Teaching Prayer with Prayerbooks

While Luther had firmly rejected medieval prayerbooks, he and his followers did not reject the prayerbook genre completely. Luther’s Little Prayer Book (1522) taught the reasons for prayer, offered explanations of the Lord’s Prayer, and provided other prayer texts. Luther’s followers produced prayerbooks which included explicit and sometimes lengthy instructions for prayer and sought to model what proper prayer was. Prayerbooks often offered prayers for particular occasions and vocations. As in other ways of teaching prayer, the lutheran+ reformers made clear that prayers were to be addressed to God, not the saints or Mary, and express spiritual and material needs. Scholarship has begun to examine the ways that prayerbooks from different geographic and confessional locations exercised influence on one another.

Prayer · Theology · Philosophy · Psychology · Religious Education and Schools