German Translation of Augustine's Soliloquia by Johannes von Neumarkt
Soliloquia (German translation by Johannes von Neumarkt)
A verified public-domain excerpt for this text is still being set. The folio is catalogued and linked below; an original Sub Rosa rendering will follow.
What it is
Jan ze Středy (Johannes von Neumarkt), Chancellor of Charles IV and Bishop of Olmütz, translated the Pseudo-Augustinian Soliloquia animae ad Deum into Middle High German for the Prague court circle, making this celebrated dialogue of the soul with God available in the vernacular for the first time north of the Alps. The Soliloquia moves through themes of divine love, self-knowledge, and the soul's longing for union with God, placing it squarely within the stream of 14th-century Rhineland mysticism. Neumarkt's translation was part of his broader programme of introducing Italian humanist spiritual literature into the imperial chancery and Bohemian court. A Heidelberg manuscript witness (Cod. Pal. germ. 436) survives, attesting to its manuscript diffusion beyond Prague.
Why it still matters
The Soliloquia in Neumarkt's vernacular form invites the reader into a sustained intimate dialogue between the searching soul and God; its meditative questions — 'What is God to me? What am I to God?' — remain a structure for contemplative prayer that any modern Christian can take up.
Kept alongside
Book of Hours of the Bohemian Queen (Unknown Bohemian Royal Woman)
Horae Beatae Mariae Virginis (Bohemian court)
Pembroke College Oxford MS 20 is a Bohemian Book of Hours created at the beginning of the fifteenth century, containing extremely fine Bohemian illuminations characteristic of the Prague court style flourishing under Wenceslas IV. The manuscript is attested as having belonged to 'the Queen of Bohemia', but no secure identification of the specific Luxembourg-Bohemia queen patron — among candidates including Johanna of Bavaria and Sophia of Bavaria — has been established in published scholarship. It was loaned to Prague in 2015 for the Jan Hus commemoration exhibition as a prestige royal devotional manuscript. Its contents follow the standard Book of Hours structure: the Little Office of the Virgin, the Seven Penitential Psalms, the Office of the Dead, and suffrages to local Bohemian saints.
Psalter of Wenceslas IV (Psalterium Wenceslai IV)
Psalterium Regis Wenceslai IV
Wenceslas IV owned a personal Latin Psalter decorated throughout with his distinctive heraldic and personal emblems: his coat of arms, his initial W interlaced with courtly love-knot motifs, his emblematic kingfisher bird, and repeated figures of a bath maiden carrying a bucket and sponge. The manuscript is held at Salzburg University Library and forms a companion object to the Wenceslas Bible project in testifying to the king's personal programme of devotional manuscript patronage in the 1390s. As a private Psalter for recitation, it served the most ancient continuous Christian prayer form — the chanting of all 150 psalms — within the framework of a luxury royal object. Its decorative vocabulary is drawn from the same Prague illuminators' workshop tradition visible in the Wenceslas Bible.
Office of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Exurgens autem Maria)
Officium Visitationis Beatae Mariae Virginis
Jan of Jenštejn, Archbishop of Prague, composed a full liturgical office with hymns and chants for the feast of the Visitation of the Virgin Mary, and in 1386–1389 petitioned Pope Urban VI to adopt it universally; the feast was duly inserted into the Roman Calendar in 1389. The office meditates on Luke 1:39–56, drawing its devotional focus through the Magnificat and the encounter between Mary and the pregnant Elizabeth. Jenštejn composed the office during a period of escalating conflict with King Wenceslas IV, giving his Marian devotion a polemical charge against secular royal power. His musical and poetic compositions were compiled in Die Hymnen Johanns von Jenstein, Erzbischofs von Prag (1886).