalised character of a particular volume. A catalogue description such as 'pen trial' may accurately record a material trace while obscuring its possible devotional function. Likewise, a tapestry, portable altar or amuletic object can operate across boundaries that modern scholarship often treats as fixed: domestic and institutional, private and communal, liturgical and devotional, image and object, prayer and protection.
One practical result was the need to separate several analytical levels that are too often collapsed: object type, content, setting, intended function, documented use, sensory perception, later reuse and modern scholarly interpretation. An object may change owners, move between domestic and religious settings, be rebound or annotated, become part of a communal memory and eventually enter a library or museum. Its relation to prayer may change at every stage. Uncertainty is therefore not a weakness to be removed from the record; when documented carefully, it is evidence.
Prayer exceeds the text

Objects also directed attention beyond words. Page layout can cue the voice; meter and sequence can organise time; images can focus the gaze; textiles and architecture can shape devotional space; touch, bodily proximity and traces of wear can reveal repeated handling. Prayer may be silent or audible, individual or collective, prescribed or improvised. It can involve attention, affect, memory, movement and sensory experience. A vocabulary centred only on texts or theological definitions will miss much of this lived practice.

Collections are part of the method

The workshop's location was integral to its argument. Sessions at the Hamburg State and University Library Carl von Ossietzky, followed by visits to the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg and the Hamburger Kunsthalle, kept discussion close to objects and collections. Libraries and museums do not simply preserve prayer-related evidence. Through acquisition, cataloguing, conservation, digitisation and display, they shape what can be found and how it can be interpreted.

This makes collection of professionals essential research partners. Shared vocabulary must be useful not only in scholarly articles, but also in catalogue records, databases, object labels and digital collections. Close collaboration with librarians, curators, conservators and metadata specialists can help researchers register multiple functions, traces of use, changes over time and degrees of uncertainty without forcing complex objects into a single stable category.

From a workshop to shared tools

The Hamburg meeting did not seek to impose a final definition of prayer or produce a closed dictionary. Its more ambitious aim was to establish a shared way of asking better questions. The next stage of WG1's work will develop case vignettes; methodological reflections and a terminology glossary or toolkit grounded in objects. Rather than presenting terms as timeless equivalents, such a resource can record their historical sources, disciplinary uses, geographical and confessional scope, evidential basis and limits. The aim is not to replace specialist vocabularies with the lowest common denominator. It is to make those vocabularies legible to one another, so that scholars and collection professionals can compare evidence without flattening its differences.

For the COST community, the workshop offers a clear example of what a research network can achieve. The fragmentation of prayer studies across disciplines, languages, regions and institutions is a genuine obstacle, but it is also an intellectual resource when researchers are given time to work through their differences. By bringing distinct perspectives into sustained contact with objects, PRAYTICIPATE is turning an apparently simple question - what is prayer? - into a collaborative programme of research.

The result is not one unified answer. It is a more precise, flexible and historically responsible framework for understanding prayer as material, sensory, embodied, social, intermedial and participatory practice.

Additional information
View the Action website
View the network website: https://prayticipate.eu/