ABSTRACT
It is a mistake to assume that because treatises like The Brotherhood of Eternal Wisdom depict Christ as Bridegroom, they were intended for “brides of Christ,” that is, nuns. By the fifteenth century, the bride of Christ was literally a popular cultural icon-widely understood, internationally reproduced, yet localized to the needs and vocabularies of individual communities. This popularity did not follow the publication of one important book, the promotion of a single saint’s cult, or the edict of any church leader. Instead, it unfolded simultaneously in dozens of cities across Europe as Latin texts about the bride of Christ, likely written for monks and nuns, were adapted for local audiences. Suso’s invitation to wed Christ as Eternal Wisdom, no matter one’s gender or vocation, which introduces the late medieval Brotherhood or Spousehood of Eternal Wisdom [Bruderschaft oder mahelschaft der Ewigen Weisheit], characterizes this process. Extracted from a fourteenthcentury Latin book designed by the fourteenth-century Dominican Henry Suso, arguably for the professional religious, elaborated on and reworked for the laity, reproduced by professional scribes and trade printers, marketed to pious book collectors, the Brotherhood’s textual history defies dualisms of “high” and “low,” “literate” and “unlettered,” or “lay” and “religious.” This modified text provided rules for an informal community of strangers joined in brotherly marriage who were to perform synchronized prayers lifted from book 2, chapter 7 of Suso’s Wisdom’s Watch Upon the Hours [Horologium Sapientiae].3 In his original Latin work, Suso made allowances for those unable to live celibately, created alternate prayers for the illiterate and those whose work obligations interfered with devotions, and prescribed special obligations for the professional religious and clerics, but nothing in his surviving writing or the cult developing after his death suggests his involvement in establishing a prayer confraternity. Suso soon lost control of his carefully crafted persona as others transformed his devotional writing into a regimen of prayers and meditations capable of wedding the full spectrum of humanity to Christ. In the fourteenth-century Low Countries, Geert Grote, the founder of a new lay religious movement known as the Devotio Moderna, transformed Suso’s Latin Horologium into the Hours of Eternal Wisdom [getijden van eeuwige wijsheit] for use in Dutch books of Hours. The German Little Book of Eternal Wisdom [Buchlein der Ewigen Weisheit] and its Latin counterpart,
de Herph, Hie seind geschriben die capitel des büchs d[as] do der Seüsse heisset … Vita; Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit; Büchlein der Wahrheit; Briefbüchlein. - Merswin, Rulman: Neunfelsenbuch. Mit Kap. 60 aus dem Spieghel van Volcomenheit von Henricus Herp (Anton Sorg: Augsburg, 1482), 103v-04r, MDZ, https://daten.digitale-sammlungen. de/~db/0003/bsb00031701/image_1.
