Paternosters

A blessed Christmas

2010-12-23T13:38:00.000-08:00

I haven't been posting much this year, but I can't let Christmas go by without a Christmas card. Especially since I've discovered the painter Gerard David (1460?-1523), who created a number of wonderful pictures that just happen to have paternosters or rosaries in them.

Here is yet another picture of the Virgin Mary, the Infant Jesus and a string of paternoster or rosary beads.

In this case, we can't tell as much about the beads as I would like because the only photo of this I could find online is a small one from the Museo Castagnino in Mar del Plata, Argentina, where the painting resides. The Museo Castagnino is a city museum named for local painter Juan Carlos Castagnino, housed in a delightfully turreted Art Nouveau mansion in what looks like the middle of downtown.

Here, as often elsewhere, the Virgin is dressed in a blue gown and red mantle. Most of what we see is the red mantle, which might explain why the beads shown are not painted in red, the color most often seen in such portraits of the Virgin with beads.

I can't tell from the painting whether we are looking at a long loop of beads with a tassel at the bottom, or whether this is a straight string with two tassels that just happen to be lying right next to each other. Either is interesting, but I would be happy if it was the latter, since it would support my theory that a long straight string is a possible, though not common, type of paternoster for women (assuming that the beads here are supposed to belong to the Virgin, not the Infant).

I can count approximately 32 beads in what we can see here, and the space hidden behind the Infant's hand and leg (and darling little toes) has room for about another 20 or so. I would guess this is intended to represent a string of 50 Aves and five Pater beads, one of which is visible just above the tassel(s) at the bottom.

The Ave beads seem to be a sort of gold color, but what I can see of the highlights and interior details (which is not much) suggest that they may be transparent, perhaps representing amber. I've seen another painting of the Virgin and Child with amber-like beads in the Isenheim altarpiece.

The Pater beads occur after every 10th Ave, as expected. They are more or less light-gray smudges in this image if you look at it up close, but I would guess that they might be intended as silver.

The Virgin and Child with beads seems to be a classic theme, and I always find it delightful, however anachronistic it is. It's an image -- like the images of the Virgin "in humility" that show her sitting on the ground -- that encouraged people, in the time when it was painted, to think of Mary and the Infant as human, warm and accessible, rather than majestic and distant. And Christmas is a celebration of exactly that: of a Christ as human as we are.

May peace be on all of us, and on this flawed but still beautiful world. Merry Christmas.

Previous Christmas posts:
Christmas 2005
Christmas 2006
Christmas 2007
Christmas 2008
Christmas 2009

Zooming at the Prado

2010-08-08T12:00:00.000-07:00

This article is a love letter to the Prado.

More and more museums are putting large parts of their collections online. This is especially helpful for the things I research, because there are so few surviving rosaries from before 1700 or so that most museums have only one or two examples, if any. The other major source of information museums have on historical rosary beads is period drawings and paintings, so I'm very grateful to be able to see more of what they've got.

I am especially pleased when the museum has spent the additional money to have their online collection well indexed. Indexing is an often invisible feature that is extremely helpful to scholars. Nothing is more frustrating than to sit in front of a museum's Search page trying one term after another -- the artist's name, his nicknames in various languages, the name of the person in the portrait -- in search of a painting that you KNOW the museum must have. I've mentioned the importance of good indexing before when I wrote about the photo archives at REALonline -- which are pretty well indexed -- and at Bildindex.de, which are definitely NOT.

When I discover a new online collection, the first thing I do is a search on "rosary," and while that probably doesn't retrieve everything I would want to see, it's especially gratifying when it turns up things I hadn't seen and was not expecting. A couple of references in the background reading I was doing about La Divina Pastora sent me to the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, and especially to the online photo gallery.

The last time I looked at the Prado site, there were very few paintings online, and the views were small. I can't see much in a 300-pixel-wide image. Rosary beads by their nature tend to be small compared to the people in the painting, and at that size, even if someone is holding beads, I can barely see that they exist. I often can't even count how many beads are showing, and it's next to impossible to see how the painter or artist has depicted the beads -- shape, highlights, surface decoration, how they are strung and other details.

Now the Prado has Zoom. For about 1,000 items in their collection, you can now not only see a good image of the entire painting, you can zoom in on details. In portraits especially, I can often zoom in close enough to practically count the person's eyelashes. More relevant to this discussion, I can see every brush stroke that went into the depiction of beads that are being worn or held by someone in the painting.

For instance, there are two portraits that I've mentioned elsewhere -- that of Federico Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, shown above, and which I referred to here (he's wearing a rosary around his neck) and the image of Philip II holding a rosary (discussed here and shown below).

Not only can I zoom in on the beads in both these portraits, the overall images of these paintings are much better than the reproductions I'd seen previously. Both are rather dark paintings, and reproductions of them tend to turn both the clothing and the backgrounds black. The museum's online images have much better contrast: the backgrounds appear as subtly shaded browns and grays, and you can see that Mr. Gonzaga's doublet is actually a very nice shade of dark blue. (Philip, of course, is still wearing black, as he nearly always does.)

Here's how it works. When you go to a painting's main page in the Prado online gallery, you see a small image, a list of relevant facts about it (not always complete), and a few paragraphs of discussion. There's usually a bit of discussion about the subject of the painting, some basic information about the painter, and a short outline of the history of this particular painting. At present, most of the pages I've seen have the painting's title, reference number, artist's name, date, and measurements, and a note whether it's currently on display. Missing in some cases are information in the data fields for technique and support (f.ex. oils on canvas), school of artists and the painting's theme. I'm glad they didn't wait to post these images until all that was filled in, though, as it's usually information available elsewhere.

Below each painting are two icons. Clicking on either one takes you to a larger image with the same icons. The magnifying glass icon on the right is for "Zoom 2."

If you click on this icon, it takes you to a screen with a scale at the bottom: grab the little dark button on the scale and slide it to the right to zoom in on details. Hovering over the painting turns the cursor to a pointing finger, which you can use to move the painting up, down and sideways to center the detail you're looking for. Click on your browser's Back button to get out of this zoom mode.

The rectangular icon below the painting on the left is for "Zoom 1." If you click on this icon, then click on the painting itself, you get a new window with an "alta resolucion" (high resolution) image of the entire painting. I find this absolutely amazing, because these images are very large, 1 megabyte or more, equivalent to the highest resolution you can see in Zoom 2. These images are easily downloaded for personal research purposes. (It's important to read the legal information linked from the bottom of the page to see what you can and cannot do with these images.)

No system is perfect, and I did find that for some paintings the medium setting is about as far as you can go in magnifying a painting to see details well. Beyond that you run across the limitations of the original photo that was taken of the painting, as with this detail, where you can easily see the "noise" generated by compressing a large image to fit into a Web-compatible format.

So what can I see about these rosary beads that I couldn't see before?

Federico Gonzaga's beads were very difficult to see against the dark background and his dark doublet. Now I can see them clearly enough to count them, to make some educated guesses about the materials they are made of, and to see the arrangement of beads and cross in the center front.

I think the Ave beads here are probably supposed to be jet: they are round, black, have a highlight indicating they are smooth and polished, but don't look at all transparent. They are arranged in nice groups of ten. Judging by how many we can see and how many are probably concealed behind Mr. Gonzaga's head, there are probably five decades. Comparing them with the width of his fingers, they look to be about 10 to 12mm in diameter.

The Pater beads are probably gold (most likely gilded silver), round, and only a little larger than the Ave beads -- which is interesting: Paters are often bigger than this, relative to the Aves. But the difference in material would no doubt be enough that you could easily tell them from the Aves by feel, especially since jet is warm to the touch and metal is not. Not much detail is visible; looking at the shape and placement of the highlights, I'd guess they are probably hollow with a horizontal seam and may be fluted.

Also interesting is the arrangement of beads at center front where the loop joins. Unusually for 1529, there are three extra beads below the joining of the loop, followed by another gold Pater bead, and suspended from the end of this short chain of beads is something that appears to be a cross. Not a lot of detail is visible, but it looks like a plain, dark colored Latin cross, possibly jet, about the length of two Ave beads. Above the short chain you can see two Pater beads side by side, one belonging to the decade of Ave beads on each side. In 19th and 20th century rosaries both of these Paters are generally replaced by a flat medal.

Philip II's beads are more nondescript, but we can get a much better view of their size and color. I would guess these are supposed to be gold: they're the right color, although the highlights make them look somewhat dull-surfaced rather than shiny as I'd expect. They are also a little browner in color than the Golden Fleece Philip is wearing around his neck, so they might in fact be something other than gold, though I can't think of anything else quite that color. They aren't transparent enough or yellow-orange enough to be amber. These are bigger than Mr. Gonzaga's beads, perhaps in the 16mm to 18mm range. All we see in this case is plain round beads with no visible Paters or ornaments, and we can't see enough of the string to tell how they are put together.

I'm very thankful to the Prado, the National Gallery in London, and other museums that now have excellent Zoom features. Their generosity in sharing these images is extremely helpful for anyone trying to do research who is not able to go see everything in person -- much as I'd like to!

Rosary or not: gauds and groups

2010-08-01T12:00:00.000-07:00

part 4 of a series

As I mentioned earlier, the first essential of doing research on rosaries and paternosters is to be able to identify paternoster beads when we see them. Besides the "people clues" — who is wearing or holding the beads and how — some clues come from the beads themselves.

I've been looking at some portraits of women with beads around the neck that I'm pretty sure are decorative necklaces and not rosaries. But then I ran across the painting below. It's called "The Magdalen Weeping," and was painted about 1525 in the Workshop of the "Master of the Magdalen Legend." It's now in the National Gallery, London.

(I must digress here to praise the National Gallery for their new website, with its quite remarkable zoom viewer. A few years ago all they had on the site was one small image of each painting. The zoom viewer is a major improvement, and a boon to anyone who needs to see small details without having to cross a large ocean.)

Here's a closeup. As always, click on the picture for a larger view:

A very good clue that something is a rosary is the presence of gauds (marker beads) at regular intervals on a single string of beads, with smaller beads between. The painter may or may not reproduce exactly how many beads are in each interval, but my sense is that the presence of larger, contrasting colored beads like this is probably intended as a signal that this element of the painting represents a rosary. So far, I have not seen anything that couldn't be a rosary that has this feature.

An additional clue in Saint Mary Magdalen's necklace is that it has a cross hanging from it. This by itself isn't definitive: medieval necklaces can also have crosses. And if you've been reading this blog for awhile, you will have seen that medieval and Renaissance rosaries didn't always have crosses, by any means: they could end with a medal, a tassel, or just be a continuous loop with no defined end point. But coupled with the gauds, this makes me even more inclined to think that this is a rosary.

In many paintings we can see enough of the beads to tell that they are definitely in groups of ten. While there were probably other devotional practices that used beads in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the "decade" style of rosary devotion was overwhelmingly the most popular and easily recognized. This is an additional factor reinforcing the message that this is intended to signify a rosary, and perhaps a clue that the artist was attempting to paint literally what he saw.

Interestingly, the bead numbers are less than clear in the Magdalen painting. If you look closely at the detail, the beads toward the back of her neck become rather vague. There might be another clear gaud (these are probably intended to be rock crystal) on the lower of the two strands after the tenth bead (counting backward from the gaud close to the cross) but the painting is rather muddled in this area.

I've also seen a number of paintings where the beads are in groups of approximately ten — nine or eleven are fairly common, and sometimes eight or twelve. If several groups are visible, they will very often have different numbers. This leads me to think that the artist is being less than perfectly literal, but that a rosary is probably still the intended meaning.

It becomes more problematic when the beads are in regular groups of less than ten. My working hypothesis is that if there are gauds at regular intervals, a rosary is probably the intended meaning. But there are cases where I'm not sure what to think. For instance, there is this: a detail from a portrait of about 1585 of the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia by the workshop of Alonso de Sánchez Coello. The Infanta is pictured with her dwarf, Magdalena Ruiz, who is wearing beads around her neck. (This portrait is in the Museo del Prado, Madrid — which has another very nice zoom viewer on their website.)

The beads are in regular groupings, but the groups are only three beads. There is a cross hanging from the beads. Rosary or not? I've debated about this one. I'm inclined to think it is: the regular groups with gauds and the cross strongly suggest it — especially since the cross is not hanging neatly in the bottom center as I think it would if this was a decorative necklace with a cross pendant. This has more the air of a familiar string of beads flung casually around Magdalena's neck because she has her hands full (with a couple of playful monkeys). The cross also looks like a type common to rosaries: compare the sketches in the Book of Guaman Poma.

My working hypothesis is that groups of "known" numbers are a clue that something is a rosary, but other groupings — depending on what other clues are present — are not necessarily a signal that this is not a rosary. No doubt this is my bias showing. I study rosaries, so I may be inclined to see them everywhere. But I would rather think that my experience with the styles and appearance of medieval and Renaissance rosaries may be leading me to point out rosaries in paintings where their significance has previously been missed.

Previous posts in this series:

Part 1: Rosary or not?
Part 2: From a Spanish galleon
Par 3: Rosary or not: the people factor

Oxolyte

2010-07-26T12:00:00.000-07:00

WALL ROSARIES, PART IV

In the last article, I showed a lot of pictures of a relatively common type of wall rosary that is made of some sort of ivory-colored material. Until recently I hadn't ever seen one of these in person, and on eBay they are described in wildly varying terminology, so I deduced that most of the people putting these up for sale have no idea what they're made of either.

A frequent guess is bone or ivory. But bone and ivory both have a "grain" of faint vertical stripes -- it's clearer in bone than in ivory. This doesn't, even when a fairly large smooth surface is exposed.

When you actually have it in your hand, this material is also harder and much heavier than bone. A sharp knife doesn't scratch it. On the Mohs scale of mineral hardness (where talc is 1 and a diamond is 10), bone or ivory has a hardness of about 3 to 5, while a steel knife is about 6, so the fact that a knife won't scratch it demonstrates that this material isn't likely to be bone or ivory.

Also, if this material were bone, that would be detectable by a simple burn test. (I bought a broken rosary of this type for tests, so I wouldn't feel bad about ruining a bead or two.) When held to a flame, bone will scorch, but it usually doesn't show a flame -- or if it does, when you remove it from the heat source the flame goes out by itself. The smell of burning bone is also quite distinctive: it's the smell of a dentist's office where someone has been drilling teeth. Bone scorches under the surface as well as on it -- if you rub off the black part, it's brown underneath.

This rosary material, on the other hand, not only shows a flame, it keeps on burning after you remove it from the heat -- you have to actively extinguish it. The surface turns black, and when it flakes off, the part just underneath the surface is completely unscorched, but soft like taffy. And it gives off a strong acrid smell like burning plastic. (This is a hint.)

This material is indeed at least partly plastic -- or "resin," as plastic is often politely called -- but why is it so heavy? A bit of Internet research reveals that some of these rosaries are labeled as being made from "Oxolyte." This turns out to be the key.

There is, as I discovered, a whole class of modern compounds that consist of stone dust with some sort of plastic (resin) binder. Oxolyte is the trademarked name for a particular compound that includes marble dust. There are other variations, which may use marble, limestone or alabaster dust (rarely quartz) as their stone component. These may be called bonded or cultured marble, sculptstone, thermostone, alabasterite or hydrostone. Most of them are from 75% to as much as 90% stone, which is why they are so heavy and hard. They are used for all sorts of ornamental plaques, statues, picture frames, stepping stones and other ornaments, especially for outdoor use since they are fairly weather-resistant. [1]

These materials can be carved, but their big advantage is that they can be cast in molds, which means a lot of copies of the same thing can be turned out very quickly. Well-made objects that have been cast are often touched up and smoothed, so there may or may not be visible "mold marks" that show where the joints of the mold were. But there's one sign that these objects were indeed cast in molds that is much harder to eradicate -- and the makers often don't bother, especially on surfaces not intended to be seen. Here's the back of the cross of the rosary I bought, and a closeup of the top of one of the beads:

See those round depressions, shaped like half of a small sphere?

Bubbles. From when the casting material didn't completely fill the mold.

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[1] Many thanks to R.V. Dietrich, Professor Emeritus, Central Michigan University for this information.

More off the wall

2010-07-18T12:00:00.001-07:00

WALL ROSARIES, PART III

As I mentioned in Part I, I see a lot of wall rosaries for sale that are made of some sort of ivory-colored (sometimes white, gray or yellowish) material.*

This type of wall rosary is pretty readily recognizable. About three-quarters of the examples of this type I see look like this one:

These rosaries are invariably constructed chain-style with metal links through each bead. The beads are more or less inverted-pyramid shape, with images on four sides. Often the designs on the examples I see are blurry; sometimes they're hard to identify -- I have the feeling they may not have been all that well made in the first place. But when I can tell what they are, the common ones on the rosaries with pyramid-shaped beads are the face of Christ and the face of Mary. Many if not all of them have Mary on two opposite sides and Christ on the other two. On other variations of this type of rosary (discussed below) I've seen similar faces, plus images of visions of Mary (standing on something with kneeling children in front), of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, of St. Anthony, and of (I think) Our Lady of Mount Carmel. The designs are "antiqued" with brown or black pigment to bring out the detail.

I will say again that there are a whole lot of these out there. These rosaries are still being made and sold new, either imported by Catholic gift shops or directly from Italian sources like RomeGiftShop.com (wallrosaries.com gets you there too). And at any given moment there are likely to be two or three of these rosaries for sale on eBay. But just as with other wall rosaries, people who run into one of these have almost always never seen one before and have no idea what they are.

Since these are assembled from parts, it's not surprising to see some mixing and matching with different styles of central medallions and crucifixes. The most common type of crucifix is this one:

(See the engraved asterisks all over the background of this? If you're old enough, you may remember this motif as a very popular one in early 1960s "modern" decor.)

Other styles I've also seen:

The commonest center element is this one, although I've seen a number of different plaques and figures:

But I won't bore you with every possible variation.

I've seen just a few photos of another version, with beads that are flattened on two sides. This example is a rosary specifically in memory of Pope John XXIII. Here's the centerpiece:

It's not a very good photo. I have an even less good image of the faces of these beads -- which have what is clearly John XXIII's face on the flat sides, as you can tell by comparing them to the center medallion, although the beads in the photo are very worn. The beads also have designs molded onto their edges, which are hard to see and identify.

I suspect, though I don't know for sure, that rosaries of this type may also have been made to commemorate Pope Pius XII -- I have seen one privately owned example that seems to have a different face on it than the John XXIII one, but is otherwise extremely similar. The face on that one is a close match for the profiles I've seen of Pius XII (pope 1939-1958), which would make sense, since these rosaries seem to have been most popular in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

I'm actually re-considering my previous idea that wall rosaries were seldom used for prayer, because the images on these seem so often to be worn looking. Either they were used and handled a lot, or perhaps the material is not very durable. This also makes me think that perhaps some of these rosaries were displayed draped tastefully over tables or other furniture where they were touched more frequently, rather than hung on walls. If anyone has better photos of beads like this, or more information, I'd love to hear about it.

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*(I was going to be all mean and make you wait for my conclusion about what these are -- and in the next article I'll tell you about the common wrong guesses. But for now, I will offer the key words: alabasterite or oxolyte. Full story next time.)

Wood wall rosaries

2010-07-11T12:00:00.000-07:00

wall rosaries, part II

Probably the most common material for modern wall rosaries is wood. It's quite a practical choice, since it's light in weight, so it's easy to make a rosary with big impressive-looking beads that doesn't require wall anchors or other heavy hardware if you actually want to hang it on a wall.

As I mentioned in the first of this series, most wall rosaries seem to be configured like the standard modern rosary: five decades with marker beads, plus a short string of a marker, three smaller beads and another marker above the cross at the end. But there are quite a number of different styles of beads.

First, I did find a couple of photos that show ways in which such a "wall rosary" can be hung. Some of them actually come with a wooden hanger, like this one:

This other picture from a recent eBay auction amuses me, because it illustrates the rather makeshift way I think some wall rosaries may be displayed. On the other hand, perhaps it was just arranged this way to be at convenient photo height.

The simplest type of wall rosary has plain round beads. These unvarnished beads are particularly nice ones.

Plain round beads may also be varnished. The lighter colored ones here are olive wood from the Holy Land. This particular style has beads that aren't as big as the others pictured; they're only about half an inch in diameter. It seems to be much easier to get olive wood beads from the Holy Land now than it was a few years ago when I was looking for them: admittedly it's hard to run any business during a state of active war.

I also see a lot of round beads that are cut lengthwise to the wood grain and finished to bring out the striped appearance of the grain.

There's a particular type of wood-bead wall rosary that seems to be especially popular in South America: it has a distinctively shaped cross. The wood here looks to me rather like palm wood. (As always, click on the photos to get a larger view.)

I used to see more wooden wall rosaries like this next one, whose beads appear to be cut from tree branches. These are out of fashion now and harder to find -- the usual wall-rosary suppliers seem to have discontinued them.

Oval beads are found as well as round ones, as in this next example. These often have particularly long, thin crucifixes on them. They look rather elegant and streamlined.

I've also seen a style that has rectangular, faceted beads, often with a very dark finish.

By far the most common and interesting type of wall rosary is one with decorated beads. The ones below all belong to a common "family" of decoration, where the primary motif is circles. You also see this style of decoration in much smaller rosary beads.

I find these beads interesting because they are all decorated using basically the same method. They are often listed as being "hand carved," but this is only partially true. I am reasonably sure that what's being used to decorate them is a small machine called a "rose engine," which was first invented in Germany in the early 1500s. When Holbein was sent to paint a miniature of Anne of Cleves in 1539, a rose-turned case was made to house the picture.

As one of my correspondents on the Paternosters mailing list explained, "These large round early 20th C wooden beads are formed into spheres on a lathe, and then the overlapping circle-dot (or Eye) designs are done using a revolving cutter, against which the beads are held by hand and cut section by section. The result somewhat resembles the pattern of a rosebud. The circles are often spaced out in a slightly random, hit-and-miss sort of way."

She adds, "This technique of carving and decorating beads I always associate with Christian rosaries, although in fact there are lots of wooden beads and some bone like this that also were made in China in around the 1900’s-1920s, and they weren't associated with crucifixes. It might be interesting to discover whether the stuff made in China was a result of Christian missionary activity or not. Or whether perhaps the method of carving came to Europe from China."

(By the way, here is a Google Books link to a description of a rose-turning engine from an 1853 edition of the Mechanic's Magazine. I also found an online gallery of some spectacular ornamental turnings, some of which were done with a rose engine. A Google search on "rose turning"+engine will get you a few more examples, although disappointingly few are illustrated.)

Wall rosaries with rose-turned carved wooden beads seem actually to be the single most common type of wooden wall rosary you'll find on eBay and similar sites. I suspect this is because in the late 19th and early 20th century they were mass-produced in vast quantities as souvenirs for just about every notable pilgrimage site connected with the Virgin Mary. In the USA, the most common are those coming from St. Anne de Beaupré in Quebec, but I've also seen examples from Lourdes, from Buglose in the Pyrenees, and from Laghet on the Côte d'Azur. They seem to be most common in France.

Many of these rosaries have inscriptions on the heart-shaped medallions that draw the ends of the loop together, and the crucifixes of these are often decorated as well. My Paternosters correspondent points out that these designs are not carved, but stamped into the soft surface of the wood. This one is stamped "Souvenir de ND de Laghet" (ND standing for Notre-Dame). The other side says "Coeur Immaculé de Marie protege nous" ("Immaculate Heart of Mary protect us").

Like the other wall rosaries, people who have these for sale on eBay often have no idea what they are. I've bought a few for as little as $5. Since the beads are of a type known from the Renaissance, they make good material for historical reproductions, and I don't mind taking apart a modern rosary for its beads if some of the beads of a rosary like this have been damaged (which is often the case).

I've also seen these rosaries offered for as much as $500 -- generally with no takers at that price. These rosaries are still being produced and are generally in the $40-$50 range new. Unless an example has a particularly interesting history, or unless its age can be documented (which is difficult, as these beads are of a style that doesn't change much) I'm always a bit sad to see them sold for much more than they're worth.

What not to do...

2010-06-29T12:00:00.000-07:00

This particular set of pretty pictures is pretty much about what NOT to do when making medieval-style rosaries.

Or at least, it's about some of the gift rosaries I've made that have some feature or other that is certainly not documentable as medieval, in my current state of knowledge.

First, you should ignore the elephant on this next set of beads: it's there because the recipient likes elephants. ;)

Other than the elephant, this is an attempt to construct a set of beads that might be appropriate for a Viking. This isn't quite as lunatic as it sounds: a good many of the Vikings did become Christians. However the peak centuries of what are popularly called "the Vikings" were a couple of hundred years before Christian prayer beads became really popular, so these are probably an anachronism. (And so is the style of the elephant pendant.)

I was inspired to create these by the marker beads, which are some sort of low-grade carnelian with silver caps. The end bead is a larger carved wood bead with more or less matching caps, and the pendant is a "knotwork" cross (though it doesn't look much like actual Norse or Irish knotwork). The small beads are carnelian.

This next set of beads has two features I wouldn't recommend if you're trying to make a set of documentably medieval beads. As I've mentioned before, I don't think I've seen any clear examples of paternoster or rosary beads with Ave beads (the small ones) of two colors alternating. I certainly haven't seen any actual surviving ones that are that way. I wrote a bit more about the doubtful evidence from paintings and woodcuts in my post on the Cabbage-Noster.

The other feature I don't recommend here is the faceted marker beads. While the carving and faceting of beads by hand was certainly possible in the Middle Ages, it was expensive, and not something that was normally done to glass beads: I don't think faceted glass beads became really common until machines were invented to do it rapidly and in quantity. I also don't think this particular style of faceting is at all likely for medieval beads. I bought these black faceted beads years ago and am finally using up the last of them.

Note: if you're wondering about the funny-looking background of some of these, I photograph most beads on my scanner, using a piece of synthetic white "fur" as the background. I'm in too much of a hurry at the moment to do the meticulous retouching to eliminate the shadows of the "fur.")

My third example today is of something that I actually think is plausible, though I can't prove it. This rosary was made for someone who wanted something in the style of "Henry VIII before the break with Rome." The flat, rose-shaped brass beads were something I ran across in a bead catalog, and I quite like them. The rose symbolism is quite appropriate for that period in English history -- a heraldic badge used by Henry VIII and his first wife Catharine of Aragon was a round symbol made from half a rose (for Henry) and half a pomegranate (for Catherine). We know that marker beads for rosaries were made in all sorts of shapes, some of which may also have heraldic significance, and we can be fairly sure that some marker beads were flat rather than round, so I was quite pleased to find these. Of course aristocratic beads like these would more likely have had actual gold markers; I don't know to what extent gold jewelry was imitated in brass in the Renaissance.

I'm much more dubious about the leaves I added to the same rose-shaped marker beads in the next rosary. We do know that at times the gauds (marker beads) were set off from the other beads by what might be called "spacers," smaller beads that are mostly decorative and don't "count" as part of the beads used for prayer. (Germans call them "Zwischenperlen," which I still think is a lovely word.) I was given these little leaf beads (also brass) as a gift, and my modern taste says they set off the rose beads nicely. But I can't document anything like this. All the Zwischenperlen I have seen in historical beads are little round, oval or flattened oval beads.

Like King René of Anjou (1409-1480) I make rosaries as a hobby. Unlike René, however, I try to make mine in the style of a historical period quite different from my own. ;) It's an interesting exercise, but it almost always means making some compromises with history, since (for one thing) for the most part we don't have exactly the same materials people in the Middle Ages had to work with. The round glass beads I use so often, for instance, are made by pressing -- a 19th century invention -- rather than being individually hand-wound on a mandrel. And we are not medieval people ourselves, so what seemed appropriate or attractive to them may or may not seem that way to us -- and vice versa.

These particular sets of beads show stronger tendencies than (I hope) most of what I make to "bend" the unwritten rules of medieval style in order to produce something I thought the recipients of the gifts would like. They're still fun, and making medieval rosaries as gifts is an incentive to research and debate the issues that come up in making them.

Off the wall

2010-06-20T12:00:00.001-07:00

wall rosaries part I

Back in the very beginning of this blog I wrote an article called Up against the wall, which discussed very large rosaries, made for hanging on the wall. I mentioned wall rosaries again recently, and I've been collecting images for a while so I could write more about them.

The purpose of a wall rosary is to decorate a room and to serve as an expression of faith. It may be hung on a wall (though I'm not always clear on exactly how you're supposed to do this -- picture hooks?), or draped gracefully over a table or other piece of furniture. I don't get the impression that wall rosaries are actually used for prayer very often.

Wall rosaries tend to have beads anywhere from half an inch to an inch or so in diameter. The beads can be plain or with some sort of design or image on them. They can be connected by wire loops or strung on strings. The only thing they have in common is their size, although most of them are also arranged in the same pattern as a normal 20th century rosary: five groups of ten beads each, and an extra short string of beads above the crucifix.

When people don't recognize a wall rosary, they often assume that such a large rosary must be a "belt rosary" -- the sort of thing a monk or priest would wear attached to the belt over their religious habit. It's true that many monks, friars and nuns in traditional habits do wear a conspicuous rosary: this is a tradition that seems to have become especially popular in the 19th and early 20th century, with the upsurge in devotion to the Virgin Mary.

But if you actually look at these "belt rosaries," while they may have beads somewhat bigger than your ordinary pocket rosary, they are usually not that big. The standard size of beads for most modern rosaries is about 6 millimeters. Belt rosaries may be in the 10mm to 12mm range, but that's still half an inch or less. It's not at all unusual to find wall rosaries with beads over an inch, and this explanation doesn't account for those.

Another theory people come up with is that these big rosaries are somehow "pentitential." With (I suppose) vague memories of Scrooge's ghost dragging heavy, clanking chains, people suppose that great sinners must have been saddled with giant (clanking? ;) rosaries as some sort of badge of shame. It's an entertaining image, but doesn't have any basis in fact that I know of. (See This rosary is shot for another instance of this idea.)

The two most common sorts of wall rosary have beads respectively of wood and of a whitish synthetic compound that at first glance looks somewhat like ivory. Here's a common type of wooden wall rosary:

The ivory-colored synthetic rosaries tend to look like this, although there are a number of slightly different styles:

The artwork on these last is often in a rather striking 1960s artistic style -- I suspect the 1960s are when these began to be manufactured in quantity.

Both the wooden versions and this version are still being made and sold today, for instance at Rome Gift Shop and Italianrosaries.com. These rosaries tend to sell for prices in the range of $40 to $60, a fact I wish that more eBay sellers knew. (I recently saw one for which the seller was asking $500 -- he said he'd bought it for $150.)

I plan to write about both these common types at some point, but for now, here are a few of the less common types I've found.

Until recently there was a website that had a number of different styles using various colors and shapes of large glass beads. That site was down when I last checked, though. I'd imagine a wall rosary made of glass could be quite pretty, but also rather heavy.

A lighter-weight version has beads made of clear hard acrylic plastic with metal decoration.

Glow-in-the-dark plastic rosaries also come in large "wall versions." I have to admit, these are not to my personal taste: the idea of having a large glowing rosary on a wall seems a bit eerie to me. But obviously some people like them.

So far I've only seen one wall rosary made from leather. This is also the only one I've seen that has "beads" that are flat circles rather than round beads -- logical for a wall decoration, I'd think. The seller of this one on eBay said it was purchased about 50 years ago from monks in Florence, Italy.

And I've seen a number of wall rosaries made from various kinds of clay or ceramic, glazed or unglazed. These can be quite attractive in a "folk art" sort of way (I rather like these myself). I'd think that the weight might make them somewhat difficult to hang on a wall, however.

Pretty pictures

2010-06-13T12:00:00.001-07:00

Every so often I make a batch of medieval-style rosaries as gifts for friends or special occasions (and before you ask, no, I'm not making them for sale).

And when I'm busy or in the middle of research for some later posts (as now), sometimes you get a "pretty pictures" post with some chat about how I made each piece and what I find out along the way.

Here is one such post.

This first rosary is the subject of an experiment. It has a braided cord -- in this case, a 3-strand, fairly coarse braid because these beads have big holes and because a 3-strand braid is the only one I can currently do easily without looking at it. I'd like to do more braided cords, because I think they are likely to be more durable than plain silk twist (as I wrote here), but I find them very time-consuming to do.

I also didn't glue or put a crimp bead over the knot as I usually do; instead I took sewing thread and sewed through the knot several times to keep it from unraveling. So this one is a test. It's for someone who's likely to give it some hard wear, and we'll see how it holds up.

The small beads are bone -- about 8mm, since I forgot to photograph this one with a ruler -- and the red beads are glass, part of a necklace I bought from eBay that was supposed to be coral but wasn't. (Glass is heavier and colder than coral to the touch, and often has swirl marks: these beads do, and coral doesn't.)

This next set is smoky quartz (8mm) and the five different colored beads specified in the story from Alanus de Rupe's early rosary manual that I wrote about in Alanus de Lupe and the beads of death ;). Each colored bead has special symbolism.

These next are some beads I threw together quickly as a prize for a tournament -- hence the rather random charms attached. Although it's a well-known Christian symbol, I've never actually seen a fish attached to a historical rosary. I suspect the fish symbol fell out of favor after the early Christian centuries and was revived after the Reformation by Christians seeking to return to their "roots."

The small beads are natural-colored mother-of-pearl, which I really like the look of. I don't know -- and would be interested to know -- whether the rosaries mentioned in historical documents as being made of mother-of-pearl were this natural color or whether they were bleached white as we usually see today.

The markers are carved jasper. I haven't seen anything quite like this five-petaled rose motif as actual historical rosary beads (there's one example of something similar in wood), but depicting rosary beads as roses is very common in woodcuts, paintings and statues. Sometimes the Ave beads in such artwork are plain round beads and the gauds or marker beads are depicted as roses, and we know markers were made in many shapes, so it is at least plausible.

The last one for now is in memory of a friend's favorite saint: Saint Amalberga. I had never heard of her and had to look her up. There are actually three saints by this name, but their legends have become confused. The earliest, Saint Amalberga of Maubeuge (who died in 690) was a relative of Blessed Pepin of Landin; three of her children also became saints (Gudula, Emebert, and Reineldis, the last of whom made a pilgrimage to Rome and whose statue I wrote about here). This Amalberga is said to have crossed a lake to bring the Gospel to the people on the other side, standing on the backs of two helpful sturgeons that appeared for this purpose. (I envision a sort of medieval jet-skis.)

Another Amalberga lived a century or so later. She was a nun and is said to have refused marriage proposals from the Emperor -- either Charles Martel or Charlemagne, depending on which version you read -- and when he tried to drag her away from the altar, he broke her arm, and as a result was stricken with an illness which she later miraculously cured. The legend has her coffin floating away accompanied by fish, so there is something fishy about her too. There was a third Saint Amalberga, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, but she doesn't come along till the twelfth century.

These beads are green glass with mother-of-pearl markers, and I added an end bead of carved jade because I had it lying around and it seemed to go with the color theme. The attachments are another fish (especially appropriate in this case) and a square flat cross.

All of these projects are attempts to construct something that is appropriate as a gift for a particular friend or occasion, but at the same time is more or less plausible as a representation of what medieval rosary beads may have looked like. We're handicapped in trying to do this by the fact that we don't have the same materials available to us and by our incomplete knowledge. But it's still fun and still an interesting and useful exercise.

Rosaries in Peru

2010-06-06T12:00:00.000-07:00

The Book of Guaman Poma

It's difficult to stay on topic while doing research. If you have any natural curiosity at all, you inevitably run across fascinating bits and pieces leading in all sorts of directions, and there's seldom time to follow them up properly. Reading an article about rosaries in the Andes recently led me not only to La Divina Pastora, but to a fascinating and unique book that is now online.

The Book of Guamán Poma is a stinging critique of Spanish colonial rule, written between 1600 and 1615 by a native Peruvian. Guamán or Huamán Poma (his Inca name) converted to Christianity and adopted the name Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala. His 1,189-page book was intended as a letter of protest to King Philip III of Spain but was never sent. The manuscript has been in the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen since at least 1660.

The full title of the book is El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (The First New Chronicle and Good Government -- "corónica" being a mistake for "crónica"). In it he outlines the injustices of colonial rule and proposes a new system of government, which would include drawing on the structures of traditional local government and appointing native Peruvians to many positions of authority. Needless to say, such a system was never implemented.

What inspired him to write such a book was probably a combination of factors. Guamán Poma worked with various Spanish officials as a Quechua translator. He himself was from a noble Inca family and lost all his estates in a series of disastrous lawsuits. In the late 1590s, he apparently became involved as one of a team of scribes and illustrators for Fray Martín de Murúa's Historia general del Piru. This experience seems to have prompted him to begin his own chronicle from a native point of view, which was -- as one might expect -- very different from Murúa's. His illustration of Murúa, in fact, shows him kicking an indigenous woman seated at a loom and is captioned, "The Mercedarian friar Martín de Murúa abuses his parishioners and takes justice into his own hands."

The Royal Danish Library has recently put the entire Book of Guamán Poma online, and it's fascinating. The best starting point is probably the index page, which contains an outline of the book and at the top, controls for viewing and enlarging pages. Each page shows a scanned image from the manuscript and a transliteration of the original text with modern footnotes. The button marked "Amplicación" leads to a much larger image of the original page.

What I immediately noticed, of course, was that many of the nearly 400 drawings in the Book of Guamán Poma show native Peruvians using rosary beads. (After researching historical rosary beads for this long, my eye inevitably goes straight to the beads in any picture!)

Here, for instance, is image #835, which is captioned, ""A Christian married couple of the Andes kneels to pray before an image of Christ crucified."

I was especially struck by this picture since you can "see" the couple saying prayers, indicated by the "speech scrolls" coming out of their mouths. This is an artistic convention that I've seen before in native South and Central American art (nost notably the Maya).

(By the way, I've done some Photoshop work on the images on this page, as you'll see if you compare them to the originals on the Danish Library website. I've lightened them and tried to fade the lettering in the background to make the pictures clearer. The originals all show lettering coming through from the other side of the page, some of them quite strongly.)

I'm not sure whether it's also artistic convention or a reflection of real practice to show people holding their rosaries with the cross upward. The majority of the illustrations that simply show someone holding a rosary have it oriented this way.

Another example (image 775) is captioned,"Exemplary Christians: A local Andean lord, seated on an usnu [Inka ceremonial seat], reads to his wife."

As is common in these pictures, the "lord" is wearing a mixture of native and Spanish style clothing -- note, for instance, his hat, which is almost identical to one worn in a portrait of Philip II of Spain. While the lord's wife is holding her rosary, he is wearing his around his neck, which as I've mentioned before was actually not uncommon in the 16th century.

Another example of mixed clothing is this image (image 806), "The chief local magistrate (alcade mayor), or túqrikuq, of the municipal council in this kingdom."

As you can see, these pictures are actually more or less just pen and ink sketches, so they don't contain a lot of detail and probably can't be relied on to be totally accurate. However it's interesting to see in this one that there is some empty thread between the bead he is holding in his hand and the next group of beads. This suggests -- and it's really no surprise -- that these are beads strung on a thread, and that each bead is moved along the thread by the fingers as its corresponding prayer is said.

A closeup of the next picture (image 808) shows how much or how little we can actually see of these rosaries. Here is "The local magistrate, or camiua, of the crown."

And a detail of the beads he is holding:

Quick though this sketch is, we can clearly see two sizes of beads, the smaller Ave beads and the larger, and more decorated, marker beads or Paters. The lower part of the rosary shows ten Aves on either side, but the top part of the circle has 9 beads visible on one side, 4 on the other, and only space for about another 4 or 5 hidden in the hand. So this probably isn't intended as a literal bead-by-bead rendering.

We can also get a good look at the sketch of the cross. The interesting things here are that it has some sort of bead or knob at the end of each arm, and also that it is equal-armed, instead of the cross with a longer bottom part that we are more used to seeing. There is also no indication of a figure of Christ on the cross -- again not surprising, since most rosaries at and before this date seem to have had plain crosses.

Several other images in the book also show rosaries. Image 837 shows a woman praying (similar to the couple in the first picture). I won't try to give a complete list, but image 757 shows another official holding beads, image 825 shows a royal messenger wearing his beads around his neck (his hands are rather full -- he's carrying a bag over his wrist, a staff and something that looks like a note in one hand, is blowing a horn held in his other hand, has a flag flying from his hat and is accompanied by a dog). Image 828 shows a rosary lying, along with a pen case and inkwell, on a scribe's table, and image 933 shows more people praying, this time holding not only rosaries but also candles about three feet tall. Image 841 shows the Virgin Mary and Saint Peter, the Virgin standing within a giant rosary. Probably my favorite image (because of the funny hats) is image 17, which shows Guaman Poma himself as a young boy (wearing a top hat), his father Martín (wearing a native-style headband) and his mother, the noblewoman Juana, being instructed in the Christian faith by a priest named Martín Ayala (wearing what looks like a teapot on his head -- but it's really a biretta or clerical hat).

La Divina Pastora: Virgin Mary as Shepherdess

2010-05-30T12:00:00.000-07:00

While reading the other day about rosaries in the Andes, I ran across something I hadn't seen before: mention of devotion to the Virgin Mary under the title "La Divina Pastora" (the Divine Shepherdess).

The article I was reading was A Short History of Rosaries in the Andes by Penelope Dransart[1]. She says:

"One of the most prominent attributes of the Rosario [image of the Virgin as Our Lady of the Rosary] is, of course, the rosary, but this feature is also shared in the iconography of a related version, the Virgin of the Shepherds. In this respect, a painting dated 1703, entitled La Divina Pastora (The Divine Shepherdess) in the Museo Nactional del Arte, La Paz, Bolivia, is of interest. In this picture the Virgin is surrounded by sheep which have roses in their mouths and rosaries of black beads hanging over their backs. Alternatively, some of the sheep have the characteristic knotted belt cords which form part of a Franciscan monk's habit draped over their backs. In the background, a lamb wearing a black rosary with a pendant crucifix has a speech scroll emanating from his mouth, bearing the words. 'Ave Maria.'"

I would love to see what this picture looks like, but the La Paz museum doesn't seem to have much of their collection online, and other sources have come up blank so far. I did, however, run across this one, which seems from the description to be along the same lines, although without the black rosaries. This is a modern painting in the "Baroque Colonial" Peruvian style by David Chavez Galdos[2]:

In Spain, devotion to La Divina Pastora appears to have started in Seville, also right around 1700, and may indeed have originated there and been carried quickly to the Americas. Brother Isidore, a Capuchin (Franciscan) priest greatly devoted to Mary, is said to have commissioned a painting of the Virgin as shepherdess from the artistic school of Alonso Miguel de Tovar. There are earlier references to Mary as shepherdess in the writings of Saint John of God, Saint Peter of Alcantara and the visionary Maria de Agreda.

The Spanish Wikipedia article (whose sources include two books on the devotion) recounts that Brother Isidore specified that the Virgin wear a red tunic, a white sheepskin around her waist, and a blue mantle slung across her left shoulder. A shepherd's staff is behind her on the right. In her left arm she holds the Infant Jesus and her right hand reaches toward a sheep taking refuge in her lap. She is surrounded by sheep bearing rose garlands in their mouths.

A little investigating online suggests that devotion to La Divina Pastora spread widely in the early 1700s and is still popular in Spain, Portugal, South America and the Philippines. The connection to roses and the rosary is not always apparent, as in this statue, located in Nava del Rey (Valladolid, Spain) and attributed to the woodcarver Luis Salvador Carmona (1709-1767). There are a number of Brotherhoods or Societies of the Divine Shepherdess in Spain and Portugal.

Variations on this title of Mary include Divina Pastora de las Almas (Divine Shepherdess of Souls), Madre Divina Pastora (Divine Mother Shepherdess) or Madre del Buen Pastor (Mother of the Good Shepherd, since Jesus is often given that title). The images may also vary: Mary is usually wearing a big floppy hat, but she may be shown alone or with the Infant Jesus, with or without a shepherd's crook. She may have a whole flock of sheep or just one or two. The roses are sometimes red on one side and white on the other: this may have connections with earlier rosary images that show groups of white, red and gold roses representing the Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious mysteries of the rosary.

As with other images of Mary -- and as you'll quickly see if you Google images of "La Divina Pastora" -- many decorations can be added to the original statue or painting, including rosaries over Mary's arm, lace and ruffles on her dress (a bit impractical for an actual shepherd!) and a gold crown, either instead of or rather awkwardly perched on top of her hat. The painting above solves the hat + crown problem by having cherubs hold the crown in the air over her head.

The Virgin Mary has a seemingly endless variety of titles in the Christian tradition, each meaning something special in terms of imagery. Roses are a common metaphor for the rosary in other contexts, so it's not surprising to see them here. I'm enjoying roses in bloom where I live right now, so it seems appropriate. Whether sheep will actually eat roses in real life I have no idea!

notes

[1] Dransart, P. 1998. A short history of rosaries in the Andes. In Beads and bead makers: gender, material culture and meaning (ed.) L. Sciama, 129-46. Oxford: Berg.

Beads in bags

2010-05-23T12:00:00.000-07:00

I'm sure I'm not alone in wondering where people kept their paternoster or rosary beads when not using them. As we have seen, sometimes they were worn as part of everyday dress, as routinely as we'd wear a wristwatch or cell phone. But where were they when they were not being worn?

Meredith Harmon on the Paternosters list on Yahoo turned up a painting that answers this question -- at least for one instance. It's a painting of the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary, painted by Gerard David somewhere in the late 1400s. It's now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York: for some reason it doesn't appear anywhere on their website, although the other panel from the same painting, showing the angel, does.

Just visible in the bottom right corner of this painting is a cloth pouch with rosary beads spilling out of it. Here's an enlargement (as always, click on the picture to see a larger view):

The beads are gold-colored but don't look metallic; my guess is that they are supposed to be amber or glass. Just visible above the edge of the pouch in the back is a decorated silver gaud or marker bead of some sort (not much detail is visible), followed by ten smaller beads. The string is dark, probably black. On the other side of the loop we can see nine beads. Both strings run through a round, decorated silver ball at the far left, and it looks like they are knotted together on the far side.

The pouch has two black drawstrings that appear to end in knobs (knots?) and there are matching black tassels at both bottom corners.

It's a bit difficult to estimate the dimensions of the pouch and beads, because they are in the foreground of the painting and the perspective is a bit strange. It looks to me as though the beads are a little smaller in diameter than the Virgin's fingers, perhaps around 10 to 12 millimeters in size. The silver ball is about twice this size. My guess is that it may be a pomander.

Using the bead as a rough unit of measure for the sides of the pouch, the bag looks like it might work out to be about 8 to 9 inches square. That's a bigger pouch than would be needed just for the beads.

Another painting by Gerard David, probably painted around the same time and now at the Detroit Institute of Art, provides a clue. This second Annunciation is a more compact painting, and the Virgin is at a rather different angle, but the bag in the foreground is identical, right down to the folds and wrinkles (except that it's blue this time).

Those who have commented on these paintings suggest that both bags are intended to be book bags. Looking at both paintings, the bags do seem to be about the right size to hold the book that Mary has in front of her in each case.

The earlier Merode altarpiece (also at the Met) by the workshop of Robert Campin has a very similar bag under the book on the table, and here too it looks to be just about the right size to hold the book. This purse also has two drawstrings, and it looks as though one ends in a round, thread-covered button, and the other has a longer string ending in a tassel (though most of it's hidden under a slip of paper). There is a contrasting colored lining and some decoration around the mouth of the bag and down the side seams. This painting and its two wings have all sorts of delightful details in them if you ever get to see them close up -- carpenters' tools in Saint Joseph's shop, a towel with striped borders and fringe, a vase, two keys, and a candlestick, among others.

(The only beads in the Merode altarpiece, however, are held by one of the donors of the painting in the left wing of the tryptych. These are a long straight string of perhaps 100 smallish red beads, with white-headed black tassels on both ends. I have a small picture of this, but I'd love to have a detail shot of the entire string to see if more details are visible.)

So from this evidence, we can suggest that beads, at least some of the time, were in book bags. It does make a certain amount of sense to carry one's devotional beads in the same bag as one's devotional book (which is probably what the pictured books are). And we have some pretty good pictures of what the book bags were like, if we want to create a modern reproduction, to carry our own books, beads, or whatever we like.

Edelsteine: Himmels Schnure

2010-05-17T12:00:00.000-07:00

A book worth breaking my no-book-buying-because-I'm-poor moratorium for doesn't come along every day. But this one definitely qualifies.

I was alerted to this book by Elizabeth Alles from the Paternosters mailing list at Yahoo -- one of the many reasons I've been glad I established that list a few years ago. It has full color photos of more than 500 small and large rosaries of many different types, and as you can see from the cover, the photography is excellent.

The book is available directly from the museum, but if you don't speak German, the online interface is a bit confusing. I'll put some ordering details at the bottom of this post.

I haven't sat down and slogged through all the German yet, but this is a catalog from an exhibition of a very large private collection. There are about 40 pieces dating from before 1600; most of the rest are 17th, 18th and 19th century. This same collection has been exhibited and published elsewhere as well. (There's a smaller 2003 book -- look for the name of the collector, Fredy Bühler.)

The book also includes quite a few rosary-related works of art -- including a picture I've wanted for a long time, a GOOD rendition of the large altarpiece of the Rosary Brotherhood from the Church of St. Andreas in Cologne, Germany. As I discovered when I went there, the painting is very large, mounted high up on a wall, and very difficult to photograph from the floor. Older photos I've seen are mostly very small.

As eye candy, this book is marvellous. But as I mentioned earlier, there are things about it that I find a bit troubling from a scholarly point of view.

Something very characteristic of private collections -- and true of this one -- is that everything is pretty. There are no partial or broken rosaries, no missing or damaged beads. Of course, part of this is a natural tendency for the nice ones to be what gets picked out for the exhibition and the book. But it leads me to wonder whether there are any less-than-perfect specimens in the collection: I, for one, would find them at least as interesting as the ones shown.

I am also disappointed to see only a bare minimum of information about each item -- a date, an assigned place of origin (on what basis it doesn't say), the bead materials (if known), and identification of any medals or other attachments. For the first half of the catalog, there are not even any measurements. In fact, there is nothing I would call discussion on any of the bead entries, including any mention of why the dates were assigned. Rosaries in general are very difficult to date just by looking at them, and the dearth of information is very disappointing.

And as I mentioned in my previous post, some of the reconstructions here bother me.

The first actual beads we encounter in the book, for instance, are these:

The first thing that struck me is that none of these are in the sort of arrangement that I would expect a rosary to be. Granted, we know that not all rosaries, even before 1600, had their Ave (small) beads in multiples of 5 or 10. But if a string is not broken or missing some beads, one would expect the numbers to correspond with some known devotional practice. I have seen little or no evidence of any such practice that would require, for instance, groups of 4 or 6, so I continue to think that fives, tens, and perhaps occasionally sevens are the numbers one ought to expect.

These first three sets of beads in the book are arranged in 6 groups of 4, 5 groups of 4, and 5 groups of 3. The beads on succeeding pages are predominantly in arrangements like 6x8, 3x8, 4x7, and 4x6. Outside of the tenners I discussed in my previous post, there are relatively few 10- or 5-bead groups. I haven't done a statistical analysis, but this looks very much to me as though whatever beads were available have been simply divided into equal parts, a marker inserted between each group, and the whole joined up into a circle. All of the rosaries presented in this book are arranged to look like complete pieces as they stand. I suspect this is misleading.

My second concern is about the way some of the sets are strung. It seems that wherever there is a metal part that has two holes or attachment points, it has been attached to the string of beads at both ends:

In the period artwork I've seen, and in other surviving originals, crosses, images of saints, and medals like these appear as pendants, and the loop at the bottom has a hanging pearl or jewel, as so commonly seen in 16th century and later jewelry. I don't think I've ever seen such a piece attached to the beads at both ends. Looking through the book, it does seem that a few of the pendants have been reconstructed as pendants with hanging pearls, but this only seems to happen when there actually is a surviving pearl.

One other thing struck me as odd. Several of the rosaries, like the one below, are strung not on any kind of fiber (silk is the most common) but on a fine metal chain. As far as I can tell from the photos, this is simply run through the beads as if it were thread. As I mentioned in discussing the Neville rosaries, I suspect this is a modern practice. I don't know exactly when chains fine enough to go through a bead hole became widely available -- I suspect, not until they were able to be made cheaply by machine.

Don't get me wrong here -- this is a very well-produced book, with lots of nice pictures and an amazing collection of medals, crosses, bead types, rosary cases (one shaped like a carrot!), reliquaries, tassels, carved beads and other parts. There are close to 600 rosaries pictured, including some very close closeups in the chapter-head pages and a lot of information about various medals and other pilgrimage souvenirs. (I could wish the rest of the photos were bigger, but I'm probably insatiable in that regard ;)

There are also several disk-rosaries that use bone disks as counters rather than beads -- and one with tin rings, which I'd never seen before. As I mentioned there are numerous illustrations of historical paintings, woodcuts, sculptures and bits of rosary literature, many of which were new to me. It's well worth buying if you are interested in historical religious artifacts.

But it's sad that in many respects it is lacking in the sort of information about the actual pieces shown that would be helpful to someone doing serious research.

ordering information

The link to the ordering page is here. Clicking on "Bestellen" brings up an order form, which is clearly not designed with overseas orders in mind. "Vorname, Familienname" are first and last names. "PLZ" is zip code, "Ort" is city. Since there is no place for "country," I simply put *all* my address information in the "Strasse" line (literally "street"), including street address, city, state and USA. It worked.

Payment is by wire transfer after the book arrives: my copy took about 8 weeks after ordering. An invoice is included with the book. My bank charged me $20 to do the wire transfer; the cost of the book plus shipping was about $55 if I remember correctly.

Fish bones & lily stones

2010-05-09T13:53:00.000-07:00

Because my name is out there on the Internet, I get the occasional question from someone trying to find information about historical rosaries. Sometimes the questions turn out to be quite fascinating, and I learn things I may never have imagined.

One of the most interesting so far was a note I got late last summer from an archaeozoologist -- of all things -- asking about rosaries made of fish bones. She had seen my photo of a large "wall rosary" made of shark vertebrae, which I ran across when it was sold on eBay:

She directed my attention to a painting I'd seen before, the St. Vincent polyptych. And sure enough, when I got a closer look at the "Fisherman's panel," second from left, there was Saint Anthony in the front row, holding something very similar. (The photo is still not very clear, for which I apologize: if anyone has a better one, please say so. As always, you can click on the picture to see a larger view.)

My correspondent in this case was Dr. Sheila Hamilton-Dyer, and she has been working on a medieval excavation at the Icelandic monastery of Skriðuklaustur, where she has found a number of shark vertebrae in the church. (A paper on the faunal remains from Skriðuklaustur is available as a PDF from the Bibliography page on her website.)

Perforated fish vertebrae tentatively identified as rosary beads have been found elsewhere -- for instance, from a 13th or 14th century chapel in Northumberland, and also in Poland. Those bones, however are smaller, and might be from cod or a similar fish.

The shark vertebrae Dr. Hamilton-Dyer found were large -- an inch to an inch and a half in diameter -- and several of them showed wear and discoloration around a central hole, something that might have been produced by a cord running through them. Here's the photo she sent (published with her permission):

Her guess was that these vertebrae might be part of a rosary. They are probably too large for a rosary a person would wear, but might be from a large rosary that would be placed on an altar or statue of Our Lady. She wanted to know if I had heard of such a thing -- other than the modern example from eBay -- and I certainly have.

One of the first articles I wrote on this blog was called Up against the Wall, and it was about the very large "wall rosaries" that you sometimes find for sale. The beads on these are an inch or so in diameter, making them far too big to wear or even carry around very easily. Many eBay sellers have no idea what they are. The prices being asked for them can vary from $5 all the way up to $500 -- and since they cost around $40 new, I certainly hope no one is buying them at that price!

Wall rosaries are, in fact, not at all rare, although many people have never seen one. In the 1950s and 60s, a lot of Catholics decorated their homes with many religious statues, pictures, and other devotional items like these wall rosaries, as a sign of their faith. This is something you see less of nowadays, perhaps because Catholics today feel less like an embattled minority. Wall rosaries are certainly still being made and sold, however, and at any given time there are at least two or three secondhand ones for sale on eBay. I've been collecting photos of more examples because I'd like to write more about some of the different types.

Donating a rosary to decorate a statue or altar within a church is also a very old practice, going back well into the Middle Ages and continuing today. Sometimes you see statues so draped in rosaries and other jewelry that you can barely see their bodies or clothes. Most of the ones I have photos of are ordinary-sized rosaries draped on relatively small statues. But the practice certainly extends to large rosaries draped on large statues as well.

I haven't yet seen any other photos of fishbone rosaries, but now I'm on the lookout. The bones are certainly for sale as beads on eBay and elsewhere. Both Dr. Hamilton-Dyer and I will be interested to see if any other fishbone rosaries turn up. Considering that I've seen rosaries made of rocks, sea shells, braided horsehair, plastic dice, and miniature footballs, I'm sure it's only a matter of time.

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

On a related note, I also ran across a charming paper by Gary Lane and William Ausich -- paleontologists -- on the legend of St. Cuthbert's beads, published in the journal Folklore in 2001. It came up in an online search because the paper mentions rosaries.

Saint Cuthbert (634-687 AD) was one of the famous preacher saints of North Britain, and his official biography was written by the Venerable Bede in the eighth century. The little disks with a hole in the center called "St. Cuthbert's beads" are found on Lindisfarne, where they weather out of limestone and can be picked up in any of the island's quarries.

Saint Cuthbert's beads are not fishbones: they are segments of the stems of fossil crinoids, animals related to sea urchins. Crinoids are known from as early as 480 million years ago, and a few stalked crinoids have survived to the present day, although they are now found only in deep water. These crinoids stand on long stalks supported by a series of bony disk-shaped segments. They are often called "sea lilies" or "feather stars."

The earliest literary reference to crinoid stem segments as "St. Cuthbert's beads" is by John Ray in 1671. In all probability the legend dates from centuries later than St. Cuthbert's life, though it might date back as far as the beginnings of limestone quarrying on the island in the 14th century. Nineteenth-century scholars, with their romantic view of folklore and religion, decided that local limestone workers must have believed these "beads" dated from Cuthbert's time and strung them into rosaries -- but disappointingly, there seems to be very little evidence this was actually done.

Many of the later references to St. Cuthbert's beads come from Sir Walter Scott's epic poem Marmion, which says:

But fain Saint Hilda's nuns would learn
If on a rock, by Lindisfarne,
St Cuthbert sits, and toils to frame
The sea-born beads that bear his name:
Such tales had Whitby's fishers told,
And said they might his shape behold,
And hear his anvil sound;
A deadened clang -- a huge dim form,
Seen but, and heard, when gathering storm
And night were closing round.
But this, as tale of idle fame,
The nuns of Lindisfarne disclaim (canto 2, verse 16).

The Neville gold rosaries

2010-05-05T17:17:00.000-07:00

Several people alerted me to two gold rosaries that were listed last winter in an upcoming sale at Bonham's auction house -- for which, my thanks. Thanks also to Rachel Osborn-Howard of Bonham's, who gave me permission to write about these and to republish a few of their photos. I also very much appreciate the additional information she was kind enough to provide.

Howard Neville was a dealer in early works of art and textiles for forty years, and Bonham's had their first sale of some of his collection this past December. Among the items for sale were two gold rosaries and a gold crucifix, all dated to the 16th or 17th century. Here's the first one:

The final version of the description in the sale catalog is: "A 17th century silver-gilt rosary with a Corpus Christi pendant, the Corpus Christi with a plaque above inscribed INRI and with a skull and crossbones below, the rosary chain with circular beads interspersed with flat pierced beads and terminating with a pierced pendant above a single chain of beads with the corpus below, chain possibly later, the cross 7.5cm high, the chain approximately 74cm long."

Here's the second one, whose catalog description was: "A 17th century Flemish silver-gilt rosary with a Corpus Christi pendant, the chain applied with segmented beads, the sides decorated with applied circles, chain possibly later, one bead missing, the cross 8.5cm high, the chain 52cm long."

There is also a third item from this sale that is just a cross, with a small pendant at the bottom:

The fact that these are gold (actually, gilded silver) automatically puts them in the "spectacular" category. For the most part, they are also in excellent condition; the first rosary has only one damaged bead; the second is clearly missing some beads, as there are only 29. The crucifixes show some normal wear, but they too are in excellent shape.

As I've said many times before, dating rosaries is always hard. That goes for these too. Hollow gold beads like these have been made for thousands of years, either plain as in the first example, or decorated with bits of added-on wire as in the second. It's virtually impossible to date them by style.

Often the best clue we have about the age of a rosary is the artistic style of the cross or medals attached to the beads. The Neville rosaries and crucifix have been looked at by experts who know a whole lot more about art history than I do: they identify the crucifixes as 16th or 17th century Flemish work.

When I first saw these, they were described as 16th century. But the longer rosary is made with a chain type of construction, where each bead is on a short length of wire with loops at each end, and the beads are made into a chain by interlocking these loops. This is how almost all rosaries were made in the 19th and 20th centuries, but it's not at all common before 1600. Most rosaries before 1600 were strung on silk thread. (The gold rosary of Mary, Queen of Scots, is an exception, dated to 1587.)

It is also uncommon -- though again not unheard of -- to see the cross hanging from a short chain of three "extra" beads. These extra beads were not originally part of the rosary in the Middle Ages. They seem to first appear sometime in the very late 1500s, but they did not really become universal until the 19th century.

The second of the Neville rosaries is strung on a fine metal chain. This is also not typical of rosaries from this period, which as far as I know were mostly strung on silk. (I've seen a number of historical rosaries that are now strung on metal chain, but to the best of my knowledge, they have all been re-strung and the chain is modern.)

You can see a bit of chain in the second rosary in the very bottom right corner of the first closeup below:

And in this not-so-good second closeup:

This second rosary currently has 29 beads and no gauds (marker beads). This too would be unusual for a rosary of this date. While there are some rosaries with 30 beads (plus gauds), the most common number is 50 (plus gauds). Some special types of rosaries have 63, 72 or other numbers, but 50 is overwhelmingly the most common.

The chain construction and the three "extra" beads of the first rosary, and the chain "string" of the second rosary, lead me to think that if these are actually more or less intact pieces and haven't been heavily modified, a date in the 17th century is rather more likely than the 16th. As you saw, the catalog description in its final version did agree with that.

But you'll notice I said "if."

The individual beads in both cases could certainly be 16th or 17th century. But I have to wonder whether some 16th or 17th century crosses and some beads from one or more other sources -- even, perhaps, from other sources of the same date -- might have been combined to make a rosary that looks more complete.

This is something that happens all the time, not only to items in private collections, but to items in museums. It is very natural to want to make an item look more complete, perhaps more like what it looked like when new -- especially if you are certain you know what it looked like originally. For rosaries, that very often means arranging the beads in equal-numbered groups (usually 10), with marker beads between each group, something like a flat metal medallion at the joining of the loop, and a short chain of three (sometimes five) beads above the crucifix. Because this construction is so universal in the 19th and 20th centuries, many people assume that this is what all rosaries should look like. As you'll have seen if you've been reading this blog, that's not really true for rosaries before the 19th century.

(Today, museums are far more cautious, and are more likely to show a broken or incomplete item in its unrepaired state, perhaps with a separate "reproduction" next to it. But this is a fairly recent trend. Anything that's been in a museum for a few decades is very likely to have been cleaned and restored in ways we might not do today.)

Thinking along these lines, I began to wonder particularly about the central medallion on the first set of beads. Here's a closeup.

Two things bother me here. (And I'm no jewelry expert, so take my opinion for what it's worth.) One is that a flat medallion at the joining is, as I said, a rather late feature in rosaries; none of the other 16th-17th century rosaries I've seen have a medallion. Either each decade ends with a gaud so there are two gauds side by side when the loop joins, or else both threads are run through a single gaud in this position. I don't know exactly when joining the loop with a flat medallion came into style, but I can't help wondering whether it was in the 19th century. Even the Biedermeyer-style filigree rosaries, which are dated to various points in the 18th and 19th centuries, don't have it.

The other thing is that, compared to the workmanship on the rest of the rosary, this medallion is rather crude. A silver-gilt rosary was a piece of fine jewelry, usually made by a goldsmith, and I would really not expect something only approximately symmetrical, and with irregular engraving like this, to be part of it. In fact, I rather wish I knew whether a metallurgic test was done on this medallion, because it looks to me as though it might even be something like a part from a 19th- or early 20th-century brass item from India.

I have no doubt that the crucifixes are original and date from when the experts say they date from. But it would have been relatively easy for someone to take some loose beads and put together plausible-looking rosaries to go with two of the crucifixes.

I don't know of any evidence this was done, but there's also -- in my admittedly limited experience -- no evidence that would comprehensively rule it out. That would also explain the relatively undamaged condition of these pieces, as well as the style of construction.

So while I very much appreciate the chance to see and study these pieces from the Neville collection, I think that considerable doubt must remain about whether they are in their original form, and therefore, about whether they can be relied on to give us significant information about rosaries in the past.

Paternosters: Greatest Hits

2010-03-16T11:35:00.000-07:00

Excuse the geekery, but I attended a talk on Google Analytics recently, and I've now installed it on this blog. Google Analytics is a free service that can provide some very interesting data on web traffic, even for such a humble blog as this one ;)

First, there must be more than seventeen of you out there reading this, since the blog is getting in the range of 100 visitors per day. This is, of course, a very modest number compared to the "super sites" out there, but it seems to be fairly steady over time.

Second, it's interesting to see which pages come up as most popular. It looks like a little over half the people that come here do so as the result of a search of some kind, and about 2/3 of those are word searches rather than image searches. The image searchers may or may not be interested in what this blog is actually about, but I'd think the word searchers are more likely to.

(By the way, many of my posts have one or more "labels" which are listed at the foot of each post. If you want to see more posts on a particular subject, click on the label.)

Overall, the most popular pages seem to be the series of posts I wrote on Protestants and the rosary. There are four of these posts and three of them are in the top ten (at least in the small sample I have right now). I've actually noticed before when I look at the "live" feed in the sidebar that these show up rather often.

Next most popular, apparently, are people searching on the word "paternoster." I'm a bit surprised by that, since I wouldn't think the word is all that well known. But perhaps these are people looking for a definition.

Third most popular -- again, rather to my surprise -- are the posts I wrote on Islamic rosaries. This isn't actually something I know a whole lot about, but apparently the dearth of good information in English that I remarked upon when I wrote these posts still continues, since I'm pretty consistently getting several visitors a day looking for this subject. And not a few of them from countries where Islam is the majority religion.

Below this, the numbers get too small to really draw much of a conclusion from. I also suspect that there may be "runs" on a specific article for a few days when someone elsewhere on the Web mentions a subject. But here are a few that turn up fairly consistently.

Bean Beads. I suspect these two posts get visitors when someone searches on a specific type of seed (such as spina-christi) or on the words "seed" and "rosary." I wish I had more information on this, because I continue to see seeds that I can't identify used in rosaries, but it's often impossible to tell what they are from a photo.

Knots. Apparently I'm one of only a few sources out there that say anything about the actual knots used in today's common knotted cord rosaries. I also get visits from people searching for "Franciscan cord knots" which are basically the same knot, at least according to what shows up in historical paintings.

Saint Anthony. I am not at all sure what people who come here are looking for, but all of the Saint Anthony posts get visits. Some people seem to be searching for Saint Anthony's distinctive Tau-shaped cross, but others go to other posts in the series and I can't tell why.

Trisagion. Apparently the Trisagion is uncommon and intriguing enough that I'm still on the first page of Google links when people search for either the prayer itself or the Trisagion rosary.

Rosary for the Dead. Again it seems that there's not a lot out there specifically about this devotion. People also come here when they're trying to identify a four-decade rosary (which this is).

Roses. I'm quite happy to see my posts on rose-petal beads get traffic, because I'm mythbusting here. A lot of people have heard that medieval rosaries were made of rose petals: as far as I have been able to tell, this is simply not true, so I've tried to show how rose petals actually *were* used, which is quite interesting in itself.

Skulls. There are quite a few posts about this, but the one that I get the most questions about (not just web traffic) is the one about skulls on the crucifix of a rosary. Apparently some people are under the impression that only nuns and monks had crosses with a skull at the foot, but actually this is not a rare style and I'm happy to explain it. Also, modern Goth culture has linked skulls and rosaries together in a lot of people's minds, although the actual history doesn't really bear out this connection in the way most people seem to think.

Subjects that have had scattered attention in the last few days include milagros, pro-life rosaries, and rosaries on belts.

The popularity of some posts is giving me ideas. I'm actually gathering material for a post on the modern "belt rosaries" or "habit rosaries" worn by monks and nuns, because there seems to be a lot of confusion about them. I've also got more information stacked up about various other aspects of Protestant rosaries. Anglican rosaries are pretty well represented on the Web, but there's not a lot out there about Lutheran versions (for instance) and I was surprised to discover there are actually beads used by Unitarians. Then there are the currently popular "story bracelets," where each color or shape of bead stands for a particular quality or incident -- I suspect these have a longer history than one might think.

Now the real challenge: to find the time to write!

Bottoms up!

2010-03-03T10:38:00.000-08:00

I'm an independent scholar not affiliated with a university, so I'm not always in the mainstream of news about the subjects that I'm interested in. I'm grateful to a member of the Paternosters Yahoo mailing list, who alerted me to a gorgeous and relatively recent book I hadn't seen: Edelsteine, Himmels Schnüre: Rosenkränze und Gebetsketten, a catalog of a 2004 exhibit at the Dommuseum zu Salzburg (Salzburg Cathedral Museum). The title translates as "Precious Stones, Heaven's Cords: Rosaries and Prayer Beads."

The extensive collection of beads in this volume is not, however, from the Cathedral's own resources; it's from the Fredy Bühler Collection, a private collection that has also been exhibited elsewhere.

I'm planning a more comprehensive review of this book, but I wanted to discuss one point in particular.

What I noticed is this: I'm a bit surprised by the way some of their sets of beads have been assembled. Although it doesn't say so in the book (that I could find -- my German is not the best), I would guess that most or all of the sets of beads in the collection have been re-strung at a fairly recent date, so what we are seeing is the collector's view (or perhaps the view of a previous collector or whatever expert was consulted) of what these may have looked like when new.

I wanted to single out the "tenners" as a particular example, because there's a very nice picture in the book of a painting that shows something rather different from the tenners in the collection itself.

One of the major sources of information about the rosary or paternoster beads of past centuries is their appearance in art of the period. Here, for instance, is Christoph Schurff, painted in 1580 with his beads (and two of his best friends ;).

For comparison, here are some of the tenners in the collection:

I've seen quite a few other tenners pictured in paintings or engravings. Some have beads all the same size. Others are graduated in size, and in every case I can think of, those in the paintings always have the bigger beads at the bottom. Here's a close-up of the painting above, showing Mr. Schurff's left hand and his beads in more detail:

There are not a lot of surviving tenners from this time period, and the chances are good that the ones I've seen have also been re-strung or reconstructed at some point, so they may not be in their original arrangement. These other surviving tenners too all seem to have the bigger beads at the bottom, including Bishop Fugger's ivory beads, which I wrote about awhile back.

But every one of the 45 or so tenners in Edelsteine that have beads graduated in size is strung with the biggest beads at the top.

What's going on here?

We are trying to reconstruct tenners from two sources of information, neither of which is entirely reliable. Images in paintings or engravings are subject to artistic license: the artist may or may not have chosen to show exactly what he saw. There are a number of paintings where it seems likely that the image presented is more symbolic than literal: it is painted as something that tells the viewer "these are rosary beads," but the real beads may have been bigger, smaller or different in number than what shows in the art.

And as I've said above, surviving beads, unless they come from a documented archaeological dig (which most do not) have almost certainly been re-strung at least once, and that may or may not be the same way they were strung originally. Unfortunately for us, until fairly recently re-stringing fell into the category of "routine maintenance" and the details of exactly what was done were often not written down.

From the evidence of paintings, I would tend to think that tenners with graduated beads are far more likely to have originally had the biggest beads at the bottom. Why are the beads in this collection strung the other way?

It's possible that the collector had information I don't. It's also possible that the collector or conservator made a single decision at some point that all of the tenners should be strung in the same way, and that that way should be with the biggest beads at the top.

the book

I ordered my copy of this book from the publishers with a bit of help from people who speak German better than I do. (The book is entirely in German, BTW.) It took about eight weeks to arrive and I think I wound up paying about $75 for it, including shipping.

Pierced pendants

2010-02-10T10:03:00.000-08:00

I taught a class on reliquaries not too long ago, and since I'm often interested in making reproductions of medieval or renaissance rosaries, I'm always on the lookout for the sorts of pierced or open-able little containers that are so often seen dangling from 16th century rosaries. In period, some such things were used as relic containers, while others were filled with scented stuff to serve as pomanders.

(By the way, as I've told my classes, if you choose to make beads with a "reliquary" pendant for replica purposes you certainly don't have to use an actual saint's relic. I know many modern people are uncomfortable with the concept of religious relics for one reason or another. A personal keepsake, such as a lock of hair, seems to me to be a pretty good substitute.)

I've also been corresponding with a couple of jewelry makers who are (FINALLY!) working from period paintings to produce actual replicas of the 1" to 2" pierced pendants visible in paintings. (If any of you are reading this, you're welcome to provide links in the Comments.) Unfortunately for me, while the ones I've seen are quite splendid, most of them are silver or gold and out of my price range at the moment. (I received a very nice little silver egg-shaped pierced pendant as a Twelfth Night gift last year -- thanks again, H.) I can certainly understand why jewelers would go for these, since I think it's the same amount of work to make something in silver or gold as it is to make the same thing in pewter, and I suspect the precious metal version is more profitable.

For those of us who do everything in pewter, however, I got a sale catalog from Fire Mountain that contains a couple of candidates for pendants that might be at least plausible for the Middle Ages or Renaissance:

Large pewter "heart" cage (18x18mm) with heart shaped piercings

IMHO, this one isn't as period looking as the smaller one below. I don't recall having seen heart-shaped piercings on any period pieces, but it's certainly a shape that was well known for brooches and other jewelry. Unfortunately the hearts on this one are randomly oriented on the back of the "cage," which is something I wouldn't expect with a medieval esthetic.

The small version OTOH (and it's quite small, about 1/2 by 3/4 inch), has round- or scallop-shaped piercings that more or less follow the shape of the object. I haven't seen a medieval heart shape that is quite as short from top to point (compared to the width) as this example -- most of the medieval hearts I've seen are taller and skinnier than modern hearts, if anything -- but I'm a lot less bothered by that.

Small pewter "heart" cage (16x13mm) with round piercings

If you do a general search for "cage" on the Fire Mountain site, you'll come up with about 40 links and drops of various sizes. Most of them have wide spaced vertical bars, which makes them easy to insert something into, but not so suitable for most "relics," since whatever is in there has to be fairly large in order to be securely held. They could, however, probably be filled with scented resin or something else that will stay put. Here's a pierced bead from a replica I made that uses a paste of benzoin and gum arabic inside the pierced metal beads. (I chose not to use a wax-based filling, BTW, because I live in California, and I don't want to risk wax melting all over something in the summer!)

Awhile back, Fire Mountain was also selling larger, flat cages they were calling "bead keepers" -- hinged containers about an inch and a half across, with woven wire backs and pierced or woven metal fronts. There are round, square and teardrop-shaped versions of these, but the square and teardrop shaped ones look very modern. The round one, OTOH, has pointed oval and quatrefoil shaped piercings and I think could reasonably pass as a period artifact. I think these are now being discontinued, so if you want one, now's the time to get it. The last I checked, they seem to be out of the silver-plated version but still have the gold-plated one.

Christmas blessings

2009-12-23T15:19:00.000-08:00

My "Christmas card" is running a bit late this year, and I had to do some rummaging around to find something I liked, since I've rather neglected this blog and have a couple of hundred pictures in the "To be Filed" folder.

Here is a picture of the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary, which is actually where the Christmas story all began, according to the Christian tradition. This is a tempera painting on wood from about 1460-1470, painted probably in Vienna by the Master of "Maria am Gestade" which translates literally as "Mary of the Shore." While I didn't notice it at first glance, you can indeed make out a bit of a view of water through the side window of this chamber.

This may not look like a rosary picture at first glance, but a rosary is there, all right. This is one of those tremendously rich little paintings full of details of domestic objects. Look at the cupboard in the top left corner of the painting. There's a rosary hanging over the edge of the shelf:

There are also details of bottles and jars on a shelf; an elaborate gold cup, book and fruit on a table; and a sewing box, pattens (medieval overshoes) and a vase of flowers on the floor. In many paintings, and probably this one, each of these objects has meaning, expressing the virtues of the Virgin or some aspect of the mystery of the coming of Christ.

This is a very graceful painting: the angel on the left, earnestly pointing toward heaven: God the Father hovering outside the window, sending the Dove of the Holy Spirit winging toward Mary, who has turned away from her book to say her Yes to the angel. That appears to be Joseph sitting on a bench in the garden, half asleep and leaning on his staff.

By the way, if you'll look closely, you can see that the photos bear a copyright notice: I got them from REALonline, the photo index from Austria (which I talked about here). I go back there every so often just to see whether there's something new, and often there is.

But I'm done with research for the day now, and I have Christmas presents to finish.

May the blessings of Christmas be with you, and may we all be open to hear the message of peace, now and at every season.

previous christmas cards:

Christmas 2008
Christmas 2007
Christmas 2006
Christmas 2005

A new look...

2009-07-09T14:03:00.001-07:00

While this is not the Project That Ate My Life that I mentioned in the last post, it is one of the things I've been working on in the background:

The Paternoster-Row.org website, with all the introductory information on rosary and paternoster beads, has a new hosting site and a new look.

It was high time for a design update anyway, and the new site is going to make it lots easier for me to add new pages -- and eventually, to move this blog over there as well. Once I do that, I will no longer have to give people two web addresses: one address will get you to both. (Don't worry, this address for the blog will still work, too.)

Hopefully that will make it easier for people to both find the basic information and keep up with my new articles.

All that's missing on the new site so far is the Gallery page with links to some of the rosaries I've made for my teaching collection. The Gallery will be back as soon as I figure out how to do it under the new system. (For the Web-savvy, the site now uses Drupal.)

As always, comments are welcome, though I may not publish all of them. You can also e-mail me directly with comments through my profile page.

Rosary or not: the people factor

2009-02-13T10:16:00.000-08:00

part 3 of a series

The first essential of doing research on rosaries and paternosters is to be able to identify paternoster beads when we see them. This is especially important when we are looking at medieval paintings, prints, or statues; does a string of beads represent a rosary, or is it simply decorative?

(I have contemplated this question before: see parts 1 and 2 below. I'm gathering these into a series now because I have several more aspects I'd like to write about.)

There are several sets of possible clues. One is how people are interacting with the beads -- how and where they are being worn or held.

For instance, common sense suggests that a loop of beads held in the hands or hanging from an elbow is likely to represent prayer beads, and much less likely to be a belt or a necklace. Here's Prince Friedrich the Wise holding his beads.

(I wrote about these beads here.)

A person holding beads and kneeling, or putting their hands together in a "prayer" pose, is especially likely to be using them to pray with.

(Another example here)

Beads attached to a belt are also very likely to represent a paternoster or rosary. Beads hanging from a brooch, pinned to a garment, or wrapped around a wrist are also likely to represent a rosary.

Then there are a few odd cases. Probably my favorite is the gentleman on the far right in The Judgement of Daniel (detail below), a panel painting by the Master of Mariapfarr from Salzburg in about 1500.

I've always wondered whether his beads would go flying if he tried to draw his sword in a hurry. Now that I'm taking a closer look, though, the beads are below the sword's crossguard and are only looped around the scabbard; he'd probably be all right. There's another gentleman with his beads attached almost the same way here.

Rosaries worn around the neck are especially problematical. Today it's usually considered "sacrilegious" (at least in English-speaking cultures) to wear a rosary around your neck. I can't tell you how many people have told me that their Catholic grandmothers were horrified at the idea! But apparently in the Middle Ages and Renaissance it was more common, though I'm told it was still frowned upon by some. (I've written about this here.)

The problem is how to tell the difference between a rosary worn around the neck and a decorative necklace. This takes some serious digging through paintings and portraits of whatever period you're interested in. Necklaces and other secular jewelry made from strings of beads haven't always been the fashion in all centuries or all cultures. There are eras where people simply didn't wear them.

I hope to write more about this later. But to try to answer the question for 15th and 16th century fashion at least, I've started to collect portraits from that period of people wearing something that's clearly a necklace. I want to see what the similarities and differences are. Many of the necklaces made of beads seem to be very short, just at the base of the neck (like what used to be called a "choker").

I also have to mention the woodcut of a friar with "flying" beads here.

The Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus are something of a special case. It is quite common to see the Infant Jesus playing with a string of beads, which the Virgin is often (but not always) wearing around her neck. In most of the cases I've seen, I do think these are rosary beads.

However, a short string of plain red beads worn around the Infant Jesus' neck -- especially if there is a little branch-like thing hanging from it -- is more likely to represent the sort of coral necklace that was often given to babies because it was thought to avert the "evil eye." Compare the one shown toward the end of this article (which I'm sure is a necklace) to this one (which I think is a rosary). And just this week I found an image that has both! This is the Virgin and Child with St. Wolfgang of Ratisbon, a votive picture commissioned about 1490 by Mathias Hierssegker in Austria.

Lastly, while I can't point to any examples at the moment, I'd like to investigate the pictures I've seen of women wearing a girdle (i.e. a belt) around their waists which is composed of beads. I am operating mostly on logic rather than data here, but I very much doubt these are rosaries. First, I've never seen one that had any of the "key" characteristics that signal unmistakably "this is a rosary" (more about this another time). Second, to use such a rosary to pray with, you'd have to unhook it from around your waist: I would think that taking off your belt would qualify as "undressing", which a lady would never do in public.

But of course I could be wrong about that ;) I've been wrong before.

If you want to test your powers of detection, take a look at these links.
· German couple holding beads.
· I think this lady has one set of beads tucked into the front of her belt and is holding another in her hands (closeup here).
· Saint Joseph (far left, in yellow) has beads tucked into his belt here.
· Charles the Good, Count of Flanders, in a 1400s portrait.

I think these are all rosaries or paternosters. Do you agree?

Previous posts in this series:

Part 1: Rosary or not?
Part 2: From a Spanish galleon

The Trisagion rosary

2009-02-04T11:00:00.000-08:00

Here is a rosary many people have never heard of: the Trinitarian or Trisagion rosary. It is quite different from the common modern rosary, and uses a different set of prayers.

The Order of the Most Holy Trinity for the Redemption of Captives was founded in France in 1198. Their Rule originally required that one-third of their total income be devoted to purchasing the freedom of Christian captives who had fallen into the hands of slavers or pirates. (More information here and here.)

From an early date, the Trinitarians have used a form of prayer based on the Trisagion (sometimes Trisagium or Triagion, from the Greek “three” + ”holy”). This is a Byzantine prayer in praise of the Holy Trinity: its simplest form is “Holy God, Holy Strong One, Holy Immortal One, have mercy on us.”

The Trisagion rosary (usually called a chaplet) has three groups of nine beads. In reciting the chaplet, each group is preceded by the Trisagion and the Pater Noster. A special prayer is said on each of the nine beads: “To you be praise, glory, and thanksgiving for ever, blessed Trinity. Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of power and might; heaven and earth are full of your glory.” Each group of nine prayers is followed by a Gloria Patri ("Glory be to the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit..."), and the whole ends with a closing prayer.

As with other rosaries that are special to a particular religious Order, its history is rather cloudy. The first question is how long the Trinitarians have used the Trisagion and its associated prayers. The prayers themselves are quite old, and may well have come to the Trinitarians from Byzantium through their connections in the Middle East. The Trisagion itself can be traced at least as far back as the Council of Chalcedon(451 AD) and perhaps further. The use of these particular prayers by the Trinitarians may very well date back to the beginnings of the Order.

A separate question is when beads began to be used to count these prayers. Reciting a certain number of prayers does not necessarily imply the presence of beads -- prayers can be counted on one's fingers, by moving a peg from one hole to another, and so forth. One possibility, and the one I'd favor as the most likely time for beads to be introduced, might be the 14th or 15th century -- when other rosaries became popular, suggesting the concept of using beads as counters. Another possibility is the 19th or early 20th century, when rosaries of all kinds became an indispensable center of prayer life for many Catholics.

It's clear that the Trisagion rosary is not closely related to any of the common Western European forms. But while the prayers may have come from Byzantium, I am inclined to think that the Trisagion rosary in its current form is not very closely related to Eastern Christian rosaries either.

The Eastern rosary does not have the same connection to the 150 psalms as its Western cousin, but rather looks to the injunction of Jesus to “pray without ceasing.” The prayer used for the Eastern rosary is most often the “Jesus prayer.” It may be said in longer and shorter forms, a common short form being, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.” The number of prayers is most often 99 or 100 (sometimes 101 or 103).

The physical form of the Eastern rosary (Orthodox and Byzantine traditions) seems more often to be knots in a string, rather than beads. While some Eastern rosaries today are made with beads, others are still knotted, sometimes using special knots with symbolic significance. In the East, the rosary is also more of a monastic practice; it doesn't seem to have experienced any great surge in popularity among lay people (unlike the Western forms).

The Trisagion chaplet is unique, and unlike both the traditional Eastern and Western rosaries in almost every respect. Today it is rather uncommon to see a set of Trisagion beads, but they do turn up on eBay and are featured by some artisan rosary makers.

Or, of course, anyone can make their own ;)

ETA: I've been asked for a complete set of the Trisagion prayers used with these beads. The most complete version I've found is here.

Same theme, different beads

2009-01-29T13:30:00.000-08:00

New rosaries part 2

As I mentioned earlier, it has been interesting to look at the invention of some "new" rosaries and what they say about rosary history.

I have another, and rather different, example, on the "pro-life" theme. This is a rosary sold by Holy Love Ministries, started by a woman in Ohio who believes she has received visions of Jesus and Mary.

"New" rosaries (sometimes called chaplets) have originated in a variety of ways over time. Many, such as the mid-1800s Rosary for the Dead (invented by Abbé Serre of Nismes, France) or the Chaplet of the Precious Blood (Fr. Francesco Albertini, 1809), were the idea of a particular person. Quite typically the inventors were priests or spiritual directors who developed ideas that they thought would help people in their parishes or under their direction.

Other rosaries, such as the Rosary of Divine Mercy (Saint Faustina Kowalska, 1930s) or the Chaplet of Tears (a Sr. Amalia from Campina, Brazil, 1929), were founded by someone who believed they had a vision.

Visions are a touchy subject. They don't fit into modern society very well, so people who have visions tend to be dismissed as either holy or crazy (or both! ;). At the same time, vision and miracle stories are tremendously popular with the public, which from the Church's point of view doesn't help the situation.

Historically the Catholic Church has been cautious. Catholics are not required to believe in any particular vision, even the ones that have Church approval (although the Church teaches it's wrong to believe visions from God are impossible). Nevertheless, it's quite clear, and well understood by the Church, that not all visions are from God. Some are the products of imagination, wishful thinking, or psychological problems. The Church teaches that Satan can also produce convincing -- but fake -- visions.

Generally, the Church deals with visions according to guidelines laid down in the 18th century by Pope Benedict the Fourteenth (1740-1758). The first investigation of visions is usually the responsibility of the local bishop. If he is convinced a vision is "worthy of belief" he submits a report to the Vatican for approval. As you can see here, most visions are, in fact, not approved, and some are specifically disapproved. In the majority of cases, however, there is simply no decision yet. This "wait and see" period can be quite long.

The pro-life rosary sold by Holy Love Ministries -- called the "Rosary of the Unborn(tm)" -- is another example of a rosary inspired by a vision. Maureen Sweeney-Kyle writes that the Virgin Mary appeared to her, showed her a special rosary, and requested that Holy Love Ministries produce this rosary for the world. She also says that Mary promised that "each 'Hail Mary' prayed on this rosary from a loving heart will rescue one of these innocent lives from death by abortion." (And other promises here)

The beads are an unusual design. The Ave beads (on which one says the "Hail Mary") are transparent blue teardrop shapes. Visible inside each one is a small flesh-colored embryo. The Our Father beads are crosses, each made out of four red teardrop shapes that represent drops of blood. Enthusiasts of this rosary find these beads beautiful and moving. People who don't share this viewpoint can have very different reactions. (Pictures here.)

This example of a "new rosary" comes from a vision on which the Bishop of Cleveland has now issued a statement, saying that the visions are not supernatural in origin. (Thanks to correspondent JH for the update on this.)

And there have certainly been other critics (another here). Some of the contents of the messages Maureen Sweeney-Kyle reports and publishes do seem more than a bit strange.

Another source of unease among those who have commented about this rosary is the very tight hold the ministry maintains on everything related to this rosary. The name "Rosary of the Unborn" is trademarked and its designs are all copyrighted. The rosaries cannot be bought from anyone else -- all sales are direct. (Prices are comparable to more ordinary rosaries.) No one can buy the beads separately to make their own rosary: only finished rosaries are sold. And the ministry says that Mary's promises apply only to these particular rosaries, bought from them.

From a commercial point of view, close protection of a design is not unusual. The designs used are very distinctive, and I suspect that the "teardrop" beads especially were a bit difficult to engineer. Maintaining a monopoly on their product also ensures that any money raised goes only to Holy Love Ministries.

But on a rosary makers' mailing list a year or two ago one person very reasonably (I thought) asked, "... if this rosary can save so many unborn children and help end abortion, then wouldn't Our Lady want as many of them out there as possible?"

This is not the only distinctive rosary resulting from a vision. (In fact I talked about another one here.) These rosaries are created not by Church authorities, but by ordinary lay people. Rosaries have a long history of being a very "grass roots" form of prayer.

New rosaries

2009-01-26T13:00:00.000-08:00

I'm a bit behind the calendar here, but Catholics in many places in the last week or two were holding events to commemorate the Roe vs. Wade court decision on January 22nd, 1973. Many of these used the "Pro-life rosary" as their theme.

Whatever your opinion on this issue(and I'm not going to get into that at all), I find it interesting that "pro-life rosaries" have appeared. One of the things I've said repeatedly about rosaries is that there is not, and never in its history has been, only one "true" rosary. In the 1200s to mid-1400s (and perhaps earlier), there were many devotions that used beads, and out of those many (which I think of as the "primordial soup" ;) a very few of the variations (and one especially) arose, became popular, were endorsed by the Church, and have endured. Many other "rosaries" have been invented since, some using the same five decades as the common rosary of today and some not.

The best-known of the Pro-life-themed rosaries originated with an idea that came to a nursing student in Louisiana at the end of 1992. In basic form, it's a modern five-decade rosary, but it's quite easy to recognize when you see one because it uses a special pattern of colors in its beads. The crucifix can be any type, but the three Hail Mary beads between the loop and the crucifix are purple. The five decades are each made up of alternating colored and white beads: the first decade aqua and white; the second red and white; the third black and white; the fourth has three colors (red, white and blue); and the fifth, green and white. The marker beads (or Our Father beads) usually seem to be white or clear. These rosaries are still being made and distributed on a fairly large scale from the Office of Pro-Life Issues in the diocese of Lafayette, Louisiana. (Hmm. I should add one to my teaching collection.) And as far as I know, anyone is welcome to make rosaries according to this pattern: most of the rosaries given out from Lafayette are made by volunteers and donated.

The basic prayers of this rosary are the same as the common rosary of the 20th century: the Apostles' Creed, fifty Hail Marys, five Our Fathers and Glorias. The themes of each decade in the Pro-life rosary, on the other hand, may or may not be the usual Joyful, Sorrowful, Glorious or Luminous "Mysteries." At least three different sets of special themes and meditations have been written for each decade of the Pro-life rosary, usually with an additional prayer on that theme to be said at the end of the decade. The ones I've found online are here, here, and here.

This is an excellent example of a "new rosary." Like most of the recent ones whose history is clear, it began as one person's idea, was endorsed by local Church authorities (the local bishop in this case), and became popular. (The common 20th century rosary came about in the mid-1400s in a similar way, as a local idea that spread. An amazing 100,000 people from all over Europe joined rosary guilds in just the seven years from 1475 to 1481.)

Another interesting thing is that both the common rosary and this one have benefited greatly from widespread literacy. Of course, once you have memorized three prayers and fifteen mystery titles, reciting the common rosary does not require a book -- that's one of its attractions for 15th century lay people. But from the very beginning, many rosary leaflets and handbooks have been published to encourage its use. Probably the most popular of the early rosary manuals was Unser Lieben Frauen Psalter (Our Dear Lady’s Psalter), attributed to Alanus de Rupe. Revised and reprinted many times by his followers, it went through seven editions between 1483 and 1502. In a similar way, the Pro-life rosary has spread through printed prayer cards and the Internet, as well as by word of mouth, public events, newspaper stories, and gifts of a Pro-life rosary from one friend to another.

A lot of people -- including some Catholics -- have an image of Roman Catholicism as an entirely "top-down" organization. But the constant invention and spread of new rosaries, I think, demonstrates that "grassroots" Catholicism is alive and thriving.

The beads of Nostradamus

2009-01-20T16:25:00.000-08:00

roses revisited, part 3

As I mentioned in Part 1, the first of Nostradamus’ two recipes (Chapter X of the book) produces an intensely scented rose extract or oil. Now we'll look at his second recipe (Chapter XI), which is for making pommes de senteur (literally “scented apples,” meaning pomanders) out of a whole list of things compounded together, of which the rose extract is only one.

Autre annotation pour composer pommes de senteur. Recipe Ladani purissimi z.ij. Storacis calamitici, Assae odoriferae, que nous appelons benioin Ann. z.i. Tricos de roses z.s. Pouldre de violete z.ij. Ambre & musc de chascun demy drachme. puis le tout soit pulverisé & pasté avec la surdite mixtion de roses: & soit faite paste fort malaxee par l’espace d’une heure: & aves d’une pomme de la plus souveraine senteur, & la plus durable qui se puisse faire au monde:

Here’s my best guess at a translation:

Another method for making aromatic balls: Take two ounces of the purest labdanum, an ounce each of Styrax calamites and Assae odoriferae (which we call benzoin), half an ounce of rose-tablets, one ounce of violet powder, and half a dram each of amber [ambergris?] and musk. Grind it all into a powder, knead it together with the rose-mixture mentioned earlier [i.e. the rose extract from the first recipe] for the space of an hour and you will have an aromatic ball of the most supreme perfume, and the longest-lasting that can be made anywhere in the world.

(By the way, these do not have opium in them! The ingredient mentioned is “labdanum” (note the B) not “laudanum”!)

So what we have here is about four ounces of ground-up plant resins (labdanum, benzoin and storax), an ounce and a half of powdered dry ingredients (rose tablets and violet powder), half a dram each of ambergris (or a substitute) and musk (both these last are waxy animal products), and an unknown quantity of rose extract.

There are some surviving objects from the Renaissance with a composition like this, or at least I think that's what they might be: there are a couple of small bear sculptures and a carved pendant from the 16th century that are said to be composed of “musk or ambergris,” though apparently they haven’t been analyzed in detail. I’d be unsurprised to find them composed of something similar to this recipe; I’d think pure musk or pure ambergris would be too soft as well as too expensive. (The resins were expensive, but both musk and ambergris were worth at least twice their weight in gold.)

What was Nostradamus' second recipe used for? And why does it say it makes "paternosters"?

Obviously the main purpose of compounds like this is to give off a pleasant scent. Many of the similar recipes I've looked at recommend leaving these scented balls or cakes in a dish on a table to scent a room, rather like potpourri. The same use is also prescribed for pastilles like the ones discussed in Part 2.

The same formulas are also recommended for burning like incense, which also makes sense. I certainly don't see any ingredients in them that would not burn, given a little encouragement.

Scented balls, or sometimes the paste before it hardened, could also be used to fill pierced metal or filigree containers, such as the pomanders that survive from this period in museum collections, or those seen in paintings (for instance, something like this, where a pomander is clearly part of a rosary:

And finally, beads. I think when M. de Nostradame says his recipe is for making "patinostres" he means beads: by the 16th century, a single bead could be referred to as "a paternoster," as well as the whole string.

There are a number of references to scented paternoster beads in period documents. Some of these are clearly pierced metal or filigree beads with scented stuff inside. (I am much indebted to R. Lightbown's chapter on paternoster beads in Medieval European Jewellery, which lists a number of these.) For instance, young Marie de France in 1377 had a paternoster of gold beads "filled with amber," probably real or imitation ambergris. Her father Charles V in 1380 had certain beads "full of musk" and in 1386 King Charles the Bold of Navarre paid for botones, probably paternoster beads, of gold and silver "that if pierced may be used for filling with musk."

Then we get to references that are harder to interpret. In 1300, Constance of Sicily, queen of Aragon, had a paternoster with "some beads of gold, pierced, and some of labdanum." In 1432 King René of Anjou had a paternoster with beads "of musk". The first of these especially suggests -- but doesn't prove -- that the labdanum was not inside a pierced gold bead, but perhaps was a solid bead by itself.

There is also a recipe from more than 100 years later that reads as follows (from From Mary Doggett, Her Book of Recipes, 1682):

Take a quarter of an ounce of civit, a quarter and a half-quarter of an ounce of Ambergreese, not a half a quarter of an ounce of ye spiritt of Roses, 7 ounces of Benjamin [benzoin], almost a pound of Damask Rose buds cut. Lay gumdragon [gum tragacanth]in rose water and with it make your pomander, with beads big as nutmegs and color them with Lamb black[lampblack]; when you make them up wash your hands with oyle of Jasmin to smooth them, then make them have a gloss, this quantity will make seaven Bracelets.

But while this, unlike Nostradamus, produces something that does have quite a lot of rose petals in it, it also has quite a lot of benzoin. And it is not a medieval or even a Renaissance recipe. And beads (if that's what they are) "as big as nutmegs" would be at least an inch in diameter, which to me makes it much more plausible to think in terms (again) of a bracelet with a single pomander hanging from it, rather than an entire bracelet of beads that big. (Though I could, of course, be quite wrong here -- any late 17th-century costumers may feel free to correct me ;)

So does Nostradamus' second recipe make beads? It very well could.

But is it evidence for medieval beads made from rose petals? I don't think so. We have evidence of Renaissance-era beads made from a lot of plant resins, a small amount of dried and powdered flower petals, and a rose extract. They are fascinating -- but I, at least, would not call those "rose petal beads."

All posts in this series:

Part 1: Roses revisited
Part 2: Rose pastilles
Part 3: The beads of Nostradamus

(P.S. This series took me a long time to write because I kept getting distracted by fascinating sidetracks: for instance, did you know labdanum was collected by clipping the beards of goats who had been grazing on the plant?)

Rose pastilles

2009-01-13T13:14:00.000-08:00

roses revisited, part 2

I promise I'll get to the second recipe from Nostradamus that I mentioned in Part 1, but first I want to digress a bit.

One of the ingredients in Nostradamus' second recipe is something called Trocis de roses. This means "rose tablets" or "rose pastilles" and there are a number of recipes for making them scattered through various sources. Like Nostradamus' first recipe, these recipes also are frequently thought to be recipes for rose-petal beads, because these trocis -- unlike the process followed in Nostradamus' first recipe -- are made by grinding up actual petals. (Nostradamus' first recipe, you'll recall, has you soak the rose petals and then throw them out and use the liquid.)

The earliest recipe I've seen for rose pastilles is from the Materia Medica of Dioscorides, which dates to the first century AD. I can't vouch for the accuracy of this translation, but here's the version I have. As you can see, there are other fragrant resins included in the recipe, so it's not just rose petals.

"Rose balls, or rhodides, are made this way. Of fresh roses before they become damp, 40 drachmas; spikenard, 5 drachmas; myrrh, 6 drachmas. These are beaten fine and made up into little troches, each weighing 3 oboli [about 1.5 grams -- Ed.]. These are then dried in the shade and stored in closely sealed jars. Some also add costus, 2 drachmas, and the same amount of Illyrian orris, mixing also honey, and wine from the island of Chios.”

There are also a great many late 16th and 17th century recipes for these scented pastilles, which may or may not use roses as an ingredient. Rose pastilles seem to be one example of a method of compounding herbs and spices that was used more generally. Culpepper's herbal has general directions for making pastilles, using gum tragacanth as a binder: "with this you may (with a little pains taking) make any Pouder into Past[e], and that Past[e] into little Cakes called Troches." Gervase Markham's The English Housewife (1615) has troches composed not of roses but of orris root, marjoram, sweet basil, cloves, sandalwood and citron.

One interesting recipe for rose pastilles is from an anonymous 16th-century Spanish manuscript called Manual de mugeres en el qual se contienen muchas y diversas reçeutas muy buenas (Mss. 834, now in the Biblioteca Palatina de Parma, Italy, and online here).

Here is the original recipe and a translation by Dana Huffman:

Receta para hacer pasticas de perfume de rosas:

Tomar una libra de rosas sin las cabezuelas, y siete onzas de menjuí molido. Echar las rosas en remojo en agua almizclada y estén una noche. Sacar después estas rosas y expremidlas mucho del agua, y majadlas con el menjuí. Y al majar, poner con ello una cuarta de ámbar y otra de algalia. Y después de majadas, hacer vuestras pasticas y ponedlas cada una entre dos hojas de rosas, y secadlas donde no les dé el sol.

Recipe for making rose-scented tablets:

Take a pound of roses without the flower heads, and seven ounces of ground benzoin. Put the roses to soak in musk water for a night. Remove these roses afterwards and thoroughly squeeze out the water, and grind them with the benzoin. And when grinding, put with it a quarter of amber [ambergris?] and another of civet. And after [they are] ground, make your tablets and put each one between two rose leaves [i.e. petals], and dry them away from the sun.

You may have noticed that in none of these recipes are you directed to pierce holes in these or to string them. The recipe from Manual de mugeres, in fact, is clearly for flat tablets, since each one is dried between two rose petals.

Next we'll look at Nostradamus' recipe and consider the ingredients used.

All posts in this series:

Part 1: Roses revisited
Part 2: Rose pastilles
Part 3: The beads of Nostradamus

Gifts and ghosts

2008-12-21T13:08:00.000-08:00

I'm running a bit behind on the Christmas stuff here, but thought I would just mention that I have written about medieval-style rosaries as Christmas presents here. (The short version: yes, anyone who uses an ordinary modern rosary can say the same prayers on this one.)

If you want to make a medieval-style paternoster as a gift, and you have a friendly local bead store, everything you need should be there. There's a shopping list here and simple instructions here. It takes less than an hour to put one together (less than half an hour, really, unless you have difficulties making a tassel). You may want to take the trouble to braid the cord you string the beads on from thinner thread, as it's likely to be more durable.

I wanted to share a few photos of several more modern-style strung rosaries I've made, all variations on a theme. The community I work for has a number of symbols they're fond of, including the color blue, an anchor (for hope), a heart, and a rose, and all of these were made for members or friends of the community.

This one is sodalite, with mother-of-pearl markers:

This one is mother-of-pearl, with lapis lazuli markers and a striped glass heart:

Mother-of-pearl again, but the marker beads are flat blue glass roses:

I particularly like this one, which is blue "goldstone" (a type of glass) with cloisonné markers:

And a detail:

I also passed a sad little milestone this week: for the first time, one of the rosaries I've made has been laid to rest. I made this one a couple of years ago for a friend's elderly mother. By special request it was rose quartz (her favorite color) with mother-of-pearl markers, the Virgin Mary with roses, and a cross with shamrocks. My friend's mother died this past week, and it was buried with her. I hope it brought some comfort to her and to her family.

Here is the one I made for her:

Perhaps hundreds of years from now, when the world has changed completely and these electrons are all dust, some archaeologist will see these beads and be touched by the thought that they brought someone a sense of peace.

Christmas blessings

2008-12-13T11:47:00.000-08:00

Time for my annual "Christmas card," with a wish that everyone may receive the gift of joyful wonder at this season.

I am always enchanted to discover yet another image of the Virgin Mary and Infant Jesus with beads. So many of these pictures were clearly painted by people who love and are well acquainted with REAL babies and how they love to play with things.

Infants approach the whole world with a sense of openness and discovery, as you'll know if you've ever tried to keep one from putting everything she encounters into her mouth. I have yet to see the Holy Infant shown actually chewing on beads or attempting to hang them on his mother's ear, but I'm sure that's going to happen any minute now in some of the paintings I've seen. Fortunately, the beads in the picture are usually (as here) red coral, a good and safe (if expensive!) choice for teething on.

This particular painting is one that's hard to find good pictures of, since the beads are quite small and don't have a lot of contrast with the background (especially not with the Virgin's dark dress and red cloak). I found a full-page version of it in Krone und Schleier: Kunst als Mittelalterlichen Frauenklöster ("Crown and Veil: The Art of Female Monasticism in the Middle Ages"), the catalog from a 2005 exhibition in the Ruhr Museum in Essen, Germany.

When the Virgin is wearing a long string of beads around her neck, they are usually supposed to represent a rosary. But if these are indeed rosary or paternoster beads, they are a little unusual. It's very common in such paintings for the beads to be red. But it's uncommon to see beads this small and numerous -- there are a little over 100 visible, which means that the closest of the "standard" forms would be a string of 150. If this is a paternoster, it's also unusual to see it shown as a string of beads all the same size: most of these paintings show a string with smaller red beads and larger "gauds" or markers of some other material. Gauds are a much clearer visual signal that what's being represented is specifically a rosary.

Certainly strings of uniformly sized beads with no markers are a recognized form of paternoster, and one that seems to have been common at least as early as beads with gauds. It's still not at all clear whether the form with gauds or the form without gauds is earlier, or whether they are both the same age: some of the earliest surviving paternosters from Western Europe have two distinctly different types or sizes of beads. Prayer beads from Eastern Christian traditions are generally all the same size, as are most of the Hindu or Buddhist prayer beads from farther east, which may or may not have been an influence on Christian ideas about prayer beads (the jury is very much still out on that one).

There's nothing about the origin of the painting itself that suggests whether this is a rosary or not. It's one panel of a large altarpiece with scenes from the life of Mary, originally painted around 1410-1420 for the monastery of Cistercian nuns in Fröndenberg. But I've been looking at paintings of necklaces that are clearly not rosaries from this general period, and I haven't seen anything quite like this. Hmmm... another topic to add to the never-ending list for further research!

Previous Christmas posts:
Christmas 2005
Christmas 2006
Christmas 2007

Computer "wallpaper" with rosaries

And a post about Christmas-themed rosaries (which I still think is kind of a strange idea)

Roses revisited

2008-12-10T15:43:00.000-08:00

part 1

Since I write about rosary beads, I do my share of myth-debunking, and like anyone else who has written about rosaries, I get a lot of questions about beads made of rose petals. As I've discussed in some detail here, modern rosaries made of rose-petal beads -- or imitations thereof -- are perpetually popular. And truly, it's a nice idea, at least when one is not smacked in the face with cheap imitation rose scent upon opening the box with the rosary in it. (I have such a rosary: I seldom open the box ;)

Nonetheless, there are some common myths about rose-petal beads, and the biggest one is that rose-petal beads have something to do with why this string of beads is called a "rosary."

I've gone into some detail here on exactly how the rosary got that name. Briefly, "rosary" began as a word for a garden in which roses are grown. From there, a few authors used it to refer to a collection of essays, such as the Rosarium Philosophorum, a 1386 treatise on alchemy by Arnaldus de Villa Nova. It was a short step to extend this from a book of written essays to a book of written prayers, and then to any other sequence of prayers, written or not. The name "rosary" for the devotion -- which dates back to the middle 1400s with this meaning -- was reinforced by the circulation of popular legends that envisioned each prayer said as a "rose" given to the Virgin Mary.

Petals, and indeed beads, are nowhere in this story.

(Incidentally, the author of the first rosary manual, Alanus de Rupe, hated the “rose” metaphor because he thought it far too evocative of sensual pleasure. But of course that may have been why it had such wide appeal. He preferred to call the devotion the "Psalter of Our Lady.")

The story is further complicated by a problem with dates. In order for rose-petal beads to have anything to do with the word "rosary," you first have to find out if rose-petal beads even existed at the time you're talking about. For rosaries, that would be the late Middle Ages, especially the first half of the 1400s when what we now know as "the rosary" was in development.

I've been looking for years for evidence of when rose-petal beads were first made, and so far, I have not found anything that clearly dates them any earlier than the 19th or early 20th century. Sources like a 1996 issue of "The Herb Companion" or Dover books' reprint of Rose Recipes from Olden Times by Eleanor Rohde, are quite willing to label rose-petal mixtures as "medieval," but without -- as far as I can tell -- consulting anything other than their own imaginations. (Typical quote: "Centuries ago, when knighthood was reportedly in flower, noblewomen made fragrant beads of petals plucked from castle rose gardens...")

It's quite easy to find multiple recipes for rose-petal beads (here's one) on the Internet: most of them involve putting rose petals through a blender and simmering the resulting mush gently for some hours. Some recipes add a binding material such as vegetable gum or flour and salt. Simmered in a cast iron pan, the mashed petals turn black, otherwise the color may be dark red, pinkish or orange. When the consistency is like clay, small amounts can be rolled into bead shapes and pierced with a needle before drying.

It was in following up another clue on this trail that I discovered something new this week (well, new to me, anyway). I discovered that a book that I'd dismissed as a figment of someone's fantasy actually does exist, and probably was written by the author it's attributed to. And while it still does not produce a recipe for beads made out of rose petals, what it does say is quite interesting.

The book is usually referred to in English by the title of a modern edition, The Elixirs of Nostradamus. To give him his proper name, Michel de Nostradame (known as Nostradamus) was a prolific French writer and professional apothecary who wrote at least two books in the mid-1500s on medicine, as well as a series of Almanacs and his famous collection of prophecies, first published in 1555.

The book usually called the "Elixirs" originally had a very long title beginning Excellent et moult utile opuscule..., but it's more usually referred to as the Traite des fardemens et des confitures (Treatise of Cosmetics and Preserves) and was first published in 1555 (or 1552, it's not clear). There doesn't seem to be any doubt that Nostradamus wrote it, although as was very common in those days, he takes a lot of his material from earlier published works. (Copyright in the modern sense did not exist back then.)

I doubt that I could have found this seven or eight years ago when I first became interested in this question, but there are now at least two places on the Internet where you can see actual facsimiles of Nostradamus's publications online. One is the Nostradamus library at Repertoire Chronologique Nostradamus but I prefer the images at the related site Prophecies Online which also contains a (partial) English translation.

The pages of interest are 55 through 59, which contain Part I, Chapter X and Chapter XI. Right there at the top of page 56, sure enough, is the word patinostres (his spelling) and the recipe that follows certainly starts with gathering a large quantity of roses. (It says "five or six hundred, more or less" -- de cinq à six cents tant du plus que du moins) (I get tired just thinking about this!)

However (and it's a big however) the recipes that follow are not your classic recipe for beads made out of mashed-up rose petals.

There are in fact two recipes: in the first (Chapter X), you are instructed to make an extract of the rose petals and then throw the petals out and boil down the liquid. One of my correspondents has tried this, and she says what it actually produces is a very concentrated, strongly scented rose oil. As Nostradamus wrote them, the instructions say the recipe produces a "sweet-smelling, long-lasting paste" (une paste laquelle sera d'une bonne odeur durant longuement), but in the end it is described as "as thick as boiled honey" (asses espes comme miel cuit).

This is the recipe I've usually seen mentioned as producing "rose-petal beads," but clearly that's not quite what it does. This is made clearer by the next recipe, which I'll discuss in a future article.

All posts in this series:

Part 1: Roses revisited
Part 2: Rose pastilles
Part 3: The beads of Nostradamus

The rosary rebellion

2008-11-28T14:10:00.000-08:00

The Reformation of the church in England was a long, complex and sometimes bloody process. For those interested in studying this process, I think that one of the great contributions to the literature of religious history in England is Eamon Duffy's account of the Reformation, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580.

This was the first book I encountered on the history of the English Reformation that begins by examining the state of religion in England before the break with Rome, and it was also the first history of the subject I read that was not written from a specifically Protestant point of view. I grew up in a Congregational church, and English-speaking Protestants, understandably, tend to dwell on the aspects of the Reformation that represent their own beginnings. But Duffy's book takes a more comprehensive view. It's joined the short list of books that I strongly recommend to anyone interested in the history of popular devotion, including the rosary.

One of the most interesting rosary-related stories in the book is this one, which I will quote in Duffy's words.

Sometime in Whit week 1549 Walter Ralegh (the father of the famous seaman) was riding to Exeter. Near the village of Clyst St. Mary he overtook an old woman on her way to Mass; she was praying upon a pair of rosary beads in her hand. Ralegh, a staunch supporter of the Reformation, challenged the old woman, asking her what she meant by carrying such beads, "sayenge further that there was a punyshmente by the law apoynted agaynste her and all suche as woulde not obeye & folowe the same & wch woulde bee putt in execution vpon theime." The old woman hurried to the church, where the parishioners, already disgruntled by the imposition of the 1549 prayer-book on the previous Sunday, were gathering for Mass,

"and beinge impacyente & in an agonye with the speches before paste betwen her & the gentleman begyynethe to upbraye in the open Churche verie harde & unsemelie speches concernynge religion, saienge that shee was thretned by the gentleman, that exvcept shee woulde leave her beades & gene over holie breade & water the gentlemen woulde burne theym oute of theire howses & spoyle theim."

The enraged parishioners all but lynched Ralegh, a local mill was burned, and the rebellion escalated. The incident, not without elements of farce, was to end in black tragedy. When ultimately Lord Russell was dispatched by Somerset to put down the rebellion, Clyst St. Mary was the scene of a particularly bloody pitched battle, in which the local peasantry were ruthlessly butchered, along with all the prisoners captured by the royal forces then and previously. The village was put to the torch. Archbishop Cranmer's dislike of beads and holy water had cost the people of Clyst dear.

This mini-rebellion -- to put it in context -- was a local but very significant incident in a larger movement, generally referred to as the Prayer Book Rebellion. The immediate trigger, and the chief grievance of the protesters, was the imposition of a new Prayer Book, which was markedly more Protestant in its declarations of doctrine than many people were prepared to countenance.

Generally speaking, London was the center of Protestant thinking at this period, and in more outlying areas such as the west of England, there were plenty of people who saw no reason to change the ways of thinking and methods of worship that had served them well for hundreds of years.

King Henry VIII had begun the process of reformation in 1534 by denying the authority of the Pope and declaring himself the Supreme Head of the Church in England -- while retaining for himself many Catholic beliefs and practices. The bishops and commissioners he appointed, however, tended to be much more avowedly Protestant. The resulting mix of religion and politics meant that the attempt to bring about a countrywide reformation progressed by fits and starts through the rest of Henry's reign, and enforcement of change at the local level was often sporadic and uneven.

The death of Henry and accession of Edward VI changed all this. A decree specifically banning rosary beads and a number of other Catholic practices was published in 1547. (Below is a nice piece of propaganda, showing some of the now banned items, "Certaine of the Popes marchandize lately sent ouer into Englande")

As this incident shows, however, we have plenty of evidence that people were still using their rosaries. As Duffy points out, the mention of "holie breade & water" indicates that it was not just beads that were the focus of the disagreement, but other specially blessed things as well. Nonetheless, the beads were an easily visible symbol, and the fact that they could be part of a dispute that sparked an armed conflict is some indication of how strongly people could feel about their beads.

Beads from the Inventory of Philip II

2008-11-24T14:04:00.001-08:00

A recent discussion on the Paternosters mailing list has made me think about all of the fascinating -- and often knotty! -- little questions that arise when we try to make sense out of the very brief descriptions of paternoster beads that survive in inventories, wills and similar lists. Often the description is all we have in the way of data about what the beads were like.

As I've commented elsewhere, these descriptions were not really written for us, hundreds of years later. They were written, for the most part, to assist in keeping track of someone's possessions during life, or sorting out how much they were worth and who they should be passed on to after the owner's death. Since whoever was doing the sorting usually had the actual beads in front of them, only the minimum description was needed, just enough to identify which of several possible sets of beads was being referred to.

On top of that, we are also dealing with historical spelling and vocabulary, which -- to say the least -- are often not identical to the modern versions of either. And as you might expect, some of the words used in the descriptions were never common words in the first place, or else they're being used in a specialized sense -- rather like the word "gauds" in English, which was originally borrowed from the Latin word for joy (Gaudete = Rejoice!) and can mean jewels or ornaments in a general sense, but which when applied to Christian prayer beads specifically refers to distinctive "markers" separating groups of other beads.

The recent discussion on the Paternosters list provided an excellent example, and several of us amateur scholars attacked it with zest.

The question came from Katherine Barich, to whom I am profoundly indebted because she just loves collecting and reading through old inventories in search of interesting bits about historical clothing. This takes a peculiar intellectual gift that I don't think I have. Fortunately she has been very generous about sharing what she finds, and periodically I get an e-mail from her with more paternoster listings for my slowly growing database.

Here's the entry she found in the inventory of Phillip II of Spain, taken in 1594. It is in "Archivo Documental Espanol - Tomo X - Inventarios Reales Bienes Muebles Que Pertenecieron a Felipe II" by F. J. Sanchez Canton.

Un rosario, que tiene sesenta y tres perlas avemariadas y otras cuatro en la cruz, con siete estremos de oro, labrado de medio relieve, con nuebe ruvies en cada un y otro estremo de oro en la cruz con diez ruvies. Tasado en trecientos y noventa y seis ducados.

Philip II, son of Emperor Charles V, was a Hapsburg and brought most of Spain (and for part of the time, Portugal as well) under his rule for a substantial swath of the 16th century. Here's a portrait of Philip II with a rosary, although clearly these are not the beads described in the inventory (for one thing, they're the wrong color):

I'm going to walk through the process I went through to try to make sense of this entry, because I think it's a good example of the sorts of things we frequently encounter.

Here's what Babelfish says (these "translations" always make me giggle):

A rosary, that has sixty and three Rep them avemariadas and other four in the cross, with seven estremos of gold, worked of average relief, with nine rubies in each and a other estremo of gold in the cross with ten rubies. Appraised in three hundred and ninety and six duchies.

OK, fixing the obvious idiocies, we have:

A rosary that has 63 Ave Maria beads [pearls]?, and four more in the cross, with seven [gauds]? of gold, worked in middle relief [bas- relief]?, with nine rubies in each; and another [gaud]? of gold: the cross with ten rubies. Appraised at 396 ducats.

I'm grateful, by the way, to the colleague who clued me in to Babelfish as a deeply flawed, but nonetheless very useful, tool in deciphering a language. What it does do well is to translate a lot of the common words for you, all in one fell swoop, so you don't have to spend your time looking up words like nuebe and sesenta and tasado. Then you attack the less common words one by one, or those that Babelfish clearly doesn't have a clue about.

This is especially helpful for anyone who isn't a full-time scholar. I, for instance, can read French reasonably well considering that the last time I formally studied it was decades ago, and I understand enough about most of the Romance and Germanic languages that I can at least tell which parts of the sentence are what and which way the grammar is going. But for the rest, it's a matter of lots of looking in dictionaries and a good deal of guesswork.

A bit of digging in my ancient Spanish dictionary (Appleton's, 1943, which I got for free from a book exchange) reveals that perlas are indeed pearls, and not (as in German) beads: the normal Spanish words for beads seem to include abalorio and (somewhat more obscurely) chaquillo. (The dictionary lists several more, including cuenta which seems to literally mean "counter.")

Estremo isn't in the dictionary. Hm. I wonder if it's supposed to be estreno, which has to do with "commencement, beginning, inauguration." (16th-century Spanish spelling? Who knows?) At any rate, there are seven of these estremos (plus one), which makes sense if there is one before each decade and extra ones before and after the last three beads.

The online dictionaries I find in a quick search don't contain either estremo or estreno. Going the other way, they prefer to translate "gaud" as adorno (decoration) or joya (jewel). Appleton's translates "gaud" as objecto charro (showy or flashy object).

If the estremos are indeed gauds, we are still not quite home free with the translation. We still have to decipher "y otro estremo de oro en la cruz con diez ruvies." Literally this says "and another estremo of gold en the cross with ten rubies."

First question, what does en mean in this context? Prepositions are notoriously tricky to translate, especially since their use is often strongly idiomatic. Literally the estremo seems to be "in" the cross, which doesn't make very much sense, so I would guess it means "next to."

Second question: which object has ten rubies? The lack of punctuation, or of any relative pronoun, means it's not clear whether we have an estremo with ten rubies, and a cross, or an estremo, and a cross with ten rubies. The fact that all the other estremos have nine rubies each makes me think it's a little more likely that the rubies belong to the estremo. We've also been told already that the cross has four pearls, so perhaps it doesn't need rubies as well. Alas, the jewels were probably re-set and the gold melted down long ago, so we'll never know.

A final interesting point about this rosary: it has 63 pearls. This strongly suggests a Brigittine rosary, which has six decades (rather than the usual five) and three extra beads at the end. I've heard this was a popular type of rosary in the 16th century, but haven't run across many examples. The only surviving example I can recall is this one, which is Portuguese and 17th century:

There are several ways the beads of such a rosary could be arranged: this one has all 63 beads in one loop, with six groups of ten and a final group of three. There are only six gauds here, as there are none next to the cross. Other examples of rosaries often do seem, at this period, to have gauds beginning and ending all of the decades including the first and last, so I would not be surprised at all to see a Brigittine rosary with eight gauds.

Of flexwire and time machines

2008-11-20T16:40:00.000-08:00

string theory, part 5

As I discussed previously, "flexwire" or nylon-coated wire has become the most popular modern material for stringing rosaries, and it requires some new techniques.

Modern rosary makers, being used to a type of rosary where the beads don't slide, have had to figure out how to string a rosary on flexwire so that the beads maintain their spacing and don't move. The solution most of them use is to string one to several very small beads between each main bead of the rosary. This also nicely covers the wire, which many people don't find very attractive -- particularly the early versions of coated wire, which resembled stainless steel wire from the hardware store. Many people have become very creative with these "betweens" (in German these would be "zwischenperlen," which I think is a delightful word!). Rosary makers like Mary's Prayers Rosaries may use two or three different types of small beads between each large one, which can make quite an attractive contrast.

With the newer types of coated flexwire, which come in at least a dozen different colors, it would seem logical to me to experiment with making modern rosaries with beads that can slide as you count them. This would mean leaving some of the wire exposed, but if it's pretty, why not? So far I haven't seen anyone try this, but it would be interesting to see how well it works and what people think of it -- and how the flexwire stands up to abrasion when beads are sliding back and forth.

As we've seen, flexwire is pretty much immune to a lot of the problems of rosaries made with string: it's very resistant to tangling and kinking, to breaking by being pulled on and to metal fatigue. But it's not perfect. To the surprise of some rosary makers, rosaries strung on flexwire can stretch with use.

You'd expect this with fiber-based threads -- in fact I've had to re-string some of my paternosters where the silk thread has stretched. But it's rather a surprise to see the same thing happening to wire. Jennifer of Miracoli Rosaries reported that one of her customers' rosaries stretched nearly an inch after just three months of regular use. On checking her stock, she found that several rosaries made with stone beads that had been simply stored hanging up for a year had also stretched.

This caused a bit of consternation on the Rosary_makers mailing list. What could have caused it? The answer seems to be that the metal wire in flexwire is not a single strand, but several strands, braided. If it's subjected to a lot of tension, it turns out that this braided strand can stretch a certain amount, even though the individual wires in it don't. This is especially likely to happen if a light weight of flexwire is used to string heavy beads, so the advice is to use the heaviest weight that will go through the bead holes. (Most flexwire comes in at least two or three thicknesses.)

The other thing that can cause stretching is if the strand of flexwire is used right off the spool, and is then pulled very tight to fasten it off after stringing the beads. This can be prevented if you "relax" the wire before using, or stretch it a few times between your hands, and perhaps let it hang overnight with the beads on it before finishing off.

To sum up, flexwire has a lot of advantages, and has made it much easier for creative rosary makers to produce strong, durable rosaries very quickly. But I have to point out that there's one type of project for which it still doesn't work very well. That is for close replicas of historical types of prayer beads from before 1600. If you want to make your beads look like they just fell through a time machine from the 15th century into your living room, even the newer, more flexible varieties of coated wire still don't work quite like silk thread. Here's an example from Rosary Workshop:

A rosary strung on flexwire simply does not hang the same way as one strung on silk, and it doesn't look the same lying on a flat surface either. The flexwire resists bending, so the strand of beads tends to lie in a gentle, nearly straight curve, and the loops where the end of a strand of beads attaches to a pendant or medal, fall in wider and more gradual curves. There are quite a few historical paintings that show a rosary casually tossed on a side table or step and about to slide off the edge, and you can definitely see the difference in the way they hang.

(The above example is a detail from Antonello da Messina's St. Gregory Triptych, 1473.)

Fortunately, most people are not trying to pretend that their rosary dropped through a time machine from some other century, so the different drape doesn't matter in the least. I cheerfully admit to being a modern person myself, and I'm thankful for many things about modern civilization, including the Internet! Historical rosaries are not the only beads I string ;)

Posts in this series:

String or Nothing
The thread thread
String Theory
Threads of silk and gold
Wired
Flexwire
Of flexwire and time machines

Flexwire

2008-11-11T10:57:00.000-08:00

string theory, part 4

Silk thread and wire links, the rosary-stringing methods of choice for most of history, are no longer the only choices. Within the last decade or two, there's been a revolution in the bead-stringing world. Various forms of plastic-coated wire are now the "string" of choice for many uses.

The first coated-wire product to hit the market (or at least the first one I became aware of) was "Tiger Tail," which is a miniature braided stainless-steel cable covered with nylon. Originally it came only in the natural silvery color of the wire, but you can now buy gold-colored versions too. In more recent years, Acculon and other companies have produced a number of variations, including different thicknesses and even more colors.

Unlike common crafting wire, which is generally made of soft copper or brass, these are mostly based on stainless steel wire, which is much stiffer and very springy. This is especially true of the early versions, which are braids of 3 or 7 strands of wire. More recently, manufacturers have produced 21- and 49-strand versions as well (three braids of 7 and 7 braids of 7, respectively). When more strands are used to produce the same size braid, the individual strands have to be thinner, and thinner strands of wire tend to be more flexible and less springy. This means that the 21- and 49-strand versions are considerably more flexible and "drapey" than the 3- and 7-strand types.

Flexwire (as I'll call this type of product in general) has some advantages over both wire-linked construction and fiber-based string, particularly if your main concern is sturdiness. Because the core of flexwire is metal, it can support very heavy beads, such as the denser types of stone beads. It's also very resistant to tensile stress -- it won't break easily when you tug on it, or if it catches on something. Tension breaks seem to be the main problem with most modern strings of beads, so this is a big advantage for makers of modern necklaces, bracelets and rosaries. The springiness of flexwire also means it's not very subject to breaking from metal fatigue, which occurs if a small area of wire is bent sharply back and forth several times and becomes brittle.

(This rather interesting modern rosary strung on flexwire is something I saw a couple of years ago on eBay. I have it labeled as "eclectic"!)

However, using flexwire also requires some differences in technique. Since it's hard to bend flexwire sharply, it's difficult to tie knots with it; the knots tend to resist tightening because of the wire's stiffness, and later to slip out because of the smooth nylon coating. This means that in order to secure the ends of the wire, instead of a knot you have to add a "crimp bead." These are small tubes of metal of just the right degree of hardness. The end of the wire is passed through the loop of a clasp, medal, or other ending and doubled back on itself. The crimp bead is slipped over both of the parallel wires and then squeezed with pliers to grip both wires tightly. This supplies the friction necessary to keep the wires from springing apart and the beads slipping off. (If a crimp bead is squeezed too firmly, it can cut through the nylon coating, weakening the wire.)

I'm much indebted here to Rosary Workshop and to the members of the Rosary_Makers mailing list, many of whom use flexwire to make modern rosaries. Several of them graciously answered my many questions about flexwire and any potential problems with it, and gave me permission to quote them.

Laura Eckert of Still Stone and Moss, for instance, did some testing of her own, and reports: "I held both ends of a piece with pliers and yanked as hard as I could. (I'm pretty strong.) After many mighty yanks, the wire finally broke -- right at the edge of the pliers. Could have been the sharp edge of the pliers that cut the wire. (For necklaces, I use a clasp that WILL break, so nobody gets strangled.)

"I tested crimp connections the same way. No crimps ever lost their grip. Even the crummiest crimps held -- this could be due to SoftFlex's nylon coating. Crimps closed with gentle pressure held as well as crimps closed with a death-grip. (I use crimping pliers -- the kind that first dent & then wrap the crimp.)

"I bent a piece of SoftFlex firmly at a U-turn angle with pliers, and the wire did "remember" that bend. Under ordinary conditions, it doesn't kink. For two-plus years, I've kept a rosary strung on 49-strand SoftFlex jumbled in the bottom of my purse -- when I pull it out, it falls into position without any weird bends. Rosaries left draped over the top of a 1/4" board for several months developed a slight bend, but returned to normal when suspended for an hour or so.

"No problems with abrasion to report after 4-plus years of use with a variety of beads, including stone & metal. No signs of wear even at the crimp points on a bracelet worn daily for several years."

Posts in this series:

String or Nothing
The thread thread
String Theory
Threads of silk and gold
Wired
Flexwire
Of flexwire and time machines

The REAL Paternoster Row

2008-10-12T11:58:00.000-07:00

One recent distraction is that I'm preparing for a long-overdue overhaul of the Paternoster-Row website, including some new material. One new bit that I'm particularly happy about is that I've finally found a decent, copyright-free map (from a survey made in 1762, I think) that clearly shows the original Paternoster Row in London. (as always, click to enlarge)

(Lots of old London maps can be found online, by the way -- for instance here, here, and here.)

If you're not familiar with London geography, Saint Paul's is in the western part of the old City of London -- the central "square mile" of London that lies inside the Roman walls. You can get an approximate idea of where this is here. (It's a map of sites mentioned in Charles Dickens, but I've had trouble finding good diagrams of the City -- most show far too much detail and you can't see the boundary.)

A view of the Paternoster Row area with a bit more context is here. I've taken the liberty of marking the old London city wall in bright blue and highlighting Paternoster Row in yellow. The upper part of the map including St. Paul's is the City Ward of Faringdon Within. (There's also a Faringdon Without, which logically enough is outside the old walls.)

I had hopes, when I was in London a couple of years ago, of having someone take a photo of me for the website showing me casually leaning against a Paternoster Row street sign. It would have been lovely, but there's a slight problem:

The only street sign I could find was twenty feet up on the side of a building.

I also discovered that modern "urban renewal" has obliterated parts of the old Paternoster Row in order to create an open space called Paternoster Square. Personally, I wish they hadn't: when I was there, admittedly in rather chilly March weather, Paternoster Square struck me as one of the bleakest, least friendly and most utterly deserted spaces I saw. It's an expanse of bare paving with one sculpture, a column, a few granite block "benches" and not much else, and the building fronts around it are equally blank.

Here's a pretty good aerial photo of Paternoster Square from Wikipedia.

The two exceptions to the universally blank building fronts that I found amusing were these:

I'm old enough to remember when geeks were called "squares," so I also wanted to someone to take a photo of me leaning up against the doorway under this sign, but the only bystanders at the time were most uninterested.

And this one just seems totally incongruous -- though perhaps not to Londoners, for whom Paternoster Row is just another familiar street name.

God's penny

2008-09-07T19:36:00.000-07:00

A bit of fallout from the trip to Leiden that I hadn't mentioned is that Gillian Vogelsang-Eastwood gave me a "Godspenning" -- literally, "God's penny" -- that she had come across in her collecting. This is an interesting variation on one of the common types of "finger" or "ring" rosaries that I wrote about awhile back.

Here's what it looks like. The photo shows both sides of the same coin.

(Many thanks to Henk 't Jong, of 't Scapreel, for his help with the translation and background on this.)

The text is (not surprisingly) in Dutch. Here's what it says.

On the front:

Heer wat wilt U dat ik doen zal
"Lord, what do you want me to do?"
This is accompanied by a rooster, symbolizing morning.

GOD red ons uit de nood! Geef vrede aan de wereld.
"God, save us from distress. Give peace to the world."
This has a sun, symbolizing (I think) noon.

HEER blijf bij mij - het wordt nacht
"Lord stay with me, night is coming."
This has a crescent moon, symbolizing night.

On the back:

Wie u vervolgt, vervolgt MIJ.
"Who persecutes you, persecutes Me."
This side has a cross made of barbed wire.

Around the edge on the front side are ten small bumps and an eleventh, larger bump -- so this can be used to count the prayers of the rosary. On the back, in tiny letters, one in each point of the star, it says GODSPENNING, and "58" at the base of the cross.

Henk says:

"The 58 means that it dates from 1958. At this time and a bit later it was sold door to door for 1 guilder to help persecuted and displaced 'Volksdeutscher' (German nationals in Slavic countries) from the east of Europe (from behind the Iron Curtain) to the west who were living in very poor circumstances in abandoned hovels, bombed out buildings, bunkers and barracks. They were made by a religious group called 'Oostpriesterhulp' (Eastern priests help) and distributed through parochial networks. Nowadays they are religious collectors' items, but on our national E-bay site, Marktplaats, they often go for €10 or less."

Obviously, this little pocket accessory can be used to count the prayers of the conventional rosary. The inscription, however, makes me wonder whether some particular devotion may have been intended by it, perhaps at morning, noon and night, reciting one of the three inscriptions on the front of the coin each time.

When I see a simple devotional object like this, I always wonder whether there are any older historical versions. So far, I haven't found one. All I've come up with is several references to something quite different with the same name. In both English and (Henk tells me) Dutch, the "God's penny" is the symbolic deposit of one penny paid to conclude an agreement to buy something. Once the "God's penny" has been handed over, neither party can back out of the deal. It's also called an "earnest-penny" in English.

This seems likely to have originated as a pre-Christian custom, to invoke the blessing of the gods on the transaction -- and, presumably, their wrath on anyone who breaks the bargain. There is a Latin word for it, arrabo, which is discussed by the first-century AD author Aulus Gellius in one of his Attic Nights essays. I ran across this via Google Books, which had this charming footnote in a 1795 translation of the Attic Nights by William Belloe:

"The arrha was the earnest-penny given in bargains. Barthius says it is a Hebrew word: Arrabo vero vox pure Hebraica est -- Venantius Fortunatus, a [saint and] Latin poet [from the late 6th century], calls the death of Christ arrham salutis, the earnest-penny of salvation."

Dragging this fascinating topic back kicking and screaming to paternosters, however...

It occurs to me that the relatively modern Godspenning does have something relevant to say. I've noticed in my research that people who aren't especially well informed about medieval artifacts can miss some very relevant details in a painting, details which may have significance, simply because they don't recognize what they're looking at. For instance, you might mis-identify Catherine Pole's rosary beads here as a decorative belt, and miss their religious meaning. (A second look reveals that she is actually holding them in her hand, not wearing them.) A portrait of an Englishwoman conspicuously holding rosary beads after King Henry VIII's break with Rome is certainly significant!

My outstanding example of understanding what you're looking at, however, is this painting, where Saint Joseph is holding something in one hand that looks like a rather peculiar leather belt with round scales on it.

Because I know what I'm looking at, I can identify this as a type of prayer counter, what I usually call a "disk rosary." (These are a current research project of mine, by the way, so if anyone else sees one of these, I'd appreciate knowing about it. I have less than a dozen examples.)

Now that we know what the modern Godspenning looks like, it will be interesting to see whether anything that looks like it shows up in a medieval context. Perhaps somewhere out there, someone will find an otherwise inexplicable something that looks like a little toothed gear, or a notched coin, and it will turn out to be... this.

Through medieval eyes

2008-08-24T19:51:00.000-07:00

pretty pictures, part 4

I made this set of green beads as another gift recently, and it presented some interesting opportunities. As is common in today's society, not all of my friends are Christian, and in fact the woman I made this for is Pagan. But since she's a re-enactor, I wanted the beads to look acceptably medieval-Christian. The colors she requested were green, white and black, and as I often do, I used a nicely non-sectarian silk tassel for the pendant at the end.

The green heart is a personal symbol (again from Venetian Bead Shop), and as I was contemplating what else I might add, I thought of the little flat silver charm you see attached.

It's been sitting in my box of charms for several years, since I bought it along with the similar one I used on a little six-decade set of coral beads. Both of these little square charms are fine silver from India, stamped with (presumably) figures from Indian legends. I immediately claimed the first one for one of my own projects.

This six-decade rosary was one of my fairly early ideas. I had found a nice string of small pink beads that were reasonably priced, real coral and not dyed (which is uncommon). The marker beads were part of an eBay purchase: they were sold as rock crystal, but the price was very reasonable, so I wasn't too disappointed when I got them and discovered they were glass, as shown by the round air bubbles in one or two of them. (Rock crystal may have flaws, but not visible, perfectly round bubbles.)

Besides being an example of beads with six decades, I made this project as an example of the sorts of miscellaneous charms and accessories that might have been hung on a medieval rosary. The cross is Ethiopian, which is admittedly rather an improbable stretch for what a medieval European might have had available. I rummaged through my charm box and found a hand with "palm reading" lines on it, which I thought made a plausible "good luck charm," as does the crescent moon. The little silver pendant with a stone in the center is a carnelian, which actually was a good-luck charm in the Middle Ages. The round medal is a very worn Sacred Heart medal -- somewhat post-medieval in form, but as I said in an earlier post in this series, the devotion itself was known in the Middle Ages.

I liked the little square charm from India, because if I try to look at it through the eyes of a medieval European, my immediate identification is that it's Saint George... or perhaps Saint Martin of Tours, except that he seems to be wearing some sort of helmet and no cloak. He's clearly on horseback, and there is a diagonal line starting in the upper left corner that could be a spear or a lance, although if you look closely you see that he's not actually holding it.

People who have studied the religious thought of the Middle Ages more deeply than I have may certainly correct me here, but my own guess is that a medieval person, seeing such a thing, would try to fit it into a conceptual framework that he or she knew, and that means it would be identified as a saint, or perhaps a knight -- some sort of familiar image.

The pendant I still had sitting in my box was more problematic. With my modern eyes, I can see that it's possibly intended to be one of the round-breasted women characters from Indian legend, but it's much harder for me to fit that image into a plausible medieval-Christian context.

It's a bit of a stretch, but I wonder whether a medieval person might see this as one of the virgin martyrs who was stripped and tortured -- Saint Agatha, perhaps?

On the other hand, as a "goddess" image, it's now found an appreciative home.

Wired

2008-08-20T21:37:00.000-07:00

string theory, part 3

I've been writing about string, since during the period of history I'm most interested in, the vast majority of all rosaries were made from beads threaded on some sort of string -- often silk, sometimes linen or other materials. But starting in the late 16th century (I think), we begin to see the occasional set of beads with the wire-linked construction we're used to seeing in modern rosaries.

Dating this innovation is challenging, since -- as I keep saying about other paternoster history questions -- we just don't have a lot of surviving rosaries from that time period to provide us with data. And unlike some of the other questions I've researched, period paintings and illustrations are no help here, since they don't usually show this level of detail -- we're lucky, in fact, if they even show anything of the string, as they do in a few cases such as the Hoccleve portrait of Geoffrey Chaucer, where you can just about see that the thread is red. Nor do inventories and documentary evidence usually shed much light on how a rosary is constructed: usually the only details are what material the beads are made of, and sometimes their number.

As I've mentioned earlier in this series of posts, wire-linked construction has some advantages over string: the chain of beads is less breakable and doesn't need re-stringing as often. On the other hand, a wire chain is less flexible than beads strung on thread, and it's still prone to kinks and tangles. Since the beads are fixed in place and not movable, the different construction also changes the way the beads are handled while praying. Rather than beads sliding along a thread one by one, the entire chain of beads moves through the hands, one bead after the next being held between the fingers.

As a method of construction, wire linking is very simple, but somewhat labor-intensive, since until recently each loop on a wire-linked rosary had to be made by hand. Instructions for this are fairly easy to find, but most people find that it takes a bit of practice to be able to make even, consistent links that look nice and hold their shape well.

The first essential is the choice of wire. It needs to be strong, even in thickness, and thin enough to pass through a bead easily. It also has to be the right hardness. The same metal can behave quite differently depending on whether it is "hard" or "soft," and wire for making chains has to have just the right balance between the two. When metal is heated and cooled, it becomes "soft," which means it is more malleable, but easily pulled out of shape. As it is bent, twisted, hammered or worked in other ways, it becomes "harder," which means it will hold its shape better, but it also becomes more brittle and prone to break. For making chains of beads, the wire must be bendable so you can make loops, stiff enough that the loops will hold their shape under stress, but not so hard that it will break.

We take abundant supplies of fine metal wire for granted today, but for a long time all wire was hand made and somewhat expensive. Comparing a beautiful woman's hair to fine metal wires was a compliment to its shine and liveliness! Wire-drawing only became a major industry in Western Europe in the late 1500s. It's probably no coincidence that a number of crafts requiring consistent supplies of even, strong wire blossomed around that same time -- not only wire-linked bead work, but for instance also silk knitting, which requires fine wire needles.

Anyway, to make a long story short -- I haven't yet seen any examples of wire-linked paternoster beads that I am convinced are original and date to much before 1600. I've been shown a few groups of rosaries that have some wire linking and a photo caption saying "XV Jh." (German "Jahrhundert" meaning "century") but none of them convince me. In one case, the style of the metal parts looks very much like 18th-century filigree. Another seems to be something constructed from part of a broken rosary, and I don't see any clear indications of date on that one either.

The wire-linked beads that do look more convincing are a few tenners. Considering Bishop Fugger's beads are wire linked and date from somewhere between about 1604 and 1626, this isn't too surprising. The added labor of forming wire loops might make a bit more sense when there are just a few beads to link.

The earliest long rosary that I know of with wire links is this Portuguese rosary of aloe wood, with a somewhat vague date of "early 17th century" according to the book I got it from. You'll note, by the way, that this is a six-decade rosary, with 63 beads, sometimes called a "Birgittine" rosary.

Rosaries and paternosters are notoriously difficult to date precisely, and like any other jewelry, they were also subject to re-making and repairing as they became damaged or tastes changed. I'm certainly open to the possibility of earlier wire-linked beads, but so far both the evidence I've seen, and what I know of the social and technological background, lead me to think that late 16th to early 17th century is still the most likely date for this innovation.

Posts in this series:

String or Nothing
The thread thread
String Theory
Threads of silk and gold
Wired
Flexwire
Of flexwire and time machines

Still more pretty pictures

2008-08-18T06:33:00.000-07:00

part 3

This next batch of medieval-style rosaries were made for friends as special gifts. Among the people I hang out with, many are medieval re-enactors, so a medieval rosary is an appreciated gift, whether the recipient actually uses such a thing for religious purposes or not.

Since "decoding" the instructions given by Alanus de Rupe for a special rosary for a penitent knight, I've made several sets of these beads with special markers.

It took me quite a while when I made the first set to find a "multi-colored" bead I liked for the first marker. Most of the multicolored beads I could find in catalogs were either very cheap and badly made, or they were covered with little pink rosebuds. I didn't think that was very suitable for a bead supposed to symbolize our "multitude of sins." Eventually I found a millefiori bead, as you can see in this example.

The light-colored marker bead is mother of pearl here, the red is carnelian, the black is jet, and the gold is a foiled-glass Venetian bead from Venetian Bead Shop. Once I found sources, I bought several of each of these types in the 10-millimeter size, so I can now put together a set of "Beads of Death" without having to run out and shop for the parts.

The small beads for this rosary are green glass, the cross is another one from Rosary Workshop, and the little silvery-looking pendant is a hollow sterling-silver bead, with the ends plugged, and a few grains of earth from the Holy Land inside. One can fairly easily buy little "souvenir" containers of "Terra Sancta" and water from the River Jordan, but I happened to acquire little vials of both a few years ago that were about to be thrown out, and I've made good use of them.

This next set of beads is a "tenner." I have a couple of strings of 14-millimeter jasper beads, which seem to be about the right size for this common men's accessory, so that part was easy.

The hardest part of shopping for "tenners" is finding a good thumb-ring for the top. It's not at all difficult to find nice-looking plain silver rings in "finger" sizes, but finding a sturdy, closed ring about an inch in diameter and without egregiously non-period decoration isn't easy. I hoard them when I find them, and I had this one in my stash, so I used it.

The brass "gold" ring suggested using small brass "gold" beads between the larger jaspers, but what to do for the end? The friend I made this for said he wouldn't mind having a cross, but I didn't see anything affordable in the right size that I liked. Then I thought about the dark jasper cross that I'd picked up at the craft store, without any project in mind. I've never seen anything quite like it in a medieval context, but there are certainly coral and rock-crystal crosses (though not this shape) and the occasional wide-armed cross (though I usually can't tell what material they are -- I suspect wood). I decided this was good enough, and after wrestling with it a bit to get the flimsy silver-colored bail off, added it to the string.

The little gold pelican is definitely not medieval in style, but the pelican on a nest is a well-known medieval symbol of self-sacrifice, since the pelican was thought by classical authors to feed its young by stabbing its own breast so the offspring could feed on its blood.

The recipient has, he tells me, already to put this string to good use. He used it to amuse himself during a very long meeting by keeping count of the rounds of applause every time someone received yet another award.

Threads of silk and gold

2008-08-13T10:56:00.000-07:00

String theory, part 2

In my previous post, I focused mostly on plain silk, which seems to have been the thread of choice for medieval rosaries, and discussed some of the reasons it breaks. Here I'm going to discuss other types of silk thread, including silk with gold.

Since the biggest problem with silk thread is weakening by abrasion from the beads sliding along it, you'd think that people would choose threads that wouldn't be harmed by abrasion. Not so, apparently. I have seen a number of references to beads threaded on, for instance, "crimson silk and gold." And -- if I had any doubt that the gold was actually part of the stringing and not just decorative -- King Rene d'Anjou had a rosary "strung on a cord of silk and gold thread."

Before the days of plastic coatings it wasn't easy to make gold thread, or even imitation gold thread. Gold is a soft metal, and while it's possible to make a very thin gold wire that can be woven like thread, it is rather fragile and breaks when repeatedly bent back and forth. In embroidery it was mostly laid on the surface of the cloth and held down with stitches, rather than being threaded into a needle and passed in and out of the fabric.

Gold wire is also very heavy and expensive, so ways to make a thread that was lighter and more affordable were invented early. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, most gold thread was made by beating gold very thin, cutting it into strips, and wrapping the strip in a spiral around a "core" thread, usually yellow silk. The silk core made the thread much more flexible and less breakable.

On the other hand, the actual gold coating on the thread was quite thin. This meant that while the thread would bend readily and you could, with care, actually pass the thread through fabric, its tolerance for abrasion was still very limited. In embroidery this thread was still mostly laid on the surface of the cloth and stitched down (called "couching"). I have difficulty imagining why anyone would thread beads on something this easy to damage -- yet clearly it was done.

A fragile thread might be made somewhat sturdier if it is not simply twisted, but actually braided or woven. I started out using ordinary silk twist to string paternoster beads with, and I think that is one reason I've experienced so much thread breakage -- especially because I haven't plied my own from reeled silk, but used commercial twist from machine-spun silk. (The Japanese Embroidery Center has been recommended to me as a source of reeled or "flat" untwisted silk.)

As with any fiber, the first step is to make a single thread out of collected fibers. Silk twist is the next step in processing, where two threads -- each composed of many fibers -- are twisted around each other. I suspect that this results in relatively long stretches of fibers being exposed to wear between the places where the threads twist around each other. The twist also does not exert a great deal of pressure on the individual fibers or prevent them from moving. My guess is that this means that when a few fibers are abraded and break, the breakage has a good deal of freedom to spread to other nearby fibers as they take up the load released by the broken fibers.

A compound thread that is braided or woven, on the other hand, has much shorter exposures of fiber, and the intersections where groups of fibers go over or under each other are generally tighter and exert some pressure to keep the fibers from moving. So we might expect slighly better survival of threaded paternoster beads strung on braided or woven thread. I'd be very cautious about generalizing from the very few examples that exist, but indeed I'm aware of at least two surviving strings where fragments remain of a braided or woven cord. (Of course there are also surviving bits of twisted cord, so I wouldn't call the question settled.)

One is this set of 15th- or 16th-century jasper beads from Salzburg, which -- if I remember correctly -- were found on a length of pink silk cord that had been tablet-woven.

Tablet weaving, or card weaving, is a technique usually used to make narrow flat strips by a technique that combines twisting and weaving threads together. It's an ancient technique and quite common in the European Middle Ages and Renaissance. A slight modification of the technique produces a round woven cord with a hollow center.

Simple braiding is of course another very common techique for producing cord. I was particularly charmed to discover "whipcord braiding," which uses two people and four hanging bobbins to produce a round four-strand plait very quickly and easily. (There's a YouTube video here.) I think we tend to under-estimate how many period techniques were done with two or more people cooperating, since as modern people we are more likely to produce our crafts alone.

A third technique, which was common in the Middle Ages and Renaissance but largely forgotten in modern times (until its recent revival), is called "fingerloop braiding," and uses (as you'd probably guess) loops of thread carried on the fingers rather than straight cords with loose ends. It can be very fast, and produces fascinating, intricate patterns. It's pretty much limited to making short lengths of cord -- a yard or two at most -- but for the length you need for a paternoster, that's no problem.

Just last weekend a friend for whom I've made a paternoster commented that hers needed re-doing and she was planning to make a fingerloop braid for them. I've also made a copy of my "Magdalen" beads for another friend (seen above), also with a fingerlooped cord. I'll be interested to see whether these wear better and last longer, but I suspect they will.

Posts in this series:

String or Nothing
The thread thread
String Theory
Threads of silk and gold
Wired
Flexwire
Of flexwire and time machines

More pretty pictures

2008-08-10T13:50:00.000-07:00

part 2

Here are more of my recent projects.

(By the way, I've had a couple of comments and e-mails about these beads, asking if they are for sale. No, I don't make paternosters for sale, although I'm sure there is a market out there for them. I'd much rather teach people to make their own! There are full instructions in Bedes Byddyng, and the materials are neither hard to find nor expensive. A while back I also posted a "shopping list" and instructions.)

I posted some, but not all of the sets of medieval-style rosary beads that I made to take with me to Leiden in March. Here are a couple that didn't make it into the first batch I posted.

These are actually two of a color combination I've made several of, and will undoubtedly make more. I bought something like 20 strings of these opaque red glass beads for a special occasion, and I still have a number left over. The clear marker beads are rock crystal -- though not especially good quality rock crystal -- and at the particular moment I bought them, were actually less expensive than glass beads the same size.

Based largely on what I see in paintings, I tend to make most of my "ordinary" medieval-style rosaries from 8-millimeter beads with 10-millimeter markers. Those seem to be the approximate dimensions of the smaller medieval rosaries I see (there are some much bigger). These particular ones have 12-millimeter markers because that was the size that was on sale at the time.

Red coral was -- again, judging by paintings -- a very popular choice for rosary beads in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, for those wealthy few who could afford them. I don't know whether red coral in that period was widely faked, but I would be surprised if it wasn't. These glass beads certainly look to me like the sort of thing someone might choose in the Middle Ages who wanted a cheaper imitation of coral. A knowledgeable eye, seeing these close up, would know they weren't real coral, if only because of the absence of flaws and scratches -- glass is significantly harder than coral. It's also noticeably heavier, but you'd have to pick the beads up to know that. From a few feet away, these would probably have looked quite splendid.

I commented once that red coral beads with rock-crystal gauds seems to be a combination one sees a lot in medieval rosary paintings -- but when challenged, I couldn't come up with a lot of examples. I've collected more examples since, but it's gradually become apparent that it is indeed a common combination, but specifically in the rosaries shown in paintings of the Virgin Mary and saints. That means we don't know whether it was actually a popular combination in real life, or whether it represents some sort of ideal "type" of the rosary, thought suitable for particularly holy contexts.

Since I was trying to assemble some representative types of rosaries, I also made this string, which is the full fifteen decades recommended by Alanus de Rupe, rather than the more common sort abbreviated to five decades.

I've seen several 15th- and 16th-century rosaries with a heart as a pendant rather than a cross, so I looked for something that seemed suitable and came up with this pendant from Rosary Workshop. It's not quite ideal for a rosary, since it has a hollow back rather than being cast in the round, but I liked it.

A heart encircled by a crown of thorns today is usually thought of as representing devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In its present form, this is a post-medieval devotion, having become popular as a result of visions experienced by Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, who died in 1690. But it can readily be demonstrated that a number of medieval saints and lay people also cherished a special devotion to the heart of Jesus, though it wasn't necessarily represented in the same way. Rosary Workshop doesn't know the exact source or date of this particular heart, but it reminds me most strongly of Mexican and Central American "milagros", so that would be my guess.

String theory

2008-08-06T10:54:00.000-07:00

It's been awhile since we discussed threads. Up until about 1600, most paternosters and rosaries were strung on a thread of some sort. Having had some interesting discussions on thread with the folks in the Paternosters Yahoo group, I thought it might be a good time to revisit the subject.

The original threads of old paternosters and rosaries seldom survive. Having now owned and worn a number of medieval rosaries, I have a better appreciation of why that might be. Even silk thread -- which was probably the strongest available fine thread in the Middle Ages -- is neither unbreakable nor immortal. I don't wear my medieval-style reproductions all that often, and some of them are on their second or third stringing within ten years. Friends to whom I've given such beads have brought them back for re-stringing after as little as eighteen months, and discussions on some of the mailing lists I subscribe to include comments from people who wear necklaces of Anglo-Saxon or Viking-style beads, who also report that these need to be re-strung every couple of years (which provides an opportunity to re-arrange them, so it's not all bad).

(By the way, the photos in this post are just here as decoration. They are paternosters I've made at various times, mostly as gifts.)

Threaded rosaries are inherently more prone to breakage than the wire-chain construction so common in modern rosaries. My guess is that wire-chain construction began to gain in popularity at the end of the 16th century for precisely this reason. Wire chain has some disadvantages -- it does tangle and kink, sometimes quite badly, as the wire loops at the end of each link catch on each other. Putting each bead on a separate wire link also means you cannot slide the beads along the thread as you count them; instead, the entire rosary is passed through the hands, one bead at a time, which gives a different "feel" to the counting process.

Thread breakage in period must have been very common. I no longer wonder why so many of the threaded paternosters and rosaries mentioned in 15th- and 16th-century wills and inventories have strange numbers of beads, such as 114, 32 or 83 ;)

Why and how threads break depends on what kind of stresses the thread is subjected to. Tensile strength is one factor -- how hard it is to break a thread by pulling on the ends. Another factor is resistance to abrasion -- how much the thread is weakened by the friction of beads sliding back and forth. A third factor is "fatigue" -- how much something is weakened by being repeatedly bent in different directions. Silk thread is pretty good on the first, not good on the second, and the third is (as far as I know) no problem at all. Metal wire is very good on the first two, not so good on the third.

One thing to consider is that medieval silk thread may well have had more tensile strength than modern silk thread, so perhaps modern experience is not quite comparable. Most silk thread today is machine-spun, which requires that the very long silk fibers be chopped into short pieces. "Reeled" silk, which preserves the original fiber length, is likely to be stronger, and in fact a lot of modern synthetic fibers like nylon make strong thread at least partly for the same reason. Much of the silk thread available in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (if you could afford silk at all) was reeled, so this may have made a difference. It would be interesting to test the two types and see how different they are.

Another thing to consider is how much care is taken by the wearer of the beads to keep them out of situations where they might break. Modern rosaries are often rather carelessly knocked around, carried loose in the bottom of a pocket or purse, or perhaps hung from a car's rear-view mirror (however much this is frowned on by safety experts!). In the Middle Ages, rosaries seem to have been more often worn out in the open like jewelry, often pinned to clothing, wound around an arm or hanging from a belt. This puts them in situations where they are very likely to catch on something, and I've had several sets of beads do exactly that while I was wearing them -- a dangling loop catching on a doorknob, for instance, or the most recent instance where the cross at the end of my Saint Hedwig beads got caught in the crack of a wooden bench, and the string snapped when I stood up quickly.

I would guess, however, that silk thread's major weakness is from abrasion due to friction. It seems to have been the custom to slide each bead along the thread as it is counted while praying. The beads can also slide back and forth as they are picked up or put down, worn or carried. As far as I can tell, medieval rosaries did not have knots between each bead (as, for instance, pearl necklaces often do). That would have interfered with sliding them, and incidentally it also means that if the thread does break you are likely to lose several beads rather than just one or two. (So far I've mostly been lucky enough to find all the beads when mine have broken, though there are still three little red glass beads in my car somewhere.)

Friction between beads and thread also depends on craftsmanship. Virtually all modern beads are machine-made, and the holes are likewise drilled by machine. This guarantees a smooth hole inside, but it can leave fairly sharp edges where the hole enters or leaves the bead. I would guess that when beads were made by hand, the openings of the holes could have been smoothed with a file, and if so, abrasion would have been lessened.

Other threads available at the time probably shared some of these weaknesses. The most plausible thread for rosaries for those who could not afford silk is probably linen or hemp. Both of these are fairly strong in terms of tensile strength -- especially if the linen is "line" spun using the full length of the fibers -- but they are also not as smooth as silk, which would have increased the friction between thread and beads. Wool thread is not very likely as a stringing material because it also has a rough surface, and compared to the others, it is relatively short-fibered and has much less tensile strength. A single reeled silk fiber may be dozens of feet long in the uncut state. Linen and hemp fibers are often as long as the plant is tall, as much as three or four feet. The longest wool fibers I know of are six to eight inches, and they are far more commonly found in the one- to three-inch range.

Posts in this series:

String or Nothing
The thread thread
String Theory
Threads of silk and gold
Wired
Flexwire
Of flexwire and time machines

Pretty pictures

2008-08-04T09:09:00.001-07:00

Since the early days of this blog, I've made comments from time to time about the attempts people make to create new, medieval-style rosaries based on what we know about beads in the Middle Ages. Trying to make replicas and re-creations is always interesting, and can sometimes teach us a lot about what the historical artifacts were like and how they were made.

Such attempts are, of course, ultimately imperfect, because we aren't in the Middle Ages and don't have a lot of complete, detailed evidence about exactly what medieval paternosters and rosaries were like. Nor are we medieval people, so we are sure to guess wrong at times about how they would have done things. Nor (as I mentioned in Creative Shopping and More Creative Shopping) do we have exactly the same materials available that they did. So all such attempts will involve compromises. But that's part of the challenge, part of the (dare I say) fun. ;)

I fairly often make such medieval-style rosaries as gifts, and since I just finished a batch of them, I thought I'd share some photos, and talk a bit about the decisions I made in making them and why I made them as I did.

I should point out that these are not "data", and I don't think anyone else should necessarily use them as models. They are not medieval, though I think they are reasonable approximations in some ways, with some additional compromises made for the sake of the particular people I'm giving them to.

This one, for instance, I made for someone as a thank-you. She's a professional artist, and since I've seen her work I know she likes these colors. And someone had given me a strand of the dyed, somewhat irregular freshwater pearls that are so common in the bead catalogs these days. The marker beads, by the way, are leftover jasper from my green jasper paternoster.

But.... dyed pearls in the Middle Ages? No, the technology for creating intense, permanent color on pearls was only developed within the last few decades. Pearls can be dyed with fabric dyes, but the color tends to be pale and to fade fairly quickly. And dyeing pearls doesn't seem to have been in fashion in the Middle Ages, perhaps because pearls were so astronomically expensive in the first place (more valuable than diamonds, at least some of the time).

This next one was made for someone who likes (as I do) the combination of fairly dark and saturated blue, red and green. The marker beads are lampworked ovals with gold foil, which does seem to be a style of bead that was made in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance, though I have no evidence one way or the other about their use in rosaries.

I'm not very satisfied with the tassel on this one. Tassel-making is my least favorite part of making medieval-style rosaries, and also the most fiddly, expensive and time-consuming, but the ready-made tassels I can find for sale are even more expensive and tend to be made of rayon, which doesn't stand up well to wear. I also haven't studied medieval tassels in enough detail to know much about whether multicolored tassels were in fashion, or if so when or where, or how they were constructed, whether the colors were randomly mixed throughout the strands or in sections, or for that matter what stitches were used to secure them.

It's clear from surviving beads and from paintings that the charms and accessories that were hung from medieval rosaries were not necessarily religious. But the dragonfly charm on this string is quite modern, both in concept and in style. (The recipient likes dragonflies.) The charm is made from cast base metal, colored with a modern resin rather than a true enamel. Also, for some reason dragonflies don't seem to be very frequent as an artistic motif in the Middle Ages. I don't know why, but they don't seem to have attracted much symbolism, either positive (like lions or eagles) or negative (like snakes or foxes).

I'm much happier with this next rosary, which also contains swirled and foiled beads. This is for someone who likes red, gold, and all things Italian. I chose amber-colored glass beads because I made it to go with a particular dress that I hadn't seen yet, and while different amber and yellow hues often look all right together, reds are much more difficult to match.

I'm a bit concerned about this string, because the thread seemed to snag once or twice as I was pulling it through the beads. I felt them with my fingers, and slid the beads back and forth a few times, and didn't find any rough spots, but lampworked beads are made by winding hot glass onto a "mandrel" or rod, and since their holes are not drilled, but formed as the bead is formed, there may be rough spots inside where I can't see them.

By wearing, using and giving medieval-style paternosters, I've become very aware that, as I tell the recipients, silk thread is neither immortal nor unbreakable. Beads threaded on silk will have to be re-threaded, at least once every few years, and perhaps more often if they are worn a lot. The average lifespan seems to be about two years, which is less than I would have thought. I do have some theories about string, which I plan to write about at some point.

More pretty pictures another time ;)

A thousand flowers

2008-07-17T15:55:00.000-07:00

part 2

I posted a few days ago about one type of lampworked beads used in paternosters, namely the kind with looped and dragged surface decoration. Everything else I know about lampworked beads should easily fit into one more post, with some room left over! ;)

Another fairly easy technique for decorating the surface of lampworked beads is to roll them in "frit" -- which is what glass workers call little ground-up bits of glass. "Frit" can be made from leftover bits of glass in whatever colors are available, ground up and sifted to produce bits of whatever size range the glassmaker wants.

The hot bead is rolled in the frit, and when the resulting bits are melted into the surface of the bead, you get random dots of color, something like the beads below. (These have a thick layer of clear glass added over the spotted core.)

500 Jahre Rosenkranz includes one rosary made from spotted, or as the description says, "marbled" glass beads. Unfortunately the photo is small, black and white and terrible, but here it is, for what it's worth:

Millefiori

The gift rosary I made that prompted me to investigate lampworked beads in the first place is shown below, and it's the reason these two posts are titled "A thousand flowers." That's the literal translation of "Millefiori," the type of beads I used for the Ave beads.

I will happily recommend Venetian Bead Shop, where I bought these: they carry a wide variety of colors, shapes, foiled and sparkly beads, swirls, hand-blown hollow beads, and many other types traditionally made in Murano, the glassmaking district near Venice. Their shipping is fast and their prices very reasonable. Occasionally they are out of stock of a particular color, but seldom for long.

Millefiori beads are created by first making a rod of glass out of many smaller rods, arranged in a flower-like pattern and melted together. The rod is then drawn out into a long, thin cane, and slices from such a cane will all show the same flower pattern. To make a millefiori bead, several such slices will be applied to the surface of a hot bead of some other color, which is then quickly rolled smooth. (You can see that these beads are hand made, because some of them are more smooth than others!)

These beads are quite nice: I've seen so-called "millefiori" beads from other countries that are much less well done and look more like multi-colored mishmash than flowers. These are sometimes labeled as "ethnic," which always makes me snort.

What I don't know here is when and where millefiori beads have been actively made and traded. The technique seems to have been known in Italy in the 15th century, but this says nothing about whether it was popular or rarely used. Wikipedia (for what it's worth) seems to think that millefiori beads have only become really common in the last century or so. Resources, anyone?

This paternoster was made for someone who likes "everything Italian," hence the bright colors. I tried a couple of different shades of plain blue glass for the marker beads before I found one that looked right.

This just about concludes all I know about the use of lampworked beads in rosaries! But I'd certainly like to find out more.

Let a thousand flowers bloom

2008-06-19T16:23:00.001-07:00

I was reminded the other day that I'd promised to look into the topic of "lampworked" glass beads, and the fact that I just made a gift rosary this month out of Italian "millefiori" beads meant that this was the month I finally went and looked at my books.

It's clear from a number of sources that glass was a popular medium for paternoster or rosary beads in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. While beads of gold, silver, amber, coral and semi-precious stones are valuable enough to be mentioned in the wills and inventories of the wealthy, there were hundreds and thousands of humbler folk who aspired to nothing more precious than beads of wood, bone, or glass to count their prayers. Few of those survive, and there is less written about them, so finding anything about them takes some digging.

Making glass beads by hand uses very simple technology and attracts many people who are looking for an interesting craft project, especially in more recent years when the basic equipment and the glass for making such beads have become easy to find and affordable. You can buy yourself a torch, some basic tools, protective goggles and enough glass rods to get you started for a couple of hundred dollars or less. If you're not intimidated by having a small blowtorch burning within inches of your fingers, you can produce some remarkably pretty beads with a bit of practice, including many that you wouldn't be able to find for sale. And if you're interested in historical glass, you can make good replicas of beads worn by the Vikings, Anglo-Saxons and similar peoples. They make impressive gifts, too.

Naturally, the question I'm most interested in is what types of lampworked beads were used in historical rosaries. I knew I had seen a few instances of glass beads with such designs, and this week I went back to look again at the photos and see what I could discover.

The exhibition catalog 500 Jahre Rosenkranz: 1475-1975: Kunst und Frömmigkeit im Spätmittelalter und ihr Weiterleben, from a 1975 exhibition in Köln (Cologne, Germany) has two examples of rosaries made from lampworked beads. One is shown in a fairly good, clear picture, although it's in black and white:

These beads are described as "blue glass, decorated with yellow stripes (Murano)." They are tentatively dated to the 17th century (with a question mark!) and are in the Diocesan Museum collection in Köln. All the glass beads in this rosary are of the same type; the marker beads are slightly larger and each of them is set off by small bone beads and rather clumsy bone disks or caps on either side. Also included in this rosary are carved bone "Five Wounds" markers: two small arms ending in hands, two feet, a heart (?) and a skull.

The smaller beads seem to be arranged in six groups of nine (?) beads (though the last group now has only six). Attached to the loop is a short straight string with a marker bead, three small beads and another marker, as on a modern rosary. This is rather an odd number, and my guess is that, like many old rosaries, this has been re-strung at some point, perhaps in an attempt to make it look more "modern." Or it could be simply missing a few beads, which not rare either.

Iclear from looking at these beads that the decoration is not just a simple "stripe." However, once you are reasonably adept at making lampworked beads, it's not too difficult to do.

The first step is to melt a thin rod of a contrasting colored glass and make a series of loops back and forth on the surface of the bead:

A metal pick can then be used to "drag" the centers of these loops downward.

Repeated around the bead, this makes a nice looped or "feathered" pattern.

The middle bead in the illustration above starts with a series of straight red stripes instead of continuous loops, and the other two beads illustrate open loops (top) and closed loops with a yellow filling (bottom).

Using different stripes and dragging some parts up and some parts down can produce some very complex-looking zigzagged and "feathered" beads, but it's really just surface decoration and simple to do.

So we have evidence of beads with at least this simple style of decoration being used for a paternoster. They were likely more expensive than ordinary glass beads because of the additional labor -- certainly today these beads aren't cheap unless you make them yourself or know someone who makes their own.

Lampworked beads are something I don't know as much about as I'd like to. I have books on Egyptian and medieval glass, but there are very few beads in them and they're rather earlier than I'm really interested in. When in the Middle Ages did beads with this looped-and-dragged technique become common in Europe? Who made them and where? How far did they travel in trade? Who could afford them? I'd welcome some book recommendations if anyone knows of good sources.

More about "complex" glass beads another time.

Details, details....

2008-05-17T15:54:00.000-07:00

Sometimes we're lucky, and someone has published books with BIG pictures of paternoster beads -- like the book with the St. Anthony pictures I was talking about awhile back. But when we're not so lucky, about the only way we can really study depictions of beads in detail is to travel to where the original paintings are and take some closeup photos ourselves. (Then again.... maybe that's a GOOD thing? {grin})

Anyway, since I had the opportunity, I've extracted and enlarged some of the photos I took recently that show details of beads. These are especially for my friends who do reproduction metalwork, some of whom I know (hope?) are contemplating making some of the types of beads and rosary parts that are not to be found on today's market. (Hint, hint!)

I've had an especially hard time finding on the modern market anything like the large, pierced, silver or gold beads, the originals of which were probably pomanders, filled with some fragrance-producing substance. Judging by how common it is to see one of these rosaries with one very large metal bead, these must have been very popular historically. Unfortunately for us, most of them were probably melted down for their precious-metal content when they went out of fashion. Surviving large beads are more likely to have been carved of boxwood or ivory, which don't melt.

But most of what's on the market right now in the way of pierced metal beads is either (1) too small to stand out as gauds on a string of 10mm to 14mm beads, or (2) of some Victorian or Art-Nouveau design that just doesn't look right.

Once in awhile, I'll find some large pierced-metal balls -- especially around Christmas -- but the only difference is that instead of being too small and of the wrong design, those tend to be too big and of the wrong design. They seem to start at about 3 inches in diameter and go up from there. The pomanders I see in paintings seem to be between about an inch and two inches in diameter. (And while I'm at it, I'd wish for reproduction pomanders that were plated base metal rather than solid silver, so they would be somewhat affordable.)

So without further ado, here are some nice details.

This one is from a painting I didn't get a good photo of overall, because the lighting kept creating spots of glare where it reflected off the varnish. (My detail photo isn't completely sharp, either.) Her identity is unknown and so is the name of the artist, but this was clearly half of a pair of marriage portraits. Note that her beads are black, possibly jet.

(As always, click on these photos to enlarge them.)

I've mentioned this one earlier, but here it is enlarged as far as I can:

The by-now-very-familiar-to-me artist Bartholomäus Bruyn the Elder painted another pair of these marriage portraits in 1528, this time of a Mr. and Mrs. Pilgrum -- Gerhard Pilgrum and his wife Anna Strauss Pilgrum. (They can easily be identified because their coats of arms are part of the picture.)

I am somewhat embarrassed by this photo. The online photos of these portraits that I was able to find are all extremely dark or very "off" on the colors. I took this in daylight, so the colors are much better. Unfortunately, this pair of portraits is displayed inside a glass case -- which reflects -- and directly facing a large wall of windows, which provides a lot of light to be reflected. I've managed to fade the impression a bit, but you can clearly see a reflection of me taking the photo -- especially since I happened to be wearing a nice, bright white shirt that day. {blush}

I was almost equally embarrassed to suddenly realize while I was there that Bartholomäus Bruyn actually lived and worked in Cologne -- I've seen a number of other "rosary portraits" that he painted, but I hadn't noticed where exactly they were from, since I found them on the Marburg Foto Index, which has things from all over Germany and beyond.

In this case, we get a bonus: not just one, but both members of the pair are holding beads. Here is a closeup of Gerhard's rosary:

And Anna's:

The closeup photos were actually easier to take, because I was able to move in close and block the light from the window behind me.

And finally, another rosary of red coral beads with a gold pomander. Sorry about the blur on this one too. (I've definitely decided after this trip, I hate my camera. I need a different one.)

This is from a portrait thought to be that of Maria Pastoir. Whoever the subject was, she was painted at age 45 in 1538. (Oh, and this photo isn't mine. It's good. ;)

Anyone studying German women's headdresses is going to want to collect all of Bruyn's portraits, because they have very good views of the folded and draped linen constructions popular on respectable heads at the time.

Pictures from Köln:

In living color
More living color
A Joos van Cleve altarpiece
Details, details

A Joos van Cleve altarpiece

2008-05-09T15:45:00.000-07:00

Another of the paintings I saw while in Cologne was this scene showing the Death of the Virgin by Joos van Cleve the Elder, painted in 1515 for a prominent Cologne family's estate chapel.

This was one of the Wallraf-Richartz Museum's "Pictures of the Week" in February 2007, so there is a fairly extensive article on it online here. To summarize briefly: Joos van der Beke, better known as Joos van Cleve the Elder, painted in Antwerp from 1511-1540. The Hacquenay family of Cologne, for whom this was painted, may have originally come from the Netherlands as well. Side wings of the altarpiece show members of the family.

The painting is after a "template" for such scenes developed by Hugo van der Goes. The apostles surround Mary's deathbed. In the center, Saint Peter in Mass vestments leads the rites for the dying, and on the far right margin, Saint Thomas enters the room (according to the curator I was talking with, we know it's Thomas because he's the apostle who's always late for things....). The apostles are not carrying their usual "attributes" (knife, spear, shell, etc.) so otherwise it's hard to tell who's who.

I'm particularly curious about who this fellow is to Peter's right, carrying the holy water bucket, because he's wearing a large rosary around his neck.*

There's another set of beads casually lying on a small bench by Peter's feet, together with an object rather like a gravy boat, which I think contains a supply of incense. Both rosaries are colored like wood, though the beads don't show much detail. Both are rather loosely strung and both seem to have brown-colored cords, suggesting linen or hemp. But the one draped across the bench has a non-matching green tassel, which from the highlights painted into it seems intended to represent silk.

The beads around the bucket-carrying apostle's neck, on the other hand, have a pendant cross, and it's nice to get such a detailed look at a type of cross that may have been used on rosaries. It's more or less the same color as the beads, and since it's painted at an angle, we can also see that the four arms of the cross are all more or less cone-shaped with their points toward the center. It's suspended from the cord by a ring that looks as if it's rigidly fixed, perhaps made in one piece with the cross. The cross could be wood, but the ring suggests it might also be cast metal. (I'm sure I've seen something like this for sale, but at the moment I can't remember where.)

An interesting detail is that the cross is threaded onto the string in the middle of a decade, where you wouldn't necessarily expect to see it. But I've seen a number of rosaries more or less from this era that also carry various medals or charms in the middle of decades. This placement of the cross, if authentic, suggests it is not "counted" as part of the rosary and that no particular prayers are said as you come to its place on the string. This is in contrast to later rosaries, where the Credo is recited while holding the cross. On the other set of beads, however, the tassel comes between two decades and probably marks the starting point for prayers.

I always count the beads in paintings (as you may have noticed if you read this blog regularly) and the results are often interesting. A lot of the bucket-carrying apostle's beads are hidden, but those that are showing seem to be in plausible groups of ten. The beads on the bench definitely look like groups of ten too: we can see two full decades, six beads from the next decade and four beads from another. The loop we can see hanging down on the back side of the bench has two small beads on one side, one on the other, and a large marker bead in the center. Since what's showing on the front is two almost equal groups of beads, this suggests that the loop hanging down the back is probably more or less symmetrical too, making the total four decades.

*Score one for those who point out that historically, people sometimes did wear rosaries around their necks, despite what your Catholic grandmother always told you.

Pictures from Köln:

In living color
More living color
A Joos van Cleve altarpiece
Details, details

Holy hats

2008-04-24T09:54:00.000-07:00

(Not terribly bead-related, this time, but on my recent trip -- you are going to get tired of hearing me say this -- I was fascinated by a lot of other things I saw as well.)

The Schnütgen Museum in Köln (Cologne, Germany) has some fascinating 15th- and 16th-century wooden figures of saints. I took photos of some of these, especially their hats, because I have friends who are interested in the details of German clothing.

Whether these hats correspond to what ordinary women and men actually wore on their heads, I don't know. Saints and other legendary figures in medieval and Renaissance art are notorious for wearing clothing that bears no relationship to reality. That's especially likely for saints like Mary Magdalene and the Three Wise Men, who were "exotic" characters. Even today, you see Bible illustrations that show people in rather vague, robe-like clothing that says more about the fact that they are Biblical characters than it does about what real people wore in the first century AD.

Here are some details from a carved wood altar panel. These rather crowded altarpieces with many figures seem to have been popular in the late 15th and early 16th century. You really have to stand there and look at them for awhile to appreciate them, because they are so full of detail. Here is an old photo from Bildindex of the one that particularly caught my attention:

This is a Passion Altar by Heinrich Douvermann, carved around 1530. Douvermann worked mostly in Kalkar in the Lower Rhine area, where the Saint Nicholas Church still has one of his pieces.

As is fairly common, this shows three scenes from left to right. The scene on the left is the taking down of Christ's body from the cross. In the center we see the lowering of the body into the tomb, and on the right the closed tomb with the guards sitting around it during the night.

In the scene on the left are three men and four women. The woman collapsing in the front is undoubtedly the Virgin Mary: both here and in the next scene she is the only woman wearing a veil over her head. One of the other women must be Mary Magdalene, since she is specifically mentioned as being present. The same four women (as you can tell by their headgear) appear in the center scene as well.

Here is a closeup of the "holy hats" on the lower two women in the left-hand scene. One has what looks like a gable hood in front, with a back decorated with netting. The other has something that looks like a puffed coif of some kind with a flat square on top.

And a closer view:

I didn't get a good photo of the third, upper woman on the left myself, but Bildindex has a photo of her from a different angle and without the cluttered background.

Like some other altarpieces, this one is actually made up of several pieces carved separately, and it's easier to see details when each piece is taken out and photographed separately. This woman is distinguished by the large roses on either side of her hat:

In the second scene, this same woman (wearing the same hat) appears kneeling in front of the tomb as Christ's body is lowered into it:

And in another photo from Bildindex, the woman with the puffed coif in the second scene is identifiable as Mary Magdalene, since she is holding a large covered cup, clearly meant to reperesent her ointment jar. This isn't visible in the assembled scene because her hands are hidden by a figure in front of her.

Also in the Schnütgen Museum were a couple of saint statues of about the same date, two of which I photographed for their especially interesting headgear.

One is Saint Margaret, identified by the dragon at her feet (which you can't see here). This statue originated in Brussels. Here's the rather amazing confection she's wearing on her head:

The other is Saint Elizabeth. This statue is from the Netherlands, and I'm not completely sure which of the several Saints Elizabeth this is: she appears to be pregnant, which suggests she is the mother of John the Baptist, though in that case I can't figure out why she is holding a book -- that's not usually one of this saint's attributes.

Finally, I was amused by this 15th-century statue of Saint Jerome. Note the dangling tassels of his (very anachronistic) cardinal's hat. I have cats, so I was utterly charmed to see Jerome's lion, which in this case is about the size of a large domestic cat. It's reaching up in very catlike fashion to play with the tassels. Saint Jerome seems to be enjoying it too.

The Holy Who?

2008-04-18T12:53:00.000-07:00

Here's another "Living Color" picture from my trip to Europe: I'd seen this painting before in black and white, and was quite happy to be able to see it in person and appreciate the color. Here's a black and white detail of the part I was especially interested in:

The title of this painting in German, "Der Heilige Sippe," is actually rather intriguing. It means "the Holy Kinship" and refers to the Virgin Mary's (legendary) extended family. As Sally Fisher explains in The Square Halo (probably my favorite book on iconography), church fathers in the Middle Ages tried to reconcile the mention in the Gospels of Jesus's "brothers" with their idea that Mary remained a virgin all her life. Their solution was to imagine that Mary's mother Anna had been married three times, each time having a daughter named Mary. The children of those other Marys -- whom we would probably call cousins -- are the "brothers."

The "Holy Kinship" is therefore composed of Anna, her three husbands, Mary and Joseph and the Infant Jesus, together with Mary's two half-sisters and their husbands and children. Quite a crowd. Here's the whole scene, which I was able to see "backstage" at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum (to whom, thanks again!).

(I was thankful to see, by the way, that other photos of this same painting have the same problem this one does: the white veils and white faces tend to "wash out" because the features are very delicately shaded. It's not just my camera this time.)

In this particular painting, the four women toward the top with haloes are the Virgin and Anna (in the center), with the "other" Marys to either side, each with her husband behind her. The Mary on the far left is the mother of the apostles John the Evangelist (with goblet) and James the Greater (with pilgrim's staff). The one on the far right (thanks to Internet sources) I can identify as the mother of the apostles James the Less, Simon and Jude (though I'm not sure which is which here) along with another son, Joseph "the Just."

The tribe is further enlarged here by two more holy families: toward the bottom of the painting on the left is Mary's cousin Saint Elizabeth, her husband Zacharias, and son John the Baptist (pointing to a sacrifical lamb). The child on the right is Saint Servatius, grandson of Elizabeth's brother and identifiable by his key and bishop's staff (with which he is poking a pesky dragon).

In the back row, other than the two uncles on either end, are four men: on the right, Anna's three husbands, with Joachim directly above his grandson Jesus. To the left of Mary is Saint Joseph, and (to arrive at the whole point of this exercise) he is holding a rosary in his right hand.

Joseph is another of those saints who is often shown with a rosary -- to the extent that when I see Saint Joseph now, I automatically look for it. It's not always there, but quite often.

This time it's a rather ordinary rosary, really: a sort of generic series of plain brown beads, probably representing wood. I've seen others like it, and thanks to the extreme closeup view I was able to get this time, I can see pretty clearly just how the artist painted it. It's rather schematic and without a lot of detail: just a few shading strokes and a highlight on each bead, and a very light shadow painted on the wall behind (which is a nice touch). I don't think the numbers of beads are supposed to be precise here: what we see is a group of 10 small beads and a group that looks like 14, unless seven beads are hiding in Joseph's hand (where there's not really room for them).

So how was the workshop?

2008-04-14T16:17:00.000-07:00

I've posted pretty pictures, but so far haven't really addressed the main reason I was in Europe last month, namely two days of rosary workshops in Leiden, sponsored by the Textile Research Centre.

The first day was a hands-on session for just a few people on making medieval-style prayer beads. I provided basically the same kits I do when I'm teaching rosary classes at home, and we had great fun assembling them. New this time was a chance to try out a perle-cotton tassel for the "Zehner" kit (for a string of ten large beads), and it seemed to work quite well: not as authentic as silk, but much more affordable. I also saw people having quite a bit of trouble putting together the rosary with disk-shaped counters. I can see I have to experiment a little more with that kit, to make it easier to assemble.

This whole thing had its genesis when Dr. Gillian Vogelsang-Eastwood started collecting types of prayer beads for a "small" exhibit (her staff now tease her about this), which she thought might run to 25 or so examples. The collection is now at 250-plus sets of beads, especially after several very generous contributions from religious communities. We got to admire a number of the display boards, which were brought over to our seminar site on the back of a bicycle (!) and set up around the room. (I also brought a few more sets of beads with me that I'd promised to contribute to the display, so you'll see their pictures here.)

The second day was the formal conference. From what I could tell, the chief purpose of this gathering was to get the ball rolling, focus a variety of people's attention on prayer beads as something interesting to research, and generate enthusiasm for pursuing such studies further. I think it succeeded splendidly; the seminar room (barely) held about thirty people and was full of conversation at breaks, lunch, and afterward. Quite a wide variety of levels of experience were represented, from a couple of academic-level papers to several interested people for whom this was more or less a first exposure to the topic.

Actually the talk that interested me most was Dr. Niko Arts talking about the beads found in the graves in his recent archeological excavation at Eindhoven, even though he doesn't have a lot of conclusions about them as yet. I hope I can say a bit more about what he's found in another article sometime (only with his permission, of course).

Of less immediate interest to me personally, Tibetan, Korean and Japanese prayer beads were presented at some length. All three traditions have multiple sizes, colors and arrangements of beads for particular purposes, and the TRC now has many examples for its future display. One thing I think was new to most of us who have a Western perspective: we were reminded that there are cultures and belief systems where it is very significant which hand the beads are held in. I don't think I'm the only one who has never even thought to look at depictions of Western beads with this in mind.

Also very interesting was Dr. Ellen Raven from Leiden University, who spoke about the iconography of Hindu prayer beads. This was another topic I think most of us were totally unfamiliar with, so her slides were fascinating. She focused mainly on tracing the appearance of prayer beads on statues of gods and divine beings, such as Agni, the god of fire, shown here in a photo from the Huntingdon Museum archives. This is of a stone sculpture from the 11th century.

A common stereotype of Hindu gods in art is that they have multiple arms -- the most familiar example being Shiva, who may have as many as six or eight. I was interested to hear that this is something that appears only gradually; many of the earlier surviving statues, like this one, show gods and divine beings with only two arms. Later, more arms are added as the god acquires more attributes, so all of them can be shown at once. One hand may hold a torch, another a string of beads, another a book, still another a water jug, sheaf of grain or whatever is appropriate. This must be very convenient -- Christian saints with only two hands are at a decided disadvantage!

I learned a number of interesting things at this gathering and made some contacts I think I'll be very happy to have, including a couple of folks from the beading-society side of things, who are likely to know more about the history of Venetian beads (for instance) than I could easily lay my hands on. There will likely be more activity in the future, so it will be interesting to see what develops. The TRC is actively looking for a new home, and Dr. Vogelsang is already contemplating a permanent prayer bead exhibit there.

More living color

2008-04-05T12:05:00.000-07:00

I noticed my "travelogue" was getting a bit lengthy, and I still had more to say, so here's the continuation.

I went to Mass on Easter morning in the Kölner Dom (Cologne cathedral), with the Cardinal Archbishop presiding (this being an opportunity that doesn't come along every day!). It was, as one would expect, quite beautiful, and also FREEZING cold. I don't know whether the building simply doesn't have heat (after all, none of them did in the Middle Ages) or whether it simply can't be used at the moment because of current construction. (And I didn't have that essential medieval winter accessory, a brazier, with me ;) My German isn't good enough to follow much of what the Archbishop said, but I believe he did apologize for the cold.

But since this was, after all, mainly a research trip, I spent the afternoon of Easter Sunday in a museum.

I was very happy with my visit to the Schnütgen Museum, which is nicely settled into its new home in another former church (Saint Cecilia), though they are still working on the attached new building that will eventually give them a much expanded display space.

As it is, it is an utterly amazing place. (There's a photo on their web page in the link above.) Dozens of medieval wood sculptures, many rescued in the late 19th century from church attics and basements, sit right out in the open where you can practically walk right up and put your nose against them to see all the details (though no doubt state-of-the-art security alarms would go off if you actually touched them). Since I was there on Easter Sunday afternoon, I very nearly had the entire place to myself -- I think I saw perhaps four or five other visitors in three hours.

Down in the crypt -- again, the very last display room -- I was glad to see the rosary displayed that I had particularly hoped to see. It's the chain of seven skulls from 16th-century Mexico that I discussed in some detail a couple of years ago.

It's really a shame that the museum hasn't published big, gorgeous color pictures of this rosary and all its parts. The only photos I could find when I wanted to talk about this earlier were black and white catalog photos from the Marburg Foto Index (informally known as "bildindex") and they are not very clear. This piece is also featured in the 2006 exhibit catalog Zum Sterben schön : Alter, Totentanz und Sterbekunst von 1500 bis heute (which translates roughly as "Beautiful Death: Age, the Dance of Death, and the Art of Death from 1500 to today"), but again, there's only one photo of the whole string, and not a very large one.

There's more than one reason to wish for big photos. As you'll remember if you read the previous series, each of these skulls opens to reveal two tiny panels, each showing a religious scene carved in boxwood, a very dense wood that allows very fine detail carving. You can see the Marburg photos of a few of these scenes here. (Keep in mind that each skull is perhaps an inch high!) I did not have time before I left to slog through a complete translation of the discussion of these scenes in Zum Sterben schön, but from a quick look at it, I suspect I disagree with some of their conclusions as to what these scenes represent.

The other reason I wanted some better photos is purely artistic. There is an entire genre of these tiny devotional boxwood carvings. One of their outstanding features is that many of these scenes have a distinctive background, painstakingly constructed from bits of iridescent blue feathers. This in fact is one of the clues that leads art historians to conclude that these pieces came originally from Mexico, where native traditions such as featherwork combined with the new arts introduced by the Spanish to produce some astonishing works of art.

Black and white photos just don't convey this adequately:

But because I was there in person, I was able to get a whole series of photos that let us admire these now in all their glory.

Edited to add: As a bonus, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is currently featuring an exhibition of Native American feather work called Radiance from the Rainforest: Featherwork in Ancient Peru, which is well worth looking at, even just the online images.

Pictures from Köln:

In living color
More living color
A Joos van Cleve altarpiece
Details, details

In living color

2008-04-03T10:22:00.000-07:00

I'm home from the trip to Germany and the Netherlands, and it was quite productive... barring the usual mishaps with misplaced luggage, changing time zones, and so forth. But I have lots of pictures to show off, and months worth of interesting paternoster-related bits to write about.

Here's my proof that I was actually there: those are my toes you see in this photo of the cast-metal hole covers in the streets of Köln (which is what you call Cologne, Germany when you're speaking German).

My first appointment was at the Wallraf-Richarz Museum, which has a splendid collection of medieval and Renaissance paintings. I was able to go "back stage" and take close-up photos of a number of paintings that I'd only seen in black and white -- for example, this one:

And now I have this:

I also found time to stop by the Church of St. Andreas, which turns out to be just a couple of blocks from the Kölner Dom (the Cathedral). Actually it was quite easy to walk everywhere in Köln, since essentially everything I wanted was in the center of town, which is quite compact. I spent a few quiet minutes in the crypt of St. Andreas, where Saint Albertus Magnus is buried in a Roman stone sarcophagus, but my main reason for being there was to look at the Rosary Society altarpiece, which has yet another of those scenes of the Virgin Mary and Infant Jesus with a (rather anachronistic) string of rosary beads. Unfortunately I couldn't get good pictures, since while the painting is quite large, it's mounted rather high up on a wall and I couldn't get a good angle. I may try again if I have more time on another visit.

Then I was off to Munich for a few days, where I went off in the wrong direction more than once on the excellent, but slightly confusing tram system (though I always got where I was going, in the end). I was able to look at a couple of interesting rosaries backstage at the Bayerischen Nationalmuseum, but I probably spent more time ogling the very large and fascinating collection of royal knicknacks at the Residenz Museum's Schatzkammer.

The Residenz is the former palace of the rulers of Bavaria, and the Schatzkammer is their collection of "treasures," which include lots of gold, jewels, ingenious things carved of amber and rhinoceros horn, silver and so forth. I spent quite a bit of time trying to get the best photos I could of the twenty or so rosaries on display. Many of them date from later than the periods I'm most interested in, so for the most part they are fairly standard rosaries, and they are interesting mostly for the materials they are made of and the medals and accessories that go along with them. Here are a random few beads from one of the displays:

One of the pieces I especially wanted to see was the green emerald rosary I had modeled this one after. It was in the same display case as the beads above, but of course (since I wanted to see it) it was way in the back of the case, making good photography difficult. I was also a bit disappointed to see that it wasn't specially noted or described in any detail, since I think that, if only for sheer ostentation value, a rosary made entirely out of emeralds outshines a lot of the other things in the collection. More than that -- not only was it in the back of the case, it was actually dusty. Tsk, tsk, tsk.

Back to Köln for Easter weekend, I had a chance to go to the three remaining museums on my list: the Domschatz (Cathedral treasury), the Schnütgen Museum (of which more later) and the former Diocesan Museum, which moved last year into new quarters at the ruined Church of St. Kolumba a few blocks from downtown.

At Kolumba, they are still in the process of moving things from and to storage, so I couldn't make an appointment to see any of their large collection of beads. There were no beads on display either, since this particular museum is now designed as a place for contemplation rather than for historical study, with a lot of open space and about two-thirds modern religous art to one-third historical art. The historical pieces they do have on display are quite spectacular, though, and I was particularly happy to see, in the very last room, another painting that I had only seen in black and white. It's this one, called "Muttergottes in dem Erker" ("the Mother of God in a corner").

I am not a betting person, but I had made a bet with myself that the beads in this painting would turn out to be red: and sure enough, they are.

In color, this painting strikes me as an extraordinarily tender and lovely scene.

Pictures from Köln:

In living color
More living color
A Joos van Cleve altarpiece
Details, details

100 names, five stories

2008-03-26T13:06:00.000-07:00

There seems to be general agreement among those who discuss the 99 Islamic names for Allah that the 100th name of Allah is “hidden” or mysterious. Sufis and others may meditate on the “mystery” of the 100th name as a symbol of God’s transcendence, or as a symbol of the true nature of God, which the other 99 names only attempt to describe.

This is relevant to the rosary in a sort of indirect way: the ideal way to recite the Islamic tasbih, which is often called the Islamic "rosary," is to recite the 99 names of Allah, one per bead.

Until now, I have known four different stories about the 100th name.

I should make it clear that, as far as I know, all of these are folk tales or speculations, rather than established theology. I am not Muslim, and I wouldn't presume to say whether any of them have any basis in Islamic theology or not. Some are clearly intended to be humorous.

Here are the four stories, which I'm repeating from one of my earlier posts:

• The 100th name of Allah is known only to angels, since it's too holy to be entrusted to human beings.

• The 100th name will be revealed by the Mahdi (the prophesied redeemer of Islam) at the end of time.

• Allah will reveal the 100th name in the heart of each true believer who devoutly prays the other 99 names.

• The 100th name is known only to camels.(!)

Someone recently sent me a fifth story.

The story goes that whoever invokes Allah by his mysterious 100th name, all his prayers shall be granted.

Now at the present time, the only one who knows this 100th name is Satan, and Satan intends to use this on the Day of Judgement to have all his sins forgiven.

But what Satan doesn't know is that on Judgement Day, Allah will make him forget the 100th name...

(Personally, I still like the one about camels the best. It would explain such a lot... ;)

Six, seven, and the Servites

2008-03-24T16:12:00.000-07:00

While I'm in Europe, I'm posting a couple of excerpts from Bedes Byddyng, with a few extra notes, including some of the newer research I did for that book that I haven't discussed here before.

Quite a few other devotions exist in the Roman Church that use beads of various configurations. These can equally well be called “rosaries,” though they are most often called “chaplets” or “crowns” to distinguish them from the standard fifteen-decade rosary with mysteries. While new chaplets have been invented in all centuries, and in especially large numbers in the 19th and 20th, there are several that have longer histories. A few of them date back -- or might date back -- to well before 1600, including the the Franciscan Crown, the Brigittine rosary, the Rosary of the Passion or the Five Wounds (both of which I've discussed before), and possibly also the Seven Sorrows chaplet. (There's also the Trisagion chaplet, which I may get to soon).

The Franciscan Crown

The seven-decade Franciscan rosary has a unique format. Each decade of the Crown is dedicated to one of the Seven Joys of Mary: the Annunciation, Visitation, Nativity, adoration of the Magi, finding of the child Jesus in the Temple, the Resurrection, and the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin (which includes her coronation in heaven). (This combining of the Assumption and Coronation of Mary as one event was a common early variant for the five-decade rosary as well; in that case, the Last Judgement was used as the fifteenth Mystery.)

On the first Ave of each decade, the theme is introduced after the word "Jesus": for instance, “...and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus, whom thou didst joyfully conceive.”

The Franciscan Crown also adds two Aves after the last decade, for a total of 72, which according to one tradition is the number of years the Virgin Mary lived on earth.

The legendary origin of the Franciscan Crown says that it dates from a Franciscan novice’s vision of Mary in 1422, who told him that since he was now a poor friar and didn’t have money to bring her offerings of flowers any more, he could offer her spiritual “flowers” (Aves) which she would like even better. It should be noted, however, that this story, or one very similar, is also told about the five-decade rosary.

The Brigittine (six-decade) rosary

The six-decade or “Brigittine” rosary (actually 63 beads in all) may not be as old as the lifetime (1304–1373) of St. Birgitta of Sweden, after whom it’s named, but there are mentions of it from at least the 16th century and possibly earlier. Saint Birgitta may have used a string of paternoster beads, but this rosary was probably associated with her at some later time because it includes 63 Aves, the three additional ones being said after the last Pater Noster. These represent the number of years the Virgin Mary is supposed to have lived on earth, according to the Revelations of Saint Birgitta (clearly a different tradition than the Franciscan one).

The first written documentation of this rosary is a decree of the Congregation of Indulgences issued in 1714. This quotes a lost brief of Pope Leo X from 1515, granting an indulgence of one hundred days for each Ave to those reciting the Corona of St Bridget.

The Servite rosary (Seven Sorrows chaplet)

What prompted me to post about this in particular was a recent discussion on the Paternosters mailing list over at Yahoo!groups. I've done a bit more investigating and expanded what I wrote for Bedes Byddyng.

As we’ve seen with Saint Birgitta, the founding date of a religious Order does not necessarily indicate that its particular devotions all originated at that date. This is likely also the case with the Servite devotion known as the Seven Sorrows chaplet.

In 1240, seven members of a Florentine confraternity known as the Laudesi, or Praisers of Mary, were gathered in prayer, under the presidency of Alessio Falconieri. The Blessed Virgin appeared to them, surrounded by angels bearing the instruments of the Passion of Christ, and exhorted them to devote themselves to her service. These men formed the Order of Friar Servants of Mary (to give them their formal name) and adopted as their principal devotion the sorrows of the Virgin Mary at the foot of the Cross.

The Servites were not the only ones to celebrate this and similar devotions. Various lists of the Sorrows of Mary were in circulation, including lists of five, seven, fifteen and twenty-seven(!) sorrows, and not all the lists include the same items. The devotion has also been expressed as Our Lady of Sorrows, the Sorrowful Mother, or Nuestra Señora de la Soledad (solitude), commemorating Mary’s bereavement.

In 1413, this theme was given its own feast day in Germany, called the Feast of the Compassion of Mary. Later in the fifteenth century, this evolved in some places into a commemoration of the Five Sorrows of Mary, corresponding to the Five Wounds of Christ, or in others, of the Seven Sorrows, beginning with the prophecy of Simeon when the infant Jesus was presented in the Temple.

The question is when the Seven Sorrows devotion became a chaplet recited on beads. I have turned up no evidence one way or another about this so far. As I've said before, we cannot just assume that because certain prayers were said, that beads were necessarily used to count them. That is a separate invention and may have occurred at a quite different time. You can equally well count prayers by making marks on paper, or by moving pegs from one hole to another in a piece of wood, or even by counting on your fingers.

The Sorrows currently agreed on are those set forth for the Servites in 1668. This, if not before, may also have been when the prayers of the devotion were set. There are seven groups of seven Aves, with a Pater Noster at the end of each group.

These are the Seven Sorrows used in the chaplet:

(1) the prophecy of Simeon;
(2) the flight into Egypt;
(3) having lost the Holy Child at Jerusalem;
(4) meeting Jesus on his way to Calvary;
(5) standing at the foot of the Cross;
(6) Jesus being taken down from the Cross; and
(7) the burial of Christ.

In the absence of evidence, my own guess would be that that the Servite chaplet probably does not date quite as far back as the 1200s. (As ever, I'd be happy to be proved wrong by the evidence.) At that time, the little evidence we have suggests that beads were primarily used to count large numbers of Pater Nosters. Far more likely to me is that the Servite chaplet was part of the great variety of "chaplets" or devotional sequences of prayers circulating in the 1450s.

You may blame my degree in biology for the fact that I am fond of referring to these as a "primordial soup," Out of this wide variety, the rosary and related devotions have "evolved," in the sense that the most popular ones have been the ones to survive and spread.

Ooooooh, shiny!

2008-03-21T15:30:00.000-07:00

I am writing a few shorter, less serious posts at the moment, because when you read this I will be on a two-week research trip to Europe. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it ;)

I've been meaning for a while to share a few of the photos I've gleaned of some nice modern rosaries. These are from my "amazing what you can do these days" folder, in that all of them are in one way or another made from materials that couldn't have been used, or in some cases didn't exist, a few decades ago. All but the last are from rosaries for sale on eBay.

There's a bit of a historical purpose here, too. One of the challenges in making medieval-style or replica rosaries is that it requires some "creative shopping." By and large, unless we are bead makers or metal casters ourselves (and I'm not), we are limited to what's available (and affordable!) on the commercial bead market, and that can be frustrating because modern fads are not the same as what was in fashion in (say) 1483.

For glass beads, various iridescent coatings have become very popular in the last few decades. They go by various names, including "aurora borealis," "vitrail," "iris," and "luster." To the best of my knowledge, these finishes on beads didn't exist until very recent times; most of them are not simply sprayed onto the beads but require modern techniques like vapor deposition in a vacuum.

Likewise, in the last ten years or so it's become possible to make an affordable cultured pearl out of just about any glass bead shape, so we now have not only natural-shaped pearls, but flat, square, faceted, twisted, petal-shaped and cross-shaped pearls. Cultured pearls in mass production were not possible until the beginning of the 20th century, when techniques were invented to reliably create pearls "in the round" that were not attached to the wall of the pearl shell. I should add that while natural colored pearls do exist, bright, colorfast dyes for pearls like the ones shown here are also quite a new thing.

While various shaped glass beads can be made by hand, the mass production of pressed glass beads in a mold is also fairly recent, dating back only to the early 1800s. While beads of other glasslike substances, such as faience, have been known since ancient Egypt, beads of true glass were mostly shaped either by lampwork techniques (which involve melting) or were cut as if they were semi-precious stone, which was expensive and required a lot of hand labor.

At times I gripe a bit, because the newer bead types in some catalogs seem almost to be crowding out the plain rounds, ovals, simple cuts, and other shapes I look for when making replicas. But historical bead types do still exist, though you may have to look a bit harder for them.

Finding out just how recent some of the new techniques are has also given me a renewed appreciation for traditional glass beads like those from Murano that contain gold or silver foil and other enhancements. Before modern finishes, the options for adding "sparkle" or "bling" to paternoster beads were a lot fewer and more expensive. Foiled beads must have been quite a welcome invention; they aren't cheap, but neither are they solid silver or gold.

And finally, here's a rosary someone made just for fun, out of recycled faceted glass beads and miniature Christmas tree ornaments! This was made by a student at the school I work for as an art project a few years ago, and I keep it in my box of modern examples because I think it's cute. ;)

Anthony the ordinary

2008-03-12T19:41:00.000-07:00

Previous Saint Anthony posts:

Tickling Saint Anthony
More beads for Saint Anthony

Two more Saint Anthonys with paternoster beads today: one from Spain, one from the Netherlands, both from the third quarter of the 15th century.

Nuño Gonsalves painted the St. Vincent Altarpiece in 1467-69 for Lisbon Cathedral (it's now in the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga). The deacon Saint Vincent of Zaragoza is one of the patrons of Lisbon. This is a huge, six-paneled piece crammed with faces. The ones in the front rows seem to be saints, Portuguese royalty, and other famous figures, and behind them are the faces of about thirty spectators. (By the way, out of about 60 figures I count exactly two women in this picture: Saint Margaret kneeling in the front of the left central panel, who has a small dragon apparently dancing on her head and is also holding paternoster beads, and another woman behind her, who is thought to be the Infanta Isabel, daughter of King João I.) Saint Vincent appears dressed in red and gold deacons' robes in both of the central panels. Six panels is a bit unusual for an altarpiece, but if there was ever a seventh panel in the middle showing the Virgin and Child or some other scene, it's been lost or hasn't been identified yet.

Many of the figures (especially among the spectators) are thought to be portraits of actual 15th-century people from Lisbon, including the artist and Prince Henry the Navigator, though there's some uncertainty as to exactly who is who. There is more information here.

At any rate, Saint Anthony appears in a curious crouched position in the front of the second panel from the left, called the "Fishermen" panel. He shows next to no distinguishing marks, so my identification of him as Saint Anthony is based on his brown robe (which is apparently a signal meaning "hermit") and on what the book I got it from says. The photo in the book is rather small, so this is the best reproduction I can get, and it's not very good.

About all we can really see in this fuzzy photo is that his beads, too, are wood-colored, and they seem to be rather loosely strung. I can't even be sure of their shape -- they could be disk-shaped, they could be round or oval.

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

The real star of this series, however, is Saint Anthony's beads in the Portinari altarpiece, painted by Hugo van der Goes (1440-1482), and now in the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

In some ways these are the most interesting beads so far, because they are painted in a way that suggests these are real beads that might have been owned by a very ordinary person, painted (more or less) from life, rather than an abstract concept of beads (as the Ghent altarpiece beads seem to be). Here is Saint Anthony, on the left. The figure on the right is Saint Thomas the Apostle; that vertical pole he's holding is a spear, one of his attributes. Saint Anthony is nicely identified by his T-shaped staff and by the bell in his other hand.

Clothing historians often complain that they never get to see much of what ordinary people wore in history, since both the surviving garments and surviving documents such as wills and inventories focus mainly on the clothing of royalty, the Church, and the wealthy, and these are also about the only people who ever get their portraits painted. Well, here we get to see what I think are a very ordinary person's beads, and it's nice to get such a good look at them. (I love books with BIG photos!)

The beads themselves look very real. There are 28 beads that look like they are probably made of bone, shaped like fat rounded disks (rondelles), one or two fatter than the rest. There are seven transparent beads -- a very small one right above the little equal-armed cross, three smallish spheres, two large spheres, and one rondelle. The bead just below the cross might also be transparent and just doesn't look that way because it's against a dark background and shows no highlights or reflections -- or it might be black. Anyway it's another large sphere.

It's very interesting that these beads are so irregular in size and shape. Common sense suggests this could have been quite normal for the beads of a common, not too well-off person. They might have been homemade, or if they were bought, irregular beads would likely be cheaper. And if your purpose is to count prayers and not to show off (more expensive beads were often "conspicuous consumption" pieces) then a few irregularities don't matter.

The transparent beads I would guess to be glass, as the cheapest of the transparent materials available. (Amber and crystal were luxury materials.) Again they don't all match. If you compare the beads with the size of the saint's fingers, they are by modern standards quite large for rosary beads, the biggest nearly an inch across. I have a theory that the reason modern rosary beads are usually only about 1/4 that size is that modern people generally don't display their rosaries like jewelry, but stuff them into a pocket or purse.

What is probably not quite realistic is the bead count. Not counting the marker beads, I see groups of 5 (or 6), 10, 7, 5, and 5, which doesn't match any pattern of prayers I can think of.

Usually when I see bead numbers that don't make sense -- especially when the bead groups don't all have the same number -- I attribute it to artistic license, the artist painting to make a nice picture rather than feeling compelled to reproduce a real model exactly. These beads are otherwise so realistic looking, however, that I am now wondering whether that's a correct assumption, or whether there really were prayer beads like this, or whether perhaps the artist might be painting a real set of beads that has been damaged and imperfectly mended. I'll keep my eyes open now for more evidence on this question.

Or I can just add it to my list of questions for, "If I ever get to heaven, I am going to track down so-and-so and ask....."!

The dating game

2008-03-09T15:41:00.000-07:00

Now that my name has been out on the Internet for awhile, I occasionally get questions about rosaries that people have found or inherited. I'm happy to answer them when I can, though I know much less about beads from more recent times (anything later than about 1600).

One type of question that makes me a little nervous, though, is when I'm asked about the date of someone's rosary. Sometimes this is an inherited rosary, but most often, it's a question from someone who has a rosary they would like to sell on eBay. Almost inevitably, they would like me to tell them it's very old and valuable. Unfortunately, it's usually not.

I do run across a very few rosaries with at least some real documentation of their dates. There's one currently for sale by "Church-woman Antiques", for instance (they always have delightful things) that is known to be at least 95 years old because the current owner (who is 95) remembers being told by her mother that she'd had it since before the owner was born. But such family stories are seldom written down, and memories do change and become less reliable with time, or when the story is transmitted from one person to another.

Part of the reason most of the rosaries I'm asked about turn out to be modern is pure statistics. There are a lot of perfectly nice old rosaries out there in the world, but as any archaeologist will tell you, even very common artifacts that were manufactured in large quantities have very low survival rates over the long term. I am guessing here, but I'd say that probably 99% of all the rosaries in existence right now date from sometime after 1900. Of the remaining 1%, I'd guess that at least 90% of those date from sometime in the mid to late 1800s. That means that perhaps one out of every thousand rosaries is older than 1800 -- and I suspect I'm being generous here.

Rosaries older than that certainly exist, but in much smaller numbers. I've seen a fair number of filigree rosaries from Europe, a few of which may very well be 18th century (the 1700s) -- but I'm basing that on other people's reports that that is when the style became popular, and I don't know what the evidence is. Certainly most of the "filigree" rosaries I see are made (like the one shown here) from machine-stamped components, which would put them firmly in the 19th century and the days of mass production. True filigree is hand-made from curled and soldered wire and is much rarer (and more expensive because of all the hand labor).

By the time we get back into the 1600s and 1500s, there are literally perhaps a couple of hundred surviving rosaries in museums, total -- most of them in Europe. I have no idea how many may be in private collections, but I would be surprised if the grand total in existence were more than four or five times that number -- out of all the many millions of rosaries and paternosters that must have been made in the last five or six centuries.

Another reason dating rosaries is difficult is that in some ways, styles have changed very little. Rosaries from the 1600s may have the exact same construction, number of beads, and arrangement as rosaries 400 years later. Of course wishful thinkers are going to hope that since the style dates back to the 1600s, their rosary might be that old too. A hopeful seller contacted me about a rosary he found while snorkeling in Grand Turk and Caicos(!), for instance, but I had to point out that it seemed to be made of wood and string, neither of which lasts very long in the sea.

There are a few key characteristics that at least enable us to say a rosary must date from after a certain time. Chain construction with wire links (as opposed to stringing beads on thread) can occur anytime from the early 17th century onward. I'm still not sure when the addition of the short string of five extra beads ending in a cross to the rosary dates to, but I certainly don't see it in the pre-1600 rosaries I look at, and its introduction may date from as late as the 1800s. Faceted beads, especially large numbers of faceted Ave beads, mostly became popular only after the invention of facet-cutting machinery made them easily affordable.

I've also seen several "old" rosaries (like the one below) that incorporate not just beads strung on wire links, but actual lengths of pre-made, flattened chain between the decades (called "curb chain" by jewelers) and so far all the ones I've seen like this seem to date from the 1940s or later. (Thanks to Catherine for the photo.)

Sometimes the size and shape of the beads, or the type of material they are made of, will give some clues -- glass bead aficionados can recognize "carnival" glass from the 1910s and 1920s, for instance. But most rosaries are made using crosses, beads, medals and other findings that were quite common types, and nothing is really added in the process of rosary-making (with a few exceptions) that provides any further information.

The most useful parts of a rosary for dating purposes are generally the medals or crosses. Very plain or simple ones don't change much, but often the more elaborate ones are styled like the jewelry of the same time period. Here, for instance, is a rosary with metal parts that practically shout "1960s" to the knowledgeable eye.

Medals and occasionally crosses may have engraved dates, though all the date means is that the rosary was made sometime after that date, and not necessarily very soon after. Many rosaries have the "Miraculous Medal," for instance, which has the date 1830 on it because that's the date of the vision on which the medal is based. But rosaries with that "1830" medal are still being made today.

So anyone hoping to obtain fabulous riches from old rosaries is likely to be quite disappointed. But rosaries from the 20th and late 19th centuries are often interesting for reasons of their own, and many collectors are quite happy to find a nice one, especially one that has been well loved or has a story attached.

More beads for Saint Anthony

2008-03-06T13:20:00.000-08:00

For reasons I haven't yet figured out, certain saints are more often pictured with paternoster beads than others in medieval painting and sculpture. Saint Jerome, for instance, if he's shown in his study will very often have a string of beads hanging somewhere in the background.

Saint Anthony Abbot is another saint often pictured with a paternoster. Probably one of the reasons is to signal his status as a prototype of all holy hermits, along with his friend Saint Paul of Thebes. Another major reason is that tradition says Saint Anthony counted his prayers using a pile of pebbles, throwing one away after each repetition of his prayer, which makes him a forefather of the rosary as well. His beads, however, are generally not shown as a pile of pebbles, but as an ordinary strung paternoster of whatever time period the painter decided was appropriate -- usually the painter's own century.

As I think I've mentioned, the temptation of Saint Anthony by demons is a popular scene, and in most of these scenes he is holding a string of beads, often rather more conspicuous than the small glimpse of beads we see in the Isenheim altarpiece. One of my favorite "Temptations" is this one, a detail from the Penitence of Saint Jerome triptych by Joachim Patinir, painted about 1515-24 and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Square Halo, a favorite book of mine about saints and their depiction in medieval paintings, notes that these demons appear to be rather quiet and polite as demons go -- tapping gently at the saint's book to get his attention, rather than pulling his hair or tweaking his nose. Enlarging this part of the painting reveals details of the beads and also some rather intriguing details of the book he's reading -- perhaps it's even identifiable, but in any case it has a very fine tooled leather cover.

The beads appear by their color to be wood, which makes sense if the saint is off in the wilderness somewhere. There are probably supposed to be five decades -- set off by marker beads somewhat larger than the others -- but the painter didn't quite count them precisely as there is one "decade" with only eight beads.

A rather more magnificent set of beads is held by Saint Anthony in the forefront of another painting, the Hermit Saints panel (labeled "Heremite Sancti") of the very famous Ghent altarpiece or Adoration of the Mystic Lamb by Jan and Hubert van Eyck, painted for Saint Bavo Cathedral around 1432. This is a huge painting, with many panels showing saints of various types all surrounding the central picture: there are groups representing virgins, martyrs, apostles, popes and clerics, soldier saints, hermits, pilgrims and so forth.

The holy hermits are in panel 13 (bottom row, just to the right of the central scene) and Saint Anthony and Saint Paul of Thebes are in the front row, as befits their role as prototypes. You can tell which is which by the fact that Saint Anthony has his staff -- L-shaped rather than T-shaped this time. There is supposed to be a blue Tau-cross on his robe, but I can't see it in this reproduction. Also, as is often the case when these two saints are shown together, Saint Anthony is on the left (heraldic "dexter," the position of honor), indicating he has precedence in rank.

Since the events in the painting are supposed to be taking place in Heaven, or at least in the Book of Revelations, Saint Anthony is not restricted to plain wooden beads, but has a long straight string of about 35 beads that are probably supposed to be rock crystal. It also has fancy pearl-embellished tassels on both ends; clearly in Heaven, wealth is infinite and saints can afford whatever they like!

The beads carried by Saint Paul of Thebes in the same painting are black, on a red string, and are probably supposed to represent jet. I can't think of any particular association between Saint Paul and jet, but these would be valuable beads, although not as valuable as Saint Anthony's. There are 21 beads visible, though the exact number is probably not significant. Of more interest, there seems to be a flat cross of some sort at the bottom of the loop of beads. This area of the painting is quite dark and it's difficult to see details of the cross in a reproduction. It appears to be a cross pattée with the arms narrow at the center and wide at the ends.

I have another couple of Saint Anthonys to show, but I'll save them for another post.

The Cabbage-noster

2008-02-19T13:17:00.000-08:00

An excellent thing I've experienced this past year -- through correspondence, websites and the publication of Bedes Byddyng -- is more people becoming aware of paternoster beads and their history.

One result: more people making paternosters for themselves, especially people interested in medieval history and crafts.

I love it when people send me pictures, and this is one of my favorites. This "Cabbage-noster" and photo are by laurelfactorial, who gave me permission to feature it here.

The maker says this was an early effort, but it's still very cute. Really, the beads that look like cabbages are supposed to be roses. They are flat pieces carved on the front with semi-natural-looking rose petals, from various colored semi-precious stones. I first saw these in bead catalogs a couple of years ago, and now there are pages of them in every imaginable size and material. (A couple of examples here)

Hers look especially cabbage-like because they happen to be green. I think her small ones are probably serpentine (sold as "new jade" but softer and cheaper than real jade) and the large one might be green jasper. Her Ave beads are alternating rock crystal and black onyx, and it's strung on a green silk ribbon.

Aside from being amusing, this is an exercise in creative interpretation from the rather limited historical information on paternoster beads. As I have often pointed out, there are very few surviving paternoster beads from the Middle Ages, and documentary evidence isn't exactly thick on the ground either.

The ideal in historical re-creation is to find out what "they" did in the Middle Ages and simply do the same. But when we don't know all the details (and we often don't), we have to start from what we've got and make deductions, extrapolations, and some inspired guesses. And the fact that we can't re-create things perfectly is no reason not to try.

The first question to be answered is often whether the technology and knowledge were available in a particular time and place to make it possible to create the thing we are looking at. In the case of the "Cabbage-noster," on the whole it seems likely.

We know there were beads of rock crystal, though they were much more expensive than nowadays. Black stones similar to onyx were also used for paternoster beads by the wealthy. The carved "cabbages" were also quite possible with medieval technology. While the modern "roses" are probably machine cut, the technology certainly existed to carve such things by hand, as demonstrated by other cut stones, for instance a paternoster from Salzburg of bright turquoise-colored jasper whose beads are carved with spiraling facets.

A second question to ask when re-creating historical artifacts is whether the modern re-creation is plausible -- whether it would be unremarkable if it dropped through a time machine into the century and location of the originals. This is much harder to answer, because it depends on a number of things, including artistic style and which materials are used for which parts of the artifact.

In this case we see the effect of the modern marketplace on our attempt to do reconstructions. As a general rule, the materials used for the Paters or marker beads of a rosary are higher in value or social status than those used for the Aves or ordinary beads. Today, rock crystal and onyx cost about the same as jasper, but in the Middle Ages, rock crystal was a very high-status stone, more valuable even than amber or red coral. So when we see it in period rosaries it is usually only as marker beads.

Another question is whether period rosaries used two alternating types of beads in the Aves. I think the jury is still out on this one. I certainly can't say this was "never" done, but I can only find two examples, and both of them are very doubtful. One is a hand-colored woodcut, where the beads in the kneeling people's hands have been hand-colored alternating green and white. This may very well just represent the whim of the hand wielding the paint brush.

The other is this set of beads, from a painting of about 1500 from the area around Ulm:

There certainly appear to be differences in the Ave beads here, but I'm not sure what, if anything, they represent. There seem to be at least three different colors of beads (other than the markers, which are all gold and swirly) and they don't seem to be in a regular pattern. Actually, we know this is probably not a realistically painted set of actual beads, since the plain beads are in groups of 10, 7, 10 and 6, which doesn't match any pattern of prayers I'm familiar with. So I'd be reluctant to accept this as evidence.

(I don't seem to have the full context for this painting, by the way, so if anyone can help me identify what it is and who painted it, I'd be grateful.)

As for artistic style, my main question would be whether medieval carved roses look like these: and by and large, they don't seem to. I found this example from Exeter Cathedral, probably carved in the late 13th or 14th century:

As you see, the roses are carved to show the entire face of the flower. This is different than the more modern style of the carved roses used in the "cabbage-noster" where the flower is seen from an angle, with several petals obscuring the flower center.

I don't mean to be critical of the "cabbage-noster" here; I think it's an interesting experiment and a good effort. But I wanted to use this as an example to explore some of the ways in which we approach making educated guesses about medieval prayer beads in the process of making our own.

My friends who study heraldry have evolved a rule of thumb, informally called the "rule of two weirdnesses." According to this, designing a new piece of heraldry that shows one departure from known period practice (one "weirdness") is a reasonable level of extrapolation and will probably produce something that could pass the "dropped through a time machine" test. However, when you get to two "weirdnesses," there's much more ground for doubt whether the result is really going to look acceptably medieval.

We are not medieval people and we don't know everything, so every reconstruction we make will be full of approximations and compromises. The important thing is to know what compromises we're making and to make the best ones we can.

Tickling Saint Anthony

2008-02-05T11:44:00.000-08:00

There's at least one more interesting set of beads I want to mention in the Isenheim Altarpiece, this time on one of the inside panels. Here's the altarpiece with the inner wings open:

This altarpiece was probably commissioned for a church or guild honoring Saint Anthony Abbot, traditionally a fourth-century Egyptian hermit, one of the "Desert Fathers" of the early church. (There's a lot more information about him here.) The two painted panels on the innermost wings of the altarpiece show, on the left, the visit of St. Anthony to his good buddy St. Paul of Thebes, another of the Desert Fathers, and on the right, St. Anthony's temptation by demons. Here's the left panel:

And the right one:

And, for completeness, a closer view of the statue of St. Anthony -- note the pig nestling under his robes on the right, and another held by his follower:

Saint Anthony is distinguished by a Tau (T)-shaped or sometimes L-shaped staff. This is actually an early version of the more familiar curly-headed bishop's crozier. The crutch-like shape may also relate to the fact that St. Anthony is almost always shown as a very old man.

The "Temptation of Saint Anthony" is one of those classic scenes artists seem to have really enjoyed painting, perhaps because it gave them carte blanche to exercise their imaginations and dream up some really interesting demons. The moral of this story is that being alone in the desert doesn't eliminate the possibility of sinning, it's just that it comes to visit you instead of you having to go look for it. Hieronymus Bosch painted the scene several times, with his usual weird creatures in the background (for instance here and here), though for some reason most of those directly tempting St. Anthony in this case appear to be human. Jan Wellens de Cock, Pieter Bruegel, Bernardino Parenzano, and Lucas van Leyden were other examples I could readily find, with the last-named having particulary interesting creatures on offer. But Grünewald's version in the Isenheim altarpiece has them all beat.

As you can see in Grünewald's Temptation panel, the demons are combinations of animal parts and nightmare, and there's a bit of confusion about exactly which parts belong to whom where they are all jumbled together. They are pulling the saint's hair, threatening to beat him with sticks and making terrifying faces (not that they can help that last part).

As you might expect, my attention went straight to the saint's right hand, which something with a bird beak is trying to bite. In that hand you can see he is holding his staff and also a string of beads:

As beads, there is nothing particularly remarkable about them; we can see just five plain round red beads. Being red, they are likely intended to be coral, which was probably not popular with fourth-century hermits but very popular with those who could afford them in 15th-century Alsace.

It's really the expression on Saint Anthony's face that I find the most intriguing thing in this picture. I am no art historian, so I don't have a good feel for how fifteenth-century painters depicted facial expressions; it's entirely possible that this particular expression means something I'm not aware of. But to me, it looks as though Saint Anthony is laughing, or perhaps giggling. I suppose this is as good a reaction as any when one is being tempted, especially when one has no intention whatever of giving in.

Or perhaps the demons have been given Supernatural Tickling Powers. Oh horrors.

Appearing at a rosary conference near you...

2008-01-25T22:25:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to mention for some time that I've been honored with an invitation to speak at a one-day conference on prayer beads in March.

(I will candidly admit that my initial reaction is along the lines of "Lawk a-mercy me: this is none of I!" -- a Mother Goose reference. I am of course tremendously flattered that someone considers me an expert, but me? really? I shall have to make a good effort at it now.)

The conference is on the history and role of prayer beads in different cultures and communities, and it's on 27th March at Leiden University (in the Netherlands). It's sponsored by the Textile Research Centre, a 17-year-old project currently under the wing of the National Museum of Ethnology, but hoping for its own home soon.

This all started when the Centre's Director, Dr. Gillian Vogelsang-Eastwood, who specializes in Near Eastern textiles and dress, started searching for more information for a "small exhibition on prayer beads from around the world" she was planning for this summer. She found this blog, and the Paternoster Row site, which she says "have totally saved me." The exhibit has expanded into a full-fledged intercultural project, and there's no end in sight: the conference is one result.

The list of topics and speakers seems to be fairly firm at this point (it's on the TRCV website), and as you can see, it is very wide-ranging:

Hindu iconography and prayer beads, Dr. Ellen Raven, Leiden University
Tibetan Buddhist prayer beads, Dr. Henk Blezer, Leiden University
Korean shaman prayer beads, Prof. Boudewijn Walraven, Leiden University
Japanese Buddhist prayer beads, Dr. Andreas Marks
Orthodox Christian prayer beads, Dr. Karel Innemée, Leiden University
A history of Catholic rosaries, Ms. Chris Laning, Independent scholar, USA
Prayer beads from medieval and post-medieval excavations in Eindhoven, ca. 1225-1900, Nico Arte, Eindhoven Archeological Centre
Protestant attitudes to prayer beads, Dr. Anneke Mooi, Leiden University
Prayer beads and medieval Arab/Persian sources, Dr. Asghar Seyed-Gohrab, Leiden University
Modern Islamic prayer beads, Mr. Yusuf Alan, Rotterdam
Neo-Pagan prayer beads, Dr. Gillian Vogelsang-Eastwood, TRC, Leiden

How we are going to fit all that into one day I don't know!

I'm particularly interested to see two speakers on the Islamic prayer bead tradition. As readers of this blog know (all seventeen of you :) it's a subject on which very little information seems to be available, especially on its early history. One possible reason seems to be that many of the cultural studies in Islam that would concern themselves with such artifacts are regional rather than pan-Islamic. I look forward to hearing what the speakers have to say.

American that I am, I'm of course particularly excited to be invited to speak in Europe, and since the conference coincides with my Easter break, I will have about ten days before the conference to travel around. Besides sightseeing and museums, I hope to see many historical paternoster beads and take many pictures! Most of the places I'm going will be new to me, including Cologne (Köln), Nuremburg, Regensburg, and possibly Konstanz. I've been in both Amsterdam and Munich once before, but that was thirty-mumble years ago and I hardly remember any of it.

As for the conference, I would of course be delighted to meet anyone there who reads this blog, so do please introduce yourself. You can find more information on the TRC's prayer beads project here, and on the conference itself here, including where to write in order to register.

This is turning out to be a delightful instance of "it's a small world," since I had actually encountered Dr. Vogelsang-Eastwood once before: a good friend of mine has raved about her book on Pharaonic Egyptian clothing, which is excellent. Not the sort of thing you'd expect to combine with an interest in rosaries!

Beads in the Isenheim altarpiece

2008-01-23T16:40:00.000-08:00

Christmas vacation finally gave me a few days when I was actually home during the day on a week day, and fortunately, they were also days when it was neither too hot nor pouring rain... so I've finally been able to get down to the university library. I'm quite thankful that I live less than a mile from an excellent library on one of the University of California campuses, and they have a "Library Associates" membership that lets you take out ten books for two weeks at a time. I've had an Associates card there almost continuously since I finished graduate school there.

On this visit, while looking for a book that wasn't there on the shelf, I happened upon something else: Gothic and Renaissance Altarpieces by Caterina Limantani Virdis and Mari Pietrogiovanna. This is a true feast for the eyes, especially for us old, tired eyes over 40, since it features nice BIG detail pictures, four or five of them for each piece. (And by BIG I mean full-page photos nearly a foot square).

Needless to say, my eyes go straight to the beads :)

As I've come to expect, about half the paintings have rosary or paternoster beads in them somewhere -- held in someone's hand, lying casually on the step below a throne, or hanging from someone's belt. In many cases they are included in the details of the painting that are enlarged to full-page size, and often they are so meticulously painted that it's quite easy to count the beads, see what color thread they are on, and make a good guess about what material they're supposed to be. The paintings are also full of other fascinating little details -- close-up views of locks and keys, stirrups, book covers, candlesticks, fire screens, and a blue and white painted vase containing flowers. Ordinary books with just one photo of the whole painting simply don't show this kind of thing.

The book goes into detail on thirty selected altarpieces, ranging in date from about 1375 to somewhere in the early 1500s, and in location from the Low Countries to France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Some are single paintings, but several consist of elaborate cabinets that may have one set of paintings on the outside doors, which would be displayed on ordinary days, and then on feast days and special occasions the doors or wings would be opened, revealing more paintings on the inside of the wings and in the center.

The first piece I want to share from this book is a panel from the Isenheim Altarpiece, which was originally painted sometime before 1520 for a church in Alsace. The painting is usually attributed to Matthias Grünewald, who is supposed to have produced a large body of paintings mostly in the Rhineland and Alsace, but it's not at all clear who he was, or indeed whether the work of several painters with similar names has become confused.

As an altarpiece, this is unusual in having not just one set of wings, but two, one inside the other. Opening the outer doors reveals four panels showing first the Annunciation, then an intermediate panel with the Virgin Mary and celebrating angels, a Virgin and Child scene, and the Resurrection of Christ. When the inside wings are opened, two paintings from the life of St. Anthony flank an elaborately carved and gilded wooden sculpture of St. Augustine, St. Anthony enthroned and St. Jerome. Here is the altarpiece opened to show the four panels:

The Virgin and Child scene from a bit closer:

And finally, a detail of the beads:

This is only the second (I think) instance I've found where the Infant Jesus is playing with a string of paternoster beads that are not red coral. As I've mentioned in other posts here, quite a few paintings of the Virgin and Child show the infant playing with this very anachronistic accessory, probably because it gives the painter a chance to emphasize the Holy Child's humanity -- anyone who knows babies knows beads are the sort of thing they love to play with (and chew on). Red coral was often given to babies as a good-luck charm or teething toy, since it was thought to avert the "evil eye."

These beads look as though they might be amber, especially as they seem to be a little irregular in size. They are round, and about the same color as the Virgin Mary's hair or the gold clasp at her neckline. There appear to be about fifteen beads, plus one larger element that might be a much larger bead or some sort of medallion -- we can only see the edge of it, as it's falling down behind the Infant's little round stomach. He is holding two of the beads very delicately between his thumbs and index fingers, and both mother and child are smiling.

Amber may range anywhere from transparent to almost completely opaque, and it has always been a favorite material for rosary beads, despite the fact that it is softer and more easily damaged than the harder types of semiprecious stone. As a luxurious and expensive material, it could also provide an opportunity to show off one's wealth and good taste as well as piety. Amber also has a sweet, resinous scent when warmed, and when rubbed briskly with a cloth will attract little bits of lightweight paper or chaff -- a very mysterious phenomenon in the Renaissance, which we now know is due to static electricity.

The "paternoster blade"

2008-01-09T15:49:00.001-08:00

Modern historians of the Middle Ages often don't have very nice things to say about the Victorians.

There are reasons for this. Victorian ideas about medieval history still have a lot of influence on most people's image of what the Middle Ages were like. The Victorians are the source of knights in shining armor, peasants dressed in burlap and wallowing in mudpiles, and ladies in tall pointy cone-shaped hats -- all of these being things that have a grain of truth to them, but that were never as extreme or as common as the movies would have you think.

To be fair, 19th-century scholars were operating on much less information than we have now. More sophisticated archaeology techniques have enabled us to recover a lot more data about life in those times, and many long-neglected documents have been discovered, analyzed and published. As I'm fond of saying, while the Middle Ages are long past and haven't changed, our knowledge about the Middle Ages certainly has.

What brought the Victorians to mind was a query on the Paternosters mailing list a few years ago whether any of us had ever heard of a "paternoster blade." The source was George Cameron Stone's A Glossary of the Construction, Decoration and Use of Arms and Armor in all Countries and in all times (NY:NY, Jack Brussel, Publisher, 1961). This was originally published in 1934. It says:

Paternoster Blade. A sword blade pierced with openings so as to answer the purpose of a rosary, and enable the pious owner to count his prayers even in the dark. (Burton Sword 136.)

Now certainly the idea of a pious soldier is not impossible. And while pierced sword blades are not exactly common in history, neither are they that rare; piercing is one of many types of decoration that can be applied to a sword blade, along with grooving and etching.

But there are practicalities involved here, one of which is that from a common sense perspective, no competent sword wielder is going to make a habit of putting his fingers all over his blade. Sword blades are made of steel, and they can and do rust. This is why it's important to keep swords clean and polished, giving rust nowhere to take hold. Even the characters in sword-and-sorcery fantasy novels make a point of cleaning their swords frequently (however clueless they may be about history in other respects!). Fingerprints on a blade are a no-no, because they deposit water, salt, and acid on the blade, all of which promote rust and corrosion of the metal.

This makes holes in a sword blade an unlikely form of prayer counter. Stone, to give him full credit, does cite his source, which is Richard F. Burton's The Book of the Sword. London, 1884. Since that book is long out of copyright and has been reprinted several times, I was able to find the relevant page online. Here's what it shows:

I'm inclined to think that Burton ran across this somewhere and invented an explanation to suit himself, though it's possible that the blade could have even been called a "Paternoster blade" before he saw it. A number of things are called "paternoster" because they're seen as analagous to beads on a string, and certainly the illustration shows rows of dots. To a Victorian observer, it may have seemed likely that the word implied some real connection with prayer.

Here is the key to the basic problem with Victorian scholarship, I think. The Victorian worldview -- especially as embodied in someone like Burton -- was a supremely self-confident one. Victorians expected the world to make sense, and it often didn't occur to them that there could be more than one viewpoint, system of logic, or frame of reference other than their own. Often their educated guesses about the purpose, construction or original form of some artifact are put forward with as much confidence as though they were established fact. Nowadays we would find that unmannerly, or even unscientific. We are much more aware of how little we actually know, and hopefully we're more careful to separate facts that can be observed from opinion and speculation.

The "paternoster blade" is probably an error, at which we can now be amused. But it's also a cautionary tale about scholarship, and as such, is worth remembering.