Barely a decade after the Hortulus animae first came off a Strasbourg press, a patron had the entire book written out again by hand. The result is Cod. 2706 of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna, a parchment codex copied after 1510 from a printed exemplar.
A Printed Best Seller Recast as a Handwritten Book
The Latin Hortulus animae appeared in Strasbourg in 1498, and Sebastian Brant put it into German in 1501; dozens of editions followed. Print had made the text cheap and ubiquitous. Copying it onto parchment reversed that logic, returning a mass-market devotional anthology to the condition of a singular object.
Alsatian Language, Netherlandish Painting
The scribe wrote in an Alsatian dialect, while the painted decoration belongs to the visual world of the Southern Netherlands. Cataloguers accordingly place production in Ghent, Bruges, or Alsace, and the localization remains open. One miniature includes the Gravensteen, the castle of the counts of Flanders in Ghent.
A Book That Gave an Artist His Name
In 1925 Friedrich Winkler drew the name Master of the Hortulus Animae from this codex, gathering around it a body of Flemish illumination that later scholarship redistributed among other hands; Simon Bening has since been proposed for part of the painting. The page itself is disciplined and small in scale: a single column of seventeen lines.
Prayers for Every Occasion
The work assembles devotions for daily and seasonal use, among them a German rendering of the Stabat mater dolorosa, which occupies pp. 400–404. Devotion here was not simplified by print but re-elaborated against it.
We have 2 facsimiles of the manuscript "Hortulus Animae":
- Keiz. Hofbibliotheek te Weenen Hortulus Animae. Cod. Bibl. Pal. Vindob. 2706 facsimile edition published by A. Oosthoek, van Holkema & Warendorf, 1911
- Seelengärtlein. Hortulus Animae. Cod. Bibl. Pal. Vindob. 2706 facsimile edition published by Jos. Baer, 1907