Office of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Exurgens autem Maria)
Officium Visitationis Beatae Mariae Virginis
Exurgens autem Maria abiit in montana cum festinatione...
Our renderingBut Mary rose and went with haste into the hill country...
What it is
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).
Why it still matters
Jenštejn's Visitation office — built on the Magnificat and the mystery of two expectant mothers — is fully usable today as a structured Marian liturgical prayer, particularly as an evening office during Advent or on 31 May, the feast of the Visitation.
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.
Liber Viaticus of Jan of Streda (Travelling Breviary)
Liber viaticus Jana ze Středy
This lavishly illuminated breviary was commissioned between 1353 and 1364 by Jan ze Streda, bishop of Litomysl and Olomouc and the most influential ecclesiastical figure in Charles IV's chancellery. Its 319 folios contain the full standard breviary offices alongside the Legend of St Sigismund, a letter of Pseudo-Dionysius on the martyrdom of Peter and Paul, an office in honour of the Holy Lance and Nails of Christ, and Charles IV's own Wenceslas legend — a concentrated assembly of the court's devotional priorities in a single portable volume. The anonymous illuminator, now called the Master of the Liber Viaticus, produced work that influenced European Gothic book illumination, drawing on French and Italian models. The codex is held at the National Museum Library, Prague (MS XIII A 12), and is regarded as one of the supreme achievements of Bohemian Gothic illumination.