Five (More) Wounds

While idly looking at a woodcut I've used (in slightly altered form) on the "front page" of Paternoster-Row, I suddenly realized that this was not just a picture of a rosary I was looking at: it was a picture of a particular type of rosary called a Rosary of the Five Wounds.



The key is what you can see on the five medallions: two of them have pictures of feet, two of hands, and one of a heart. This woodcut of the Virgin Mary and Saint Dominic is from the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, Germany.

You know how you never notice something, and then suddenly you start seeing it everywhere? That's happened to me with these Five Wounds rosaries. And they seem to be more common than I would have expected, given that today they are only a very, very small minority of all rosaries.

First, a bit of clarification. The first "Five Wounds" rosaries I noticed were ones that had five groups of five beads. A historical example is this one, carved in wood, from the Diocesan Museum in Köln (Cologne, Germany), of a type that appears in the 15th century. (As the museum label somewhat evasively puts it: "Der type erscheint im 15. Jhr.") The photo isn't very good and it's hard to decipher the carving, but the flat surface of the topmost flower-shaped bead has a hand carved on it, the one on the bottom right has a foot and ankle roughly outlined (and upside-down), and the pendant at far right is a pierced heart inside a crown of thorns (broken). The backs of the "flower" parts seem to be carved with a rough circle and radiating "vein" lines.



I've also seen such rosaries -- as in the first illustration -- with five groups of ten beads. I actually do not think this is a terribly significant difference. As a phenomenon that pretty much started at the "grass roots" of popular devotion and only gradually became officially noticed and regulated, rosaries and chaplets of all sorts have always had a good deal of room for improvisation and the development of new variations. There is seldom only one "right" form. If something has the five medals with hands, feet and heart, I'll call it a Five Wounds rosary.

Modern rosary makers do still make and offer these -- here's an example. I find these modern medals less than exciting, but they seem to be all that's commercially available.



Now for the jucier stuff. First, there's the St. Dominic woodcut I've already mentioned. (We know now that St. Dominic Guzman really doesn't seem to have had anything to do with the origins of the rosary, but for much of the Middle Ages and later, people firmly believed he did.)

Next, there's this one:

Here again, we have ten "roses" between the medallions bearing the "wounds." This woodcut is by Wolf Traut, 1510. (Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek.)



And here, an angel in a 17th-century engraving (from the Gruuthusmuseum, Bruges) holds up another version. This one has the five "wounds," and there are five groups of five beads. A sixth medallion shows the head of Christ with a crown of thorns, and it ends in yet another medallion showing the Virgin Mary and Child. The inscription under the engraving says (if I'm reading it right):

"Myn Seele gebenedyt den Heere die u croont in bermhertigheyt ende ontferminghen - Psal. 102" I'm not sure how to translate this (German? Dutch? Low German?) and I can't find the verse offhand in either Psalm 102 or 103, but it seems to be something beginning "My soul [blesses?] the Lord..."



I truly hope the angel is not -- as this engraving certainly makes it look -- proposing to use this rosary as a jump rope. He'll trip. :)

Beads with passion

As I mentioned in Five-Wounds Rosaries, there's an entire genre of rosaries that feature various combinations of tools or symbols of the Passion of Christ. The simplest are the "Five Wounds" rosaries, which usually feature two hands, two feet and either a heart or a head, in addition to the usual Ave beads and Paters or gauds.

I'm not sure how much is known about how such rosaries have historically been used, and what prayers they have been used for. Since most of them have the usual five (or fifteen) decades of beads, they can be prayed just like a more conventional rosary. But of course the sequence of prayers we now know as "the rosary" is not, and never has been, the only possible combination of prayers said using a string of beads.

Here's an example that showed up on the German eBay a year or so ago:



And here's an older one of blue glass beads, with carved bone parts and caps, tentatively dated to the 17th century. Note this one is 6 decades.



Another version:



Passion rosaries in general, like these, often make a rather eclectic selection from the many possible tools or symbols. A "five wounds" rosary may have hands, feet, a heart, a skull (as well as a separate head), a hammer, a chalice, or a little three-pronged item that represents a cluster of three nails.

Other "tools of the Passion" in the strict sense may include a spear (sometimes trident-headed), a ladder, pincers, a crown of thorns, and a scourge. I've also seen a clenched fist, which may represent being beaten.

Less obvious symbols include a rooster (!), representing the one that crowed to remind St. Peter of his denial that he knew Christ. You will also sometimes see a heart, a sword, a T-shaped tunic to represent Christ's "seamless garment," and even the pair of dice that the Roman soldiers are supposed to have thrown to see who would get the tunic. There are also a couple more things I haven't identified yet because they are shown on edge in the photos. A sponge is a possible candidate, as it's often included in the collection of similar items shown on a shield and collectively called the "arma Christi" (i.e. the "coat-of-arms" of Christ).

There are two Passion rosaries in the Cologne (Köln) diocesan museum that have more than five decades and a lively assortment of parts including most of those I've mentioned above. There are clearly some duplications and missing beads. Both are dated to the 17th or 18th century.

This one has a chain construction, 12 incomplete decades of faceted black glass beads, paters with silver caps, and cast silver parts.



In this one, each of the cast gold parts is placed between 2 silver filigree beads to mark the end of a decade, the assemblage serving as the Pater marker. The Aves are faceted coral. 15 decades. This one has two roosters and (I think)two chalices, suggesting it was assembled from fragments of more than one original.

Five-Wounds rosaries

Occasionally a rosary comes up for sale that has "hands" -- along with feet, a head or heart, and/or various tools of the Passion (nails, hammer, crown of thorns). In general these are referred to as "rosaries of the Passion", of which there are several types. I've seen a few of these that date somewhere in the 16th to 18th centuries; six are pictured in one of my mainstay reference sources, 500 Jahre Rosenkranz.

The exact configuration varies, as does the degree of sophistication. One of the more common types is referred to as a "Five Wounds" rosary. Generally these have five decades, with two hands, two feet, and one heart or head (or sometimes a skull). The hand-carved or cast-metal "body parts" are usually in addition to the Pater ("Our Father") beads, and usually they are strung directly on the rosary thread somewhere in the middle of each decade (i.e. they are not "charms" attached later). In the historical examples I've seen, the hands, feet, etc. are sometimes just flat cutouts, sometimes 3-dimensional and rather realistic.

This example, from the diocesan museum in Cologne (which seems to be one of the major European collections of rosaries) is of bone or ivory, from the 17th century:



And an enlarged detail:


There was actually a rosary very much like this, with wooden beads and cast-metal parts, for sale on the German version of eBay a year or so ago. Rosaries that are the least bit unusual from eBay tend to run in the $100+ range, but I'm still kicking myself for not having at least put in a bid. I did download the photos, though:



A closeup -- and note that this example has two hands, a head, a hammer and nails rather than five actual "wound" symbols:



Ways of counting the wounds of Christ vary, as do the choices of exactly what to feature on the various Passion-oriented rosaries (of which the Five Wounds is one type). The conventional five wounds are two hands, two feet and either the side (heart) or the head (crown of thorns). The heart seems more common. Hands, feet, heart, head, and something else would make the significant number seven, but what to count as the seventh is somewhat unclear; the bruise on Christ's shoulder from carrying the cross is sometimes suggested, though it's difficult to depict.

Making one of these rosaries is definitely on my long list of "things to do" for the study collection. You can actually still buy modern five-wounds rosaries, or the parts to make them, although the modern parts are usually quite a bit less exciting, being flat-modeled or engraved medallions. There are also enameled ones, which are quite nice.



I've been threatening to learn pewter casting to make my own -- considering how sketchy and primitive some of the existing pieces are, I'm sure I can do at least that well at carving or modeling something to cast from.