My Psalter, My Self; or How to Get a Grip on the Office According to Jan Mombaer: An Exercise in Training the Attention for Prayer

Accessus ad exercitationem.¹

Approach to the exercise. At the start of this exercise, we must inquire into six things: the title of the work, its subject-matter, its purpose, its usefulness, the part of philosophy to which it belongs, and its manner or method of treating its subject.

Titulus. The title of this exercise is a pun or play on words, alluding in the first part to the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s Our Bodies, Ourselves, first published in 1970, and in the second part to the chyropsalterium or “hand-psalter” invented by the late fifteenth-century Augustinian canon Jan Mombaer (Johannes Mauburnus) of Brussels (d. 1501) as a method for helping his fellow canons sustain their attention on the meaning and affect of the Psalms as they were praying the Divine Office. The allusion in the first part is intended both to indicate the nature of Mombaer’s work as a type of handbook and to suggest something about the way in which Mombaer hoped his technique of attending to the Psalms would enable the one praying to inhabit them, make them his (or her) own, as the great monastic father John Cassian (d. 435) urged (ideally) the monk should. The allusion in the second part is to the use of the hand as a way of holding onto the attention so as to achieve this integration of Psalter and Self.

Materia. The subject-matter of this exercise is the Directorium solvendarum horarum per Chyropsalterium, the fifth titulus or part (out of 39) of Mombaer’s Rosetum exercitiorum spiritualium et sacrarum meditationum as published in Paris 1510 by Jehan Petit and reprinted in Milan 1603 at the behest of Seraphin Merlin, general superior of the canons regular of the congregation of the Lateran; and in Douai 1620 at the behest of Leander of St. Martin, general superior of the English Benedictines at Douai. By 1510, the Rosetum had already been printed twice—in 1494 (probably) by Peter van Os at Zwolle and in 1504 by Johannes Speyer at Basel—but with significant errors, which the (posthumous) 1510 edition was intended by Mombaer to correct. In these earlier printings, the Chyropsalterium appears as a distinct title, following the Directorium. For the present exercise, I have consulted the 1504, 1510, 1603, and 1620 printings, all of which are now available through Google Books. The figure (on page 78) reproduces the chyropsalterium as depicted in the 1620 printings.

Intentio. The purpose of this exercise is to introduce Mombaer’s Directorium as an example of the way in which late medieval Christians, particularly those in religious orders, grappled with the demands of saying the Office as traditionally St. Benedict and others had insisted they should, their minds in harmony with their voices (“ut mens nostra concordet voci nostrae”). Mombaer’s Directorium is unusual (to my knowledge, unique) in the specificity and system with which he approaches this challenge, but his sources (cited copiously, verbatim, and at length) would have been at least familiar to almost every monastic practitioner of his day, particularly those—as the Directorium would almost immediately, albeit initially under a different title (Exercitia utilissima pro horis solvendis)—that had recently appeared in print. Other than with the chyropsalteriumitself (although even here, as we shall see, he had models), Mombaer was not so much an innovator as a compiler; his genius lay in his ability to read exhaustively in both the Fathers and works of his own day and to organize their insights into a mnemonically robust system. As such, Mombaer stands with his contemporaries on the cusp of a new age, backward-looking in his appeal to the patristic and medieval monastic, canonical, and mendicant sources upon which he depended, but forward-looking (as the publication history of the Rosetum suggests) in the way in which he organized instruction in the practice of prayer. The purpose of the present exercise is not, however, to debate whether Mombaer as one of the principal proponents of...