Magdalena’s gulden letanien

Abstract

In contrast to the other works of the fifteenth-century mystic Magdalena of Freiburg, her Golden Litany was heavily copied in Germany and the Low Countries in the late Middle Ages. Despite its popularity, this meditative prayer on the Passion has not yet been studied. This article attempts to fill this gap. It offers a full survey of the transmitted manuscripts of the text and aims to provide insight into its distribution in the late medieval German and Dutch language areas. The prayer is discussed in the context of contemporaneous literary and religious traditions. In this way, the article attempts to explain why a southern German text was so popular in the Low Countries, especially in the circles of the Devotio Moderna.