ABSTRACT
In comparison to transalpine Europe, the use of deluxe prayer books for private devotion came fairly late to Italy, and the Supplicationes is one of the earliest surviving examples. Like Bonaventure’s Soul’s Journey Into God, the Supplicationes guides the reader in progressive steps from the natural world to prayer and contemplation, leading in its final section to the Mercy-Seat, threshold to divine ecstasy. The medieval reader who once turned the pages of the Supplicationes variae apprehended the book by means of sense perception: touching its parchment pages, seeing its written words and its painted and drawn images, and hearing his own vocalization of hymns and prayers. Though the author of the Solilioquies petitions God to grant him true vision, it is not until the end of the Supplicationes, in the thirty-three full-page drawings that depict the Life of Christ, that the reformation of the senses is illustrated and explained.
