Edelsteine: Himmels Schnure

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.

The Rose-Garden Game

For a long time, Eithne Wilkins' The Rose-Garden Game was the only readily available book in English about the history of the beads of the rosary. (Of course there have been many other books about the rosary, but most of them are about the prayers and their benefits, not the actual beads.)

The Rose-Garden Game was actually the book that got me interested in rosaries, years ago — I took it out of the public library when I was in high school, and found it fascinating. When I started researching rosaries seriously, it was one of the first things I bought. As I went looking, I actually had very little trouble finding a used copy on the Internet for a reasonable price.

Unfortunately this book is clearly a product of its times (1969) and it has some problems. The author is fond of the Mystic East, and finds a great deal to say about the metaphoric and psychological implications of roundness, beads, circles, roses, the repetition of prayers and so forth. A lot of the statements she makes are not backed up by any reference to sources. She definitely has her own ideas about the meaning of beads and their history, and I am skeptical of a lot of her conclusions, since they don't seem to me to be backed by any solid historical documentation.

It also shares a fault with many other popular books about the history of artifacts, which is that — as was common before the mid-1980s or so — it assumes without saying so that 19th-century popular culture is an essentially unchanged version of traditions that go back to the Middle Ages or earlier. We now know a lot more about how traditions are transmitted and where they come from, and it's generally agreed now that this was a highly romanticized view, powered by wishful thinking more than by any actual evidence. Nineteenth-century "tradition" can give us useful clues, but we can't assume these apply to any other century without checking them out. Wilkins relies on a lot of 19th-century material, which is certainly interesting, but has to be treated with caution.

That said, she does include direct quotes from some historical sources — for instance, she has more information about Lady Godiva's will than I've seen elsewhere — and she also reproduces quite a few photos, which are all footnoted as to source and include the dimensions of the rosary (yay!!). Some of her photos are of pieces I haven't seen any photos of anywhere else — the very drool-worthy emerald rosary from the Schatzkammer in Munich, for instance, and a couple of paintings that show people using the less common rosaries that use "disk" counters rather than beads.

As virtually the only source in English for many years, it has been relied on by many other authors, including Lois Sherr Dubin in her massive history of beads. But while it's still valuable (especially for its photos), there are now much better sources on the history of the rosary.

For the development of the rosary (as we now know it) in the middle 1400s, and its rapid rise in popularity, I would recommend Anne Winston-Allen's Stories of the Rose: The Making of the Rosary in the Middle Ages. She does not, alas, discuss the actual beads, but she thoroughly explains the ideas that came together to form the rosary, the people most responsible for its development, and the foundation of the first "rosary brotherhoods" in Germany.

For information about the actual beads, who made them, who bought them or gave them as gifts, how they were arranged and so forth, Ronald Lightbown's Medieval European Jewellery is the book to see. It was put out by the Victoria and Albert Museum and is now very hard to find except in a university library; it's also huge, heavy, out of print and very expensive (multiple hundreds of dollars, if you can find a copy at all). Its chapters are packed full of examples and citations, and the color photographs in the back are utterly gorgeous.

---

The Rose-Garden Game: A Tradition of Beads and Flowers, by Eithne Wilkins. (1969, Herder & Herder, no ISBN)

Stories of the Rose: The Making of the Rosary in the Middle Ages, by Anne Winston-Allen (1997, Pennsylvania State University Press, ISBN 0-2710-1631-0)

Medieval European Jewellery, by Ronald Lightbown (1992, Victoria & Albert Museum, ISBN 0-9481-0787-1)

Book review

Originally uploaded by ChrisLaning.

My most recent rosary research foray has been into _Beads of Faith_, by Gray Henry and Susannah Marriott. This was recommended to me by a correspondent who researches the history of Islamic religion, although prayer beads (the *tasbih*) are not his specialty.

When I mention that Gray Henry was a student of Joseph Campbell, that Susannah's most recent book is _The Good Karma Guide_, and that the book has no bibliography and only the most rudimentary photo credits, you'll know what I think of its reliability.

It appears to be the book-ization of a video, and admittedly the photography is gorgeous. :)

However, based on what I _do_ know from better sources, they seem to me to be stretching to make a lot of connections that may not actually be there.