Statuesque II

In my previous post, Statuesque, I showed examples of two statues of people with rosaries -- one in ivory, one in alabaster. This time I have two statues that are both wood, but that take very different approaches in how they show the beads.

This first example is Saint Mary Magdalene -- you can tell it's her, because she always has some sort of little jar or container with her, representing the jar of ointment with which a repentant woman anointed Jesus's feet. (In the medieval mind, the Gospel stories of the woman taken in adultery, the woman who anointed Christ's feet and Mary the sister of Lazarus were all about the same person, despite the fact that the women in the first two stories are not named.)



Mary Magdalene also has some sort of association with the rosary, though I haven't been able to figure out exactly what. She is sometimes shown wearing one, but not always. But for some reason, she always shows up in image searches (for instance in Bildindex) using keywords related to rosaries, even when she's not actually wearing one.

This particular statue is carved in oak, a relatively dense and hard wood, and dates from around 1530. It's a little under three feet tall and is in the Archbishop's Museum in Utrecht. It was probably carved in the Cleves or Geldern area not too far away.

Most of Mary Magdalene's beads are not fully carved in the round, but are shown in relief against the surface of her gown. Compared to the last two examples and the next, they're on the small side -- maybe only half the diameter of her fingers, which would translate to 1/2 inch or so on a real-life person. The beads are very finely carved, even, and smooth, and you can clearly see that they come in two sizes (regular Ave beads and larger gauds). I would not be surprised to find there's more detail on the large round pomander at the bottom than we can see in this photo.

By contrast, we have a remarkably conceited-looking pilgrim here, who is carrying a rosary as part of her essential pilgrim-equipment.



It's probably okay that she looks so conceited, since she is a saint: Saint Reneldis (various spellings), from the late 7th century, who became a nun in what is now Belgium after making a seven-year pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

(Biographical diversion: Reneldis's sister Gudula and brother Emebert are also saints, and their mother is Saint Amalberga, who is supposed -- in order to spread the Word of God -- to have crossed a lake riding on two sturgeons. Reneldis and others were killed by raiding Huns, and so in art, she is sometimes depicted with Huns dragging her by her hair.)

At any rate, Reneldis has a truly splendid set of wooden beads over her arm, and unlike Mary Magdalen's, almost half of them are completely free-carved, not attached to any backing. Early 20th-century photos of the statue are missing this portion of the beads, though, so what you see here is a modern restoration. But the beads shown against her gown are originals, and the restorers seem to have done a good job of matching them.

If I am deciphering the Flemish language in the description correctly, this statue is also carved of oak. It's an early 16th-century piece by the Master of Elsloo and was probably made in Limburg. It's 86 cm tall (about three feet). There is a detail photo online in which you can see that these are very big beads, nearly twice the diameter of the lady's fingers. Note also that there seem to be about four decades of beads, plus several small beads between the join and the cross.

A Blessed Christmas to all!

I just have to show you this absolutely darling picture of the infant Jesus playing (anachronistically, of course) with beads. This is a detail from the Rottal votive panel -- a devotional painting commissioned by Jo:rg Rottal zu Talberg (Austria) in about 1505. I'd love to have a color picture of the entire thing for Christmas "wallpaper" on my computer: most of the saints are dressed in red and green, and the background is gold, tooled in fantastic curly leaf shapes.



A picture (black and white, unfortunately) of the entire painting is available here, and more details in color are here, here , here , here , and here .

If you've got it, flaunt it:

Wearing medieval rosaries, part 1

After writing about giving medieval-style rosaries and paternosters as gifts, it occurred to me it would be useful to see what we can find out about how to wear them.

With modern clothes, of course, a rosary is normally carried in a pocket or purse. But especially if you belong to a historical re-enactment group, you will probably want some guidance on how to wear your medieval rosary with your medieval clothes, especially for any holiday festivities. If you have a gorgeous medieval rosary, you will probably want to flaunt it!

Starting with the simplest, we have a number of portraits of people just holding their beads in their hands, or looped around a wrist or over the arm.

Many religious paintings intended to hang in churches have small pictures of their donors kneeling in front of the holy scene, and quite a few of these donors, if you look closely, are holding rosaries. Here's a typical pair of donors, another Austrian image from REALonline.



This is from one wing of a several-paneled altarpiece, dated to around 1518, by an unknown artist who signed his painting "AA".

When not actively praying, people may hold their rosaries looped over one arm, as in the statue on the left here, carved by the Master of Elsloo in the 1520s. The donor on the right is holding his in the same way: he is from a corner of Rodrigo de Osona the Younger's painting, "The Adoration of the Magi", ca. 1500.



In the 16th-century German woodcut below, the lady on the left looks as though she is removing her rosary from where she had it stashed inside one of her sleeves.



Some of the men's style "Tenners" or ten-bead strings have a wrist loop -- as seen in this portrait of a rather grumpy burgher:



And the estimable Balthasar Eicheister, whose 1528 portrait you may have already seen in Balthasar's acorns, is wearing his rosary wrapped several times around his wrist, like a bracelet:





When I'm wearing medieval clothing, I'm usually also doing things with my hands, so I often look for ways to wear a rosary so it's visible and decorative, but out of my way. My experiments show that if you want a rosary wrapped around your wrist like Balthasar's to stay put and to hang at more or less even lengths, it needs to be fastened to your sleeve with a brooch that catches all of the strands. Otherwise, especially if the string of beads is slippery, it will slip around so that one loop hangs down too far and the others are pulled snug.

I've also tried -- though I haven't seen this in paintings -- looping a rosary several times around my upper arm, above the elbow -- again, firmly fastened with a brooch. This works very well, except that I've learned not to wear it this way when I'm driving a car, because it inevitably catches on the gearshift lever. I now have a red glass rosary with several beads that don't quite match the others, because the string snapped and spilled little red glass beads all over my car, and I never did find the last three of the ones that were missing.

posts in this series:

If you've got it, flaunt it
Rosaries on belts
Tying one on
Ring around the collar
Loops, drapes and dangles
Just hanging around
What did Margaret mean?

Statuesque

As I've mentioned more than once, paintings of rosary beads often have to be taken with a few grains of salt, because painters -- especially medieval painters -- do not always paint exactly what they see. Sometimes the demands of "visual coding" override reality. (By "visual coding" I mean that the artist must produce something which is recognizable, and whose meaning "reads" correctly, to the intended audience.)

The same goes for sculptors, of course. In addition, there are the limitations of the material being worked with, whether wood, ivory or stone. Some materials are hard to carve, some let the sculptor show more fine detail, some can better support being carved very thin without breaking. Weight, hardness, and durability are also factors, as is where the sculpture is going to be installed -- you don't have to be very fussy about details for something that will be mounted sixty feet up on the west face of a cathedral.

But from the examples I've seen, the rule of thumb seems to be that beads should be BIG.

My first example is a small ivory statue of Saint Rose of Lima. It's about 13 inches tall, originally created in about 1700 in the Philippines, and was sold by Sotheby's in 2002 for almost 18,000 Euros. Saint Rose was born in Peru in 1586 and was canonized or "sainted" in 1671. She is usually shown in Dominican monastic robes and with a crown of thorns on her head.



In this example she is also wearing a rosary around her neck. While everyone's Catholic grandmother has probably told them never, ever to do this, it was actually fairly common practice in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. (I'll talk more about this sometime.)

The string of beads is short, making a nice necklace length. The beads appear to be about as big around as her middle finger, which would make them about 14 to 16 millimeters in diameter. (Fingers are very useful for estimating the size of beads being shown.)

My second example is Saint Zita, or properly Saint Sitha in this case because that's what she was called in England and this statue is English. Sitha or Zita was born in 1218 near Lucca, Italy, and is the patron saint of housewives, servants, waiters, and people who have lost their keys :) She is often shown with a bag, keys, and sometimes a rosary.



This statue is carved in alabaster, a stone that is relatively soft and easy to carve. Alabaster was popular for statues because it is slightly transparent, so carved faces and hands can look remarkably realistic. Unfortunately it's also rather easy to break, so not many saints carved in alabaster survived the Reformation. This one is from ca. 1470-1500, and is now in the Burrell Collection in Glasgow.

Saint Sitha is holding a very simple rosary, just a loop of beads with a tassel. The carving of the beads is rather sketchy, but there seem to be about 40 of them and judging by her fingers, the beads are a little larger than Saint Rose's. If you look closely at the detail picture, you can see her keys (four of them) and a purse hanging from her belt, just to the right of the rosary.

(More about statues in the next post)

The Goose is Loose

"When the fox preaches, beware our geese." -- English Proverb

When I mentioned my "rabbit rosary" post, Who Knew?, on the Paternosters mailing list, a few more animals with rosaries came to light.

Specifically, I now have two examples of geese bearing rosaries.

The first -- which my friend Heather Rose Jones pointed out to me -- is of the classic proverb illustration, a fox in a monk's cowl, preaching to a congregation of geese.



This is an impression from a 15th-century cookie mold from Bonn, Germany (see Comments for footnote). Cookie molds are a recognized, though not very well studied, form of folk art from late medieval Germany, and provide a wealth of Biblical, humorous and proverbial imagery.

You can see the fox, up in his pulpit, who has already collected two geese -- you can see the heads sticking out of his hood. Yet his congregation of pious geese are still listening to him. You can tell how pious they are because they are all carrying rosaries in their bills.

(Personally, I would find it somewhat difficult to recite the rosary -- or anything else -- while carrying a string of beads in my mouth. Demosthenes practicing his oratory with pebbles in his mouth comes to mind. But then, these are clearly allegorical geese, so it's all right. Allegories, like dreams and visions, do not have to make sense.)

The second was contributed by Katherine Barich, who very kindly scanned and posted it for the mailing list:



This is also German, by Albert Glockendon from the 1535 Brevarium Horae Divinae, a Book of Hours now in the Nurnberg State Library.

Like the previous example, this goose (and her following fox) are also a satire on clergy who "prey" on their congregations. But in this case the goose is also poking fun at fashionably dressed women, who carry rosaries more as a display of wealth than as a true reflection of their devotion. The goose is not only carrying the type of large, rather ostentatious an expensive rosary that we've seen in Big, Red, and German and Big Berthas, she's also wearing the very fashionable "bundlein" headdress, which you can see on a real human in the Herlein Friedrich painting in Sunday's post on "wallpaper."

Perhaps I should have saved these postings for next April 1st, but they were just too cute and I had to share them!

Paternosters as gifts

One of my correspondents wrote the other day asking:

"It's that time of year again, Christmas, and I was thinking of making a
Paternoster for a friend of mine. But I just wanted to check if they would
still be used by modern Catholics?"

Good question!

The short answer is "Yes." [grin]

The longer answer is still yes, but it comes in two parts: can a modern Catholic use the older styles of beads to pray the rosary, and can a modern Catholic use the older style of beads to pray an older style of prayers.

First, what the Roman Catholic Church prescribes for the modern rosary is a particular set of meditations and prayers, not beads. You can recite these prayers on an official set of "rosary beads," or while moving pebbles from one pile to another, or for that matter you can recite them counting on your fingers. Any method you choose for keeping track of the prayers is fine.

(Digression: It is my personal belief that the idea of reciting "round numbers" of prayers -- 10, 50, 100 -- is a human idea anyway. Humans are the ones who love to play with neat mathematical patterns; God, IMHO, cares in this instance mostly about the heart, and couldn't care less if there were 99 or 37 or 106 prayers instead of some exact number. One hundred is only an "exact" number if you are counting in base 10, anyway.)

So any string of beads that makes it easy to keep track of five groups of 10 Hail Marys, with an Our Father between each group, would be perfectly fine to use as a modern rosary. The person praying will have to remember to stick in a few prayers at the beginning that wouldn't have corresponding beads, but that's no big deal. I would recommend for this purpose that you make either a loop or a straight paternoster/rosary with that "five tens" type of construction (i.e. 50 small beads and 5 larger ones).



By the way, while getting one's beads blessed by a priest is very important to some Catholics, I would encourage users of medieval or other "nonstandard" sets NOT to worry about some priest or other refusing to bless a set that wasn't what they were used to seeing. Go right ahead and ask. In all probability, they won't bat an eye, and if they do, all the owner of the beads has to say is, "It's a medieval form," and I'm sure that would take care of it. In fact, the priest would probably be intrigued; most of them don't know any more about the history of the rosary than they learned in seminary, and some of that's likely to be out of date (the St. Dominic myth, for instance).

Second question: also yes, you can pray any sequence of prayers you happen to like on whatever beads you choose. There are already hundreds, if not thousands, of such devotions, both historical and modern, of which the conventional rosary is just one. If the string of beads used is not a standard rosary, it's called a "chaplet" instead.

As for origins, some of these "chaplet" devotions are spread by devotees who believe they were instructed by God or Mary in a vision to use a certain type of prayers, and perhaps a specific form of beads. The chaplet of "Our Lady's Tears" comes to mind: if I'm remembering correctly, the woman who originated it says that Mary specified in her vision that the beads should be white.

Other such devotions were frankly just made up by someone -- often a revered leader or teacher. Someone might just have the idea that it would be a good devotional exercise to say, for instance, 33 repetitions of some prayer to commemorate the 33 years Jesus is said to have lived on earth. They may then start encouraging others to do so, writing leaflets about it, and turning out sets of 33 beads for people to use: presto, a new chaplet!

So if you think your modern Catholic recipient would be interested, you can certainly give them a different form of beads and tell them how they were historically used.

For instance, I rather like my green jasper paternoster , which is a simple loop of fifty 12mm beads with a large silver terminal bead and a silk tassel. The beads are all sorts of lovely shades of green and mauve and gray and I can imagine a lot of people would be pleased to have such a gift. This is the sort of beads that might have been used in the 13th or 14th century to recite 50 or 150 Our Fathers.

A man or any other busy person (historically it's a Guy Thing, but modernly, who cares) might like a simple string of ten beads with a ring at one end and a cross at the other, like my "Zehner."

Historically, this could have been used to simply say a set number of Our Fathers, or it could have been used to say a number of Hail Marys, or of Our Fathers each of which is followed by a Hail Mary and a "Gloria" ... there are lots of possibilities.

If you need them, class-tested instructions for a variety of paternosters and "finishes" are here.

Wallpaper -- with rosaries

'Tis the season, and if you have a computer whose screen you stare at a lot, it seems perfectly reasonable to me to decorate all that blank expanse of screen with something seasonal and worth looking at.

So herewith, a brief guide to some nice "wallpaper" images that just happen to show medieval rosaries and paternosters in them.

Both my home and work computers have BIG screens, so I look for images that are around 900 to 1500 pixels wide. Some smaller images can be enlarged and still look good, but most will start to look blurry and odd if you enlarge them too much.

This is the one I currently have on my desktop at work:



It's a Southern German panel painting by Herlin Friedrich from 1488, originally part of an altarpiece. This image from REALonline is only 624 pixels wide, so enlarged on my 21-inch screen it doesn't exactly look stellar, but for a smaller screen it can look okay. And it's cheerful, it's red and green, and it shows a whole family of kneeling people (parents, five daughters and four sons) all of whom are carrying rosaries. Most of the rosaries seem to be coral, except perhaps the father's. Mom seems to be nudging her oldest daughter to please take hers off her belt and use it!

This one is rather dark. It was painted by the "Master of the Saint Lucy Legend" around 1488 and is now in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. (When you see a painting by the "Master of.." something or other, it means we know the artist from other works but don't know his name.)



This image is over 1000 pixels wide, so it's nice and sharp. I run pictures like this through Photoshop to adjust brightness and color balance. This and the next two pictures all come from the Web Gallery of Art, a splendid picture source.

If you like "saint spotting," this picture has the "mystical marriage" of Saint Catherine -- the Infant Jesus is giving her a ring, and you can tell it's Catherine he's giving it to because she is wearing velvet patterned with wheels, her badge of identity. Saint Agnes in the right foreground is holding a lamb on her lap, and she has a nice long coral rosary hanging from her belt. There are two saints with tongs, and both of them are holding rosaries too -- the one on the left has a straight rosary with two tassels, only the second time I've seen this type on a woman. One of these two is probably Saint Apollonia, who was martyred by having all her teeth pulled out (hence the tongs) but I can't tell which one.

This one has the Infant Jesus entertaining himself with his devotee's rosary:



It's another panel painting, this time by an unknown artist, probably Flemish. It dates to about 1475 and is in the Musée d'Art Religieux et d'Art Mosan, Liège.

And lastly, can you spot the rosary in this one?



This is the central panel of the St. Columba Altarpiece, painted around 1455 by Rogier van der Weyden. (Alte Pinakothek, Munich)

Yes, that's right -- it's being held by the kneeling spectator at the very left edge of the picture with his hands resting on top of the stone wall.

As in these panels, the commonest place to find rosaries in Nativity scenes and other religious paintings is in the hands of the donors included in the painting. But whenever saints are pictured as ordinary people in contemporary dress, they too may be carrying rosaries, however anachronistic.

Who knew?

I took some time yesterday evening to systematically go through all the images that come up when you search on Betschnur (the common Austrian word for a rosary) in REALonline, an index of photo images from museums in Austria. (See here for more about this source.)

Now this is an angle on rosary history I had never considered: apparently, as early as 1481, the practice of using paternosters had already spread into the animal kingdom. Here's the evidence:



(and yes, I'm joking...)

To see more information (in German) on this image, go to REALonline. Unfortunately they don't make it easy to give a direct link to a particular image, so do this:

Click on the button that says Auswählen.

Then enter 007446A into the blank toward the bottom of the left-hand column (just above where it says Rechtstrunkierung möglich...).

Click the button just below it that says Zeige Bilder. That should take you there.

This image comes -- along with quite a few other images, which you can see if you click on the Voriges Bild and Nächstes Bild buttons -- from an antiphonal, which is a music manuscript giving all the "antiphons" or plainchant refrains used in church services through the year. The manuscript is dated 1481 and may have come from Vienna. It's now in a university library in Graz, Austria.

The manuscript has a splendid collection of illuminated initials showing saints, and in the margins, quite a few other amusing bits, including a harper, a scribe, a stretching cat, and a fox carrying a hen(with a mischievous hooded face just below it).

Sheer serendipity!

Zehner remodel

As I've mentioned a time or two, I sent a rosary display to Kalamazoo last spring, and spent some time remodeling a few old pieces that needed spiffing up. This is one of them.

I made a "Zehner", which is what the Germans call a string of ten large beads, fairly early in my collection career, because it's such a typical type of rosary/paternoster, especially in all those 15th-century portraits. (See Counting to Ten for more examples.) The way I first made it was ridiculously easy: I just took ten linked beads from one of the several wall rosaries I'd bought on eBay, added a cross to one end and a ring to the other.



The way I put this together was not terribly authentic, so I decided it needed an upgrade. Also, one of the beads had gotten chipped. Wire links are not a common technique for this type, and a couple of years looking at period crosses told me that the one I'd used (because I happened to have it around) wasn't a very good candidate either.

The beads are machine carved, and difficult to string because the holes are large and conical, much bigger at one end than at the other. Adding small black wooden beads to fill the overly large holes makes it possible to use a string of normal size. I chose hemp this time, partly because it seemed plausible for a not terribly costly set of wooden beads, and partly because I had black hemp string in an appropriate size on hand.



The cross is something I got from Rosary Workshop, and I've been looking for just the right project to use it on. Like a lot of Rosary Workshop's pieces, it's from an undated original, but most of their pieces are cast from 19th-century originals. This particular one is Greek, and shows Mary and the Infant Jesus rather than the usual body of Christ on the cross. The four roundels at the ends of the arms appear to contain angels, though it's hard to tell (such portraits are sometimes the four Evangelists instead). A lot of Rosary Workshop's pieces are "primitive looking" like this, so even if I can't justify them as accurate reproductions of anything medieval, they look the part.

Here's another detail of the remodeled Zehner.

When Rosaries are Red

Someone asked me awhile back why I keep referring to all the "Big Red German" rosaries as coral -- especially given the (relative) dearth of surviving coral beads. We also see quite a few rosaries of red beads in other contexts, especially in the many (and anachronistic!) portraits of the Virgin Mary where the Infant Jesus is playing with his mother's string of red beads. Good questions all.

First, a caution: most if not all of the red beads we talk about are actually just accessories in paintings. So we are talking about something that is really -- literally -- just dots of red paint. There will always be some uncertainty about exactly what they are supposed to represent. Here's a fairly typical example by Joos van Cleve: Portrait of an Unknown Woman, 1527.



Second, we have to weigh the question of how realistic the painter was trying to be. Paintings are not photographs, and we know that many painters don't paint exactly what's before their eyes. For instance, we sometimes see rosaries shown with peculiar numbers of beads -- 28, 39, 16. It's very likely that at least some of these are the painter's version of "how many beads will fill up this space in the painting and still be big enough that you can see what they are."

Mostly the reason I think these rosaries are supposed to be coral is that red coral shows up in many documents as a material popular for rosary and paternoster beads. Coral was popular enough for paternosters that the Dominican Order had to make a rule in 1260 that friars could not carry paternosters of coral or amber (both luxury materials). Coral is also used for other decorative purposes, including adult jewelry and the peculiar table-top sculptures called "coral gardens" -- miniature landscapes made of valuable mineral specimens, precious materials and jewels, including coral "trees."

Mentions of carnelian and other reddish stones, by contrast, seem to be fewer. For carnelian in particular, apparently a lot of carnelian is more orange to yellow as it comes out of the ground: in modern times, it's routinely heat-treated to turn it redder and darker. I don't know whether this was done -- or whether it was possible -- in the Middle Ages.

Certainly you'd expect that some who couldn't afford the real thing would purchase cheap imitations of red coral instead. Again I'm speculating, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to find red glass used this way. (And perhaps more practical than the real thing -- genuine coral is rather soft for a semi-precious stone; glass is harder, though heavier). Nor would I be surprised to find wood or bone beads dyed red, or perhaps an "inferior" type of coral given the same treatment. That's certainly happening today: I think it's fair to say you can assume any "red" coral you buy these days has been dyed -- unless a very reputable supplier is certain that it wasn't. The genuine "gem quality" red coral is terribly scarce now and horribly expensive: a rosary made from it would probably cost $600 or more.

To the point, however: The other reason I think most of the red rosary beads in paintings are supposed to represent coral is that they are painted in the same style as other beads we _know_ are supposed to be coral. The closest and best examples are the many pictures of the Infant Jesus where he is _not_ playing with a rosary, but has a string of red beads around his neck.

A string of coral beads was, and perhaps still is, thought to be an appropriate gift for a baby over much of Europe, because coral has been regarded as having protective properties against the "Evil Eye." For that matter, a good-luck charm representing a coral branch, called a corno or "horn" in Italian, is still sold for adults in Mediterranean countries (although now it may be made out of plastic). The Virgin Mary here has simply given her baby a protective necklace as would any good mother. Here's a version by Joos van Cleve (Flanders, 1507-1540), the same artist who painted the secular portrait above.



The clincher for infant necklaces is when we notice how many of them have a pendant that is clearly a branch of native coral -- perhaps somewhat shaped and polished. In that distinctive color, and in that kind of context, it really can't be anything else.

Goth

Modern "Goth" culture echoes, in some ways, the fascination in past centuries with the imagery of death, although the meaning is now rather different.

In the Middle Ages, skulls and skeletons were gruesome and frightening, but they were also seen as symbols of the intent to live a good and holy life and attain heaven in the limited time available (or perhaps through Purgatory later).

But in modern times, skulls and skeletons lack these positive associations, and are seen solely as symbols of fear, despair, suffering and evil.

Some modern "Goths" do embrace not only the black clothing and pale makeup, but a "Goth" attitude. For them, the skull-and-blood imagery, and the mockery of religious symbols such as crucifixes and rosaries, expresses their genuine feeling of alienation, sadness and hopelessness.

More often, though -- and this is why I'm writing this on Hallowe'en -- the "Goths" and "pirates" I encounter are tongue-in-cheek. They enjoy wearing the clothes as an outrageous fashion statement, and get a kick out of pretending to be evil and out of making fun of those who take life too seriously. They are not out to actually hurt anyone, and in fact, many of the ones I've met are extraordinarily kind and helpful people behind the silly or outré masks.

Unfortunately this playful sort of "Goth" is sometimes mistaken for someone genuinely interested in evil. As Joe Sinasac comments at Catholic Online, it's easy to focus on "Gothic beasties and so-called black magic", when real evil is much more mundane. "As Hannah Arendt observed," he adds, "evil is often banal, not exciting... Such fears are echoes of past alarms over the Halloween custom of dressing up the kids as goblins and witches. They make just as little sense. Real evil can be much more difficult to detect – and is far more widespread. Also much more difficult to eradicate; a simple exorcism just won’t do."

So the imagery doesn't scare me. I'm more amused than horrified by the "goth" rosaries I've encountered. (Though I can understand how others might see hostility where I see humor, and if so, they're certainly entitled to that opinion.)



Just as with real rosaries, there are tacky and flimsy goth rosaries and there are nicely-constructed ones. Also, just as with real rosaries, there are examples that stick fairly closely to the "canonical" construction of modern rosaries, and there are also variations that don't. I expect most of those (like the one below) are due to an artistic impulse to interpret the design loosely, though I suspect there are a few out there whose makers are simply unclear on the concept. :)



The site that keeps coming up in a Google search for "goth" and "rosary" (and source of the above images) is, unsurprisingly, Goth Rosary, which does have some interesting merchandise, including not only rosaries named after blood types (Type A, Type O, Type AB negative) but "coffin" purses and fragrances with names like "Graveyard" ("The smell of rich loamy soil, fresh green grass with a note of floral..") and "Mayhem" ("The smell of smoke mixed with woods & spice...."). I think my favorite is the bone-colored skull comb.

(By the way, my research also turned up an interesting online article on the history and anthropology of modern "goth" culture (originally someone's term paper) that I found well worth reading.)

Posts in this series:

Death's head devotions
Skully bits
Skulls: the inside story
Skulls: the inside story, part 2
Skulls: the inside story, part 3
Voldemort
Voldemort, part 2
A skull of one's own
Goth
More living color

Alanus de Rupe and the Beads of Death :)

When I was asked to provide a rosary display for the Artisans' Gallery at the International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo last spring, I decided I wanted to make at least one new rosary for it.

Looking through my notes, I saw that I'd written on the list of future projects "Ulm, p.112." Well, first I had to figure out which book I'd meant... but eventually I found what I'd been thinking of on p.112 of Stories of the Rose (IMHO, the best book on rosary history in English).

It turned out to be a reference to Alanus de Rupe's Unser lieben frauen psalter, one of the first printed rosary books (1483). In the tenth "Exemplum" (anecdote) in that book, de Rupe mentions a particular rosary prescribed by St. Dominic for a penitent knight. Stories of the Rose describes this as telling how "a knight was instructed to make a set out of five stones" whose colors and symbolism are detailed. Five beads, I thought: oh, that will be easy.

After a bit of investigating, I discovered that one of the manuscripts of de Rupe's handbook is available to me on microfilm at the local university library, so I went to take a look.



Much to my surprise, this seemed to offer a rather different description. The 15th-century German isn't easy (I'd swear they had letters in their alphabet I'd never seen before!), but thanks to a couple of very helpful correspondents, here's a translation.

"In the next-following figure is a paternoster that has five large stones, and after every one large stone should be ten small. The first large stone of the five is many-colored and signifies the multiplicity of your sins. The second stone is light colored, and signifies the uncertain death that is in your certain future. The third stone is red, and signifies the Last Judgement at which you must give an account of your life. The fourth stone of the five is black, and signifies hell. The fifth stone of the paternoster is gilt, and signifies the glory and joy of the saints: which glory and joy is promised to those who keep the commandment of God."

Clearly the description in Stories of the Rose should have said "a knight was instructed to make a set with five stones." After each of these follow ten ordinary Ave beads, just as in a normal rosary; the only thing different is the five specially colored gauds or marker beads with their symbolism. I wasn't 100% sure of my translation, but I mustered up enough courage to write to the author of Stories of the Rose, Anne Winston-Allen, who wrote back very cordially and agreed I was correct -- always a thrill to the amateur researcher's heart!

I had a string of rock crystal (clear quartz) Aves that was just waiting for the right project, so after considerable "creative shopping" for just the right gauds, I was able to create this reproduction:



The "multicolored" bead is a millefiori glass bead from a Venetian importer. The light-colored bead is a natural agate, the red is coral, the black is glass, and the gold bead is another imported bead from Venice, made with real gold foil.

Coffins

We seem to be getting a bit far afield from rosaries, but considering the interesting phenomenon of rosaries that use skulls (as they occasionally do) leads naturally to consideration of the other skull and skeleton "keepsakes" that are relatively common in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Especially since it's October :)

Another such "memento mori" object is the miniature coffin, which often opens to show a skeleton. Probably one of the better-known examples is the so-called Torre Abbey jewel from England (1540-1550, museum no. 3581-1856), now in the Victoria and Albert museum.



The point of having such a memento was that by remembering that death was inevitable and unpredictable, you would be motivated to live a virtuous life. This continued to be fashionable right through the 16th century.

Another example from the Victoria & Albert, which is rather more decorative with a fancy chain decorated with pairs of crossed bones, and colored black and white with enamel, is this one:



The museum's commentary notes that by the middle of the 17th century, the focus of skull, coffin and skeleton symbolism had changed -- from an abstract contemplation of death as motivation for virtue to commemorating the deaths of specific people, generally family members or loved ones.

The fashion began to turn then from memento-mori's toward mourning jewelry, with dates, initials or names, and eventually to such things as Victorian "hair jewelry" made from hair from the deceased. The impulse to create "relics," in the same way the Middle Ages treasured bits of hair, bone or clothing from saints, seems to be a recurring theme. Popular symbolism also turned from skulls and coffins toward weeping women, willow trees, gravestones and broken columns as symbols of loss.

But we are still in the Middle Ages in this discussion, and I found another very interesting coffin while roaming around in the Marburg Index, which I thought I'd share. Here is an overview:



According to the museum notes, this is ivory, from Western Switzerland around 1520. Like most of the memento-mori's I've been discussing, it's now in the Schnütgen Museum in Köln (Cologne), Germany. The skeleton is enclosed in a "box" composed of a solid base and lid in a rather eye-blinding black-and-white pattern, and open sides with narrow columns and wide spaces.

What's particularly notable about this one is that the skeleton isn't completely reduced to bones, but retains some "muscle tissue"(?) depicted in ivory on the top side, and through a hole in the stomach some "internal organs" can be seen.



I suppose ivory is such a wonderful material that it manages to make even such revolting details look eerily beautiful, but my modern sense of appropriateness still says "Eeeeeuuuuwwwwwww!"

Posts in this series:

Death's head devotions
Skully bits
Skulls: the inside story
Skulls: the inside story, part 2
Skulls: the inside story, part 3
Voldemort
Voldemort, part 2
A skull of one's own
Goth
More living color

Our Lady's Psalter

One of my correspondents recently asked what the connection is between the rosary and the "psalter" or Book of Psalms in the Bible. She was puzzled to read that prayer beads were used when reciting "the psalter" and wondered whether this meant reciting the same psalm 50 times, or whether the beads were a way to keep track of which psalm you were on. "I know people do memorize psalms," she says, "but 50 sounds like a lot to remember."

This is a good question, and it's a piece of rosary history that I don't think I've mentioned here. Here's a short review.

Priests, monks, nuns and other full-time religious people in the Catholic Church have "official" prayers to recite every day. These prayers used to be referred to as the "Divine Office" and today are called the "Liturgy of the Hours." These are seen as prayers offered on behalf of the whole church, for the entire world. The Divine Office is based on the Psalms, together with other prayers, hymns and readings, and those who pray it actually do recite the 150 psalms at least every week. (If I recall correctly, in the Middle Ages the Office was heavier on the Psalms and lighter on the other stuff.)

Lay people wanted to participate in this "official" prayer of the Church, too, including those who couldn't afford an expensive psalm or Office book and those who couldn't read. While I'm sure there were people who did memorize all 150 psalms, it was much more common for such people to simply recite the Our Father (Pater Noster) 150 times, once for each of the 150 psalms. This is what the paternoster beads were used for -- to keep count. We have records of practices like this several centuries earlier than the "rosary" as we know it today.

Later elaborations included adding a "Hail Mary" after each "Our Father," or just saying 150 "Hail Marys", and this was referred to as reciting "Our Lady's Psalter." To this day, you are likely to hear a 5-decade rosary or a loop of 50 beads (or 50 plus markers) referred to as a "psalter" in German, to differentiate it from other forms of beads (such as strings of 10, or 6- or 7-decade forms).

Other devotions also used the same beads. Various people wrote devotions for the beads, including sets of 150 rhymed verses, one to add to each "Hail Mary" of the 150 (which again required a book). One of the early rosary manuals has been republished in recent years and has been surprisingly popular because it provides 150 Scripture verses -- again, one for each bead. The modern, newly re-invented devotion is called a "Scriptural Rosary," and has many enthusiasts.

The dancing skeleton

I will get off this "skulls" thing I've been on: really, I will. But there will be just a few more posts -- October, with Hallowe'en and the Day of the Dead at the end of it, is just too good an opportunity to pass up.

One of my correspondents pointed me to an intriguing little "dancing" or "climbing" bone skeleton bead that's available from Fire Mountain Gems. It's a bit better carved than some of the bone skulls they sell, and I think it's rather cute.



I actually found a somewhat similar (but smaller) metal version, which I've used on the "plain and simple" version of a rosary in red glass in my collection.



Finally, there's another delightful little "Memento Mori" carving in the form of this "dancing skeleton." It's listed as possibly from Berlin, attributed to Joachim Hennen in the middle of the 17th century, and is now with the other "Voldemort" memento-mori's in the Schnütgen Museum in Köln (Cologne).



It's quite graceful (for a skeleton) even if the whole idea of "skeleton as dress accessory" is a bit morbid!

I should add, by the way, since this is as good a place to mention it as any, that there's also a delightful little ivory carving of a child in the same collection:



It's labeled as a "Lorettokindl," that is (I think), a depiction of the Christ Child from a group representing Our Lady of Loretto. I think it's darling. The similarity in poses is intriguing.

Posts in this series:

Death's head devotions
Skully bits
Skulls: the inside story
Skulls: the inside story, part 2
Skulls: the inside story, part 3
Voldemort
Voldemort, part 2
A skull of one's own
Goth
More living color

Rosary Month

October in the Roman Catholic Church is traditionally "Rosary Month," and hopefully I'll be able to celebrate it by catching up on some blog entries here. (It's been a busy couple of months.)

One of my recent musings is this: despite the fact that I'm doing this research and writing this blog, and despite being Catholic (a convert), I personally don't pray the rosary very often. Mostly this is just personal spirituality -- I don't tend to pray to saints very often, simply because of my own history. I also don't feel the rosary is necessary for everyone.

I have to admit that the one time I do reach for the rosary is when all else has failed and I simply cannot fall asleep. I seldom get through more than two decades, though :)

But I still find rosaries fascinating. I seem to have discovered a "hole" in medieval scholarship; there are lots of people in academia who research the prayers and devotions, but no one seems to be paying much attention to the actual beads.

Partly I think this is because "material culture" studies (i.e. research on actual THINGS) have only become a respectable part of medieval scholarship in the last twenty years or so -- before that, they were pretty much ignored or left to archaeologists, and many historians didn't bother to read about them.

I also think historical reenactment has had an influence: it's when trying to reproduce and document period artifacts that it becomes apparent that a lot of basic research and description simply hasn't been done, or done to a standard that makes reproductions possible. How many beads in a group? What are they threaded on? Where and how is the rosary worn or carried? Are beads of this material appropriate for this social class? Those are the sorts of questions that in many cases haven't been answered.

A skull of one's own

When someone pointed me to Sapphire & Sage's rosary page recently, I was a bit startled -- but pleased! -- to see a familiar image. Rhonda, who's also on the Paternosters mailing list, has made her own copy of that skulls rosary we've been discussing here, and is offering copies for sale as well.

I seem to have been more lucky than most people: for my copy of this rosary, I just happened to walk into my local bead store when they had a bunch of 1-inch skulls hand-carved from peach pits in stock. These are nearly the same size as the originals in the 16th-century rosary, though of course mine don't open into two halves with little carved boxwood scenes inside! I promptly bought ten of them and have never seen them anywhere before or since (till this week: see below!).

I thought I'd take a look around and see what kinds of skull beads are available for others who might want to replicate this rosary. Disappointingly, most of the ones I can find seem to be only about half the size of mine, and they vary widely in quality and style. Most of the skulls I found were bone, though I've also seen them in wood and pewter.

Bone skulls in the half-inch size range seem to be the easiest to find. The good thing about these is that they're usually fairly cheap, running from 10 cents to 30 cents each or thereabouts. They often come as ready-made strings of 108 (the number in the most common type of Hindu prayer beads).

Most are not very realistic looking, such as Shipwreck Beads item #52BS153. The other big online bead source, Fire Mountain Gems has something similar, currently for a much better price (but you have to buy the whole strand). An especially fun place to shop, South Pacific Wholesale Company (despite the name, they do sell retail) also has these. (The catalog from this place is a hoot!)

I wouldn't buy skull beads without seeing a good photo, because there's an even more abstract and less realistic style out there as well -- basically two holes for eyes and a slit for the mouth, or else a very schematic face with the mouth just scratched in, and roughly cross-hatched to represent teeth. This seems to be an Asian style. Shipwreck has very small (10mm) ones as item #68BS153 (25 for $3.65) and I've also seen larger ones of this type, such as Shipwreck's item #94BS156: 1 inch tell, $1.60 each.

Aside from the big bead companies, skull beads tend to be found at places with titles like Pyrates of the Coast, or else at "Goth" sites such as Goth Rosary.

(By the way, I personally see a lot of the "pirate" and "goth" cultural thing as an amusing take-off on religion. But some may see it as hostility to religion, in which case you'll have to decide whether you want to shop at such places or not. More on this another time....)

If you're willing to pay more, there are some better types of skull beads out there as well. Just on a quick search, I found several at a place called Spiritcrafts: pewter skulls (14 x 10mm, drilled side to side, $1 each), some much cruder black glass skulls (13mm, 80 cents), and some rather cheerful ceramic skulls (19x10mm drilled side to side, $1 each).

Last but not least, I did find peach pit and boxwood skull beads, but unfortunately, only from wholesalers. With minimum orders like $1,000 or a full cargo container, this isn't practical for most of us!

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

P.S. That's where the first draft of this post ended. The next day, my phone rang and it was a friend calling on her cell phone from a bead show. "They have some nice skull beads here," she said, "Want some?" and she described them. I said yes, and though I haven't seen them yet, they certainly sound like what I was seeing wholesale. So perhaps bead shows are the best place to find skulls of one's own!

Posts in this series:

Death's head devotions
Skully bits
Skulls: the inside story
Skulls: the inside story, part 2
Skulls: the inside story, part 3
Voldemort
Voldemort, part 2
A skull of one's own
Goth
More living color

More photos: REALonline

Over on the Paternosters mailing list, fellow historical-rosary enthusiast Marion McNealy recently alerted me to a source for more online photos.

She writes, "I've been browsing around in REALonline, the Austrian equivalent to Bildindex.de, only it's much better indexed and searchable. It mainly has artworks, most in color, but it does have a few objects. I *love* this site!"

Marion has also very helpfully written a user's guide to REALonline for those of us whose German isn't as good as hers. :) Thanks, Marion!

The Austrian version of the German language is a bit different, so the best keyword in searching for rosaries turns out to be "Betschnur" (literally "prayer-string") rather than "rosenkranz" ("rose-wreath") which is the most useful word on the Bildindex site in Germany.

A search on "Betschnur" turns up a few actual rosaries, indexed under "Materielle Objekte" in the catalog. There are many other references to rosaries in paintings, sculptures and woodcuts, which I've only just begun to explore.

Here, for instance, is a color photo of the small rosary I used as the inspiration for my German horn beads. I knew the description said it was "blue-green" but I certainly didn't expect this color!

Acorns revisited

I have still not figured out the mystical significance (if any) of acorns. But they still keep turning up somehow connected with rosaries.

Here's a recent item that turned up on Ebay -- a nice wooden rosary with acorn-shaped marker beads. It's Italian-made, but it's a souvenir from Our Lady of Fatima Shrine in New York state.



The seller speculates that perhaps the beads are made of oak wood, which would explain why the Our Father beads (gauds) might be in the form of acorns. This is certainly possible, although (with the exception of olive wood beads from Palestine) most wooden rosary beads in modern times don't seem to be made from anything special -- often just some nameless inexpensive wood, sometimes ebony or rosewood.

The acorns could also be a reference to the original vision of Fatima, where -- if I'm remembering correctly -- children saw the Virgin Mary in the top of a small oak tree.

However none of this explains the presence of acorn-shaped beads in rosaries made before 1917, the date of the visions at Fatima. In particular, it doesn't explain Balthasar's acorns, a portrait from the 1500s showing a rosary with just such beads.

I'm still looking for clues.

In the meantime, it would also be nice to find some modern wooden acorn-shaped beads to make a reproduction of Balthasar's beads, but I don't seem to find those either. They don't look in the painting as though they are particularly finely carved, and the one modern set of beads I've seen that resembled them were also rather crudely carved (I assume they are "folk art"). Unfortunately I'm no woodcarver or I'd try making some.

Perhaps my erratic "finder's luck" will kick in. I began looking for flat disk-shaped beads several years ago in order to make reproductions of a couple of intriguing historical rosaries that use disk-shaped counters rather than round beads. I looked in vain for about three years: then suddenly "doughnut" shaped flat round beads became popular, and are now quite common in bead stores and catalogs -- semiprecious stone, wood, bone, glass and just about any other material. Maybe two or three years from now, acorns will suddenly become popular -- probably just as I've learned how to carve wood. :)

Beads à la mode

Inspired by some of the unusual bead choices made by the students I mentioned awhile back who made rosaries in art class, I occasionally go looking to see whether anyone is making any really creative modern rosaries. Certainly Rosary Workshop, one of my favorite places to buy supplies, has some fine examples such as this one:



Historically, rosaries have tended to follow the fashions in jewelry of the time when they are made, and I have indeed found a few rosaries that are quite modern looking. But they seem to be pretty thin on the ground. Looking at my frequent hunting ground, eBay, there seem to be only half a dozen people doing anything that really looks contemporary.



From what I've seen, these modern-looking rosaries don't seem to sell quite as well as more traditional-looking ones. A little arithmetic on a sample of conventional glass rosaries tells me that about a third of the ones featured on eBay will sell, in any given week. For rosaries that look "contemporary," it's more like one out of four, though it varies.



What seems to sell the best is to take beads that are a little unusual -- barrel shapes, teardrops, cubes, bright colors -- and to make them into a rosary that's constructed in the conventional way, perhaps spending a bit more money to get a good quality, modern-looking cross and medals. Some of these sell as well as traditional rosaries.



Pricing is also important. A lot of eBay is about "collectibles," and people seem willing to pay quite a bit more for a rosary with "history," perhaps one that is very worn, has unusual medals or has some personal history attached. But new rosaries priced over about $25 seem to sell very slowly, and those in the $15 range do much better. (Of course the drawback to this is that the rosary maker gets very little money for the time they put in.)

Voldemort II

As I mentioned a week or so ago, some of the small ivory sculptures I've been running across remind me of the character Voldemort in the Harry Potter books -- whose name, incidentally, contains the Latin root "mort" (death).



Usually these little ivory sculptures -- called "Memento Moris" -- have a living person's face on one side and a grinning skull on the other. Most of the ones I've seen have some arrangement for stringing as pendants -- either an attached ring at the top or a vertical hole bored through them.

(Here's a closeup of the skull side of the example above.)



I don't have a lot of data on how these were actually used or worn -- they are almost always described as components of a rosary or paternoster, but I haven't seen any pictorial or documentary evidence of them being used that way. (Rosaries like the one in my first post are usually reconstructions.) I would be unsurprised to see them on, for instance, a watch chain or somewhere else that a small hanging decorative object would be used. These remind me strongly of the Japanese netsuke, similar little sculptures that have become a "hot" collectible art form.

Like any other expensive little accessory, these were probably worn as much to show off one's wealth and good taste as for any other reason. However they do have a serious spiritual purpose: as their name indicates, these are reminders that death comes to everyone ("memento mori" = "remember death") and that since it may be unexpected and sudden, being prepared for it spiritually is a good thing.

(Note that the left-hand one of the three below does not actually have a skull -- it has a man's face on one side and a woman's on the other. This makes me wonder whether some of these faces may be actual portraits of the owners rather than generic faces.)

I also suspect that, in the days before today's mass media, these gruesome little pieces catered to the same macabre taste as the popular "dance of death" murals -- the most popular one was in Paris -- and paintings and engravings showing a skeletal Death taking the hand of bishops, aristocrats, nuns, and ordinary people. Perhaps it's the same taste that leads modern people to watch vampire movies :)

(I've noticed worms and other creepy-crawlies on the "skull" side of several of these sculptures. This especially gruesome example has them on the "face" side as well. Eeeeeeeuuuuuuwwwwww!)

Posts in this series:

Death's head devotions
Skully bits
Skulls: the inside story
Skulls: the inside story, part 2
Skulls: the inside story, part 3
Voldemort
Voldemort, part 2
A skull of one's own
Goth
More living color