Fifteen Joys of the Virgin
Les XV Joies Nostre Dame
Et tres doulce dame... Ave Maria.
Our renderingAnd most sweet Lady... Hail Mary.
What it is
A vernacular prayer in fifteen stanzas, each opening with an invocation to the Virgin and concluding with Ave Maria, meditating in sequence on fifteen joyful mysteries of her life from the Annunciation through the Assumption. Written in French rather than Latin, it appears alongside the Seven Requests to Our Lord as one of the key vernacular texts in Parisian Books of Hours, and was standard in that tradition from at least the 1350s. Its vernacular character suggests regular oral use by noble family members — including children and those with limited Latin — for whom the Latin Hours were supplemented by devotional French texts. The prayer's fifteen-part structure as a meditation on the Virgin's joys is a direct ancestor of the Rosary's Joyful Mysteries.
Why it still matters
The Fifteen Joys anticipates the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary and can be used today as a structured Marian devotion focused on gratitude and contemplative joy; those familiar with the Rosary will find the same meditative rhythm already embedded in its form.
Kept alongside
Rationale des divins offices (Golein translation for Charles V)
Rational des divins offices — traduction française de Jean Golein
At King Charles V's personal command in 1372, the Carmelite Jean Golein translated Guillaume Durand's encyclopaedic Rationale divinorum officiorum into French, completing the dedication manuscript (BnF fr. 437) in 1374 with Charles V's own ex-libris confirmed in the manuscript — one of the most precisely documented examples of Valois royal devotional commissioning. Charles also directed Golein to insert the Traité du sacre, an allegorical commentary on the royal coronation rite that elevated liturgical explanation into political theology, binding sacral kingship to the meaning of the Mass. Durand's original Latin text (c. 1291–1296) was the most authoritative medieval synthesis of the spiritual significance of every gesture, vestment, building, and season of Christian worship.
Litany of the Saints
Litaniae Sanctorum
The Litany of Saints follows the Penitential Psalms in virtually every surviving Book of Hours, structured as a cascade of invocations to God (Kyrie, Christe), to the Trinity, to the Virgin, and to a roster of apostles, martyrs, confessors, and virgins, each answered by the response ora pro nobis. In noble Books of Hours the Litany was frequently personalised with the patron's name-saint and local dynastic saints, making this section a direct window into a family's particular devotional world. Its call-and-response form made it well suited both to private recitation and to household group prayer. The Litany's accumulated form represents centuries of the Church's corporate memory, giving it a weight and breadth no single authored prayer could achieve.
Jean Gerson, La Montagne de Contemplation
La Montaigne de Contemplacion
Written in 1400 by Jean Gerson, Chancellor of the University of Paris and the pre-eminent spiritual director of the Valois court, this short French-language guide to contemplative prayer was owned in documented manuscript copies by Charlotte of Savoy, queen of France (wife of Louis XI; BnF fr. 1835), and subsequently by Anne of France, Duchess of Bourbon. Gerson originally wrote it for his own sisters, but it became the leading practical manual for lay contemplation in Valois court circles and among noble women more broadly. Its central argument — that mystical contemplation is accessible to the simple, the unlearned, and women, requiring only humble, attentive love rather than academic theology — was quietly radical and remains its lasting contribution.