More on medieval prayer-nuts

Prayer Bead, 1500-1530, Mouth of Hell Mouth of Hell

Photo, The Globe and Mail: Ian LeFebvre

Not so long ago I wrote a group of poems for the Phoenicia Publishing anthology on the Annunciation, and then let publisher Elizabeth Adams pick what she liked best. One of the poems was about a medieval prayer-nut, and it appeared in John Wilson's Books and Culture.

Now there is some new research about prayer-nuts or prayer beads, and I think it wonderfully interesting. A fascinating article in the Globe and Mail tells us some things we've never known about these tiny, strange, packed-with-image orbs.

It turns out that a good deal of what's inside is invisible to the viewer, which is rather like the biblical idea of believing in what is unseen: "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" (KJV Hebrews 11:1). Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII at prayer are hidden behind a pillar. A rack of flayed humans is half-hidden behind the mouth of hell. The CT spies out detail that the owner of the bead never could have known.

How are these little miracles of the seen and unseen made? We now know much more than we did when I wrote my poem. The Art Gallery of Ontario has been peering around inside the beads. "The AGO’s micro-CT scans reveal for the first time that they were carved from a single piece of boxwood, but in parts, like stage sets, then held together, grain aligned, with tiny boxwood pins smaller than a single grass seed."

An experienced master craftsman, with the help of many CT scans, has now taken one of these apart, and so new secrets are known. "Craftsmen used tiny five-centimetre-long tools to drill and gouge and vein the exquisitely detailed religious scenes within the beads – some of which depict dozens of characters in full regalia and action, in a space about 2.5 centimetres wide and 1.5 cm deep." Take a look at the article; if you love the medieval world, you will find that the description of research on these small marvels is packed with interesting details.

The original post about my prayer-nut poem here.
  Includes links to beads at the Met.
The poem about the prayer-nut here.
  Books and Culture.
The new findings about prayer-nuts here.
  The Globe and Mail. With lots of images! (And, oddly, Trump and Comey.)

"The final result is an international exhibition, Small Wonders: Gothic Boxwood Miniatures, that premieres Saturday in Toronto at the AGO, and then travels to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Rijksmuseum. Toronto’s boxwood has hit the big time, baby." --Ian Brown

Dreaming back

Making Manuscripts from the Getty Museum.
Well worth watching...

I'm surprised by how many times the medieval world has crept into my books (perhaps most obviously in The Foliate Head, Val / Orson, and The Book of the Red King, but elsewhere as well) and into many of my blog posts. Perhaps I really am living in the wrong century, though I would not have lived long in the medieval world and am grateful to modern medicine's influence in matters of bad bacteria and childbirth.

My own possibly-quirky explanation of why green men invaded European churches here.

Druidic verse from Amargin, and a link to Yeats here.

"The Annunciation Carved in a Medieval Prayer-nut" here (and in the print edition.) And no, you're not missing anything; it ends with "stumbles--"

And here's one where þa middangeard crept in. "Vermont Kingdom."

And a bit of The Book of the Red King here or here. Some of these will be a little altered when the book appears.

A favorite medieval-mad website: Jeff Sypeck, Quid plura? Here are his medieval-inflected posts.

And here is Jeff's Beallsville Calendar, now in progress, inspired by medieval calendar poems.

Christmas at Camelot from Clive Hicks-Jenkins
Clive's posts on Gawain and the Green Knight are here
Information on ordering the Gawain prints (more to come) at The Penfold Press

The medieval world is still with us. I just went to the door for mail and found a box of wine and New Selected Poems by Les Murray. Looking up an interview, I see him talking about influences: "Various Scottish and Irish medieval poets too, Dunbar and the poet of that mighty anonymous hymn from Ireland, "Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart," hymn 31 in John de Luca's Australian Parish Hymn Book" (Image Journal.) And here's this, a comment I might have made, from another interview: "the deadliest inertia is to conform to your times" (The Paris Review.)

Hodgepodge, with medieval prayer-nut

The Annunciation Carved in a Medieval Prayer Nut

Here's one of the poems I wrote for Phoenicia Publishing's Annunciation anthology, forthcoming in the not-too-far-off future. Being the sort of person I am (you can call that mad, or you can call it in love with making things and words), I wrote seven, so that editor Elizabeth Adams could pick one from a group. So this poem is not going to be in the anthology, but it is HERE, and also in the print version of "Books and Culture," edited by the most widely-read reader I have encountered, John Wilson. (The poems in the anthology will be: "Mystic Journey," "The Annunciation Appears in a Painting by Andrew Wyeth," and "Iconography of an Imaginary Medieval Painting.")

I also have a couple of poems in the just-out current (print, though I expect that issue 13 will eventually be up at trinacriapoetry.com) edition of Trinacria, edited ("by invitation") by the feisty, formal-poetry-defending Joseph Salemi. And those two are "Solitaire" and "In the Dream Behind My Eyes."

Photos: This is a sixteenth-century prayer-nut on display at the British Museum. Photo credit is unlisted at my source... though I'd be happy to credit more than the British Museum! If you want to see more prayer-nuts (they are fascinating) in a round-up of examples, go to My Modern Met.

"Macbeth" with gulls and Glimmerglass and Glimmer Globe Theater

Lovely evening at the new Hamilton amphitheater behind Fenimore Art Museum, starting with a champagne picnic with shrimp salad and duck enchiladas and baguette and meringue cookies, followed by "Macbeth" with newlyweds (well, a year out--still new!) Michael and Danielle Henrici as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Must say that a pregnant Lady Macbeth adds to the drama of many lines. So fine to see a great play with Glimmerglass lightly wrinkled in the background and gulls flashing white against the hills.

Photo from the Fenimore Art Museum album on Facebook.
Michael Henrici as Macbeth

Danielle Henrici, Lady Macbeth,
above Hamilton amphitheater at the Fenimore Art Museum.
Photograph by Macbeth, aka Michael Henrici!

Goodreads giveaway / jacket copy / pub date

"a haunting tale of dark obsessions and transcendent creative fire, 

rendered brilliantly in Youmans' richly poetic prose."  --Midori Snyder

Official pub date is rapidly approaching: September 1st.
I will soon be doing events in North Carolina and Virginia,
but if you have a special interest in my work, please spread the word,
as this is a book from a university press and could use a kiss
from the lovely Lady Word of Mouth.

Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.
Design by Mary-Frances Glover Burt.
Mercer University Press

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Jacket copy: Begin with what seems the end of things—how Conall Weaver lifts a gun to his head. And now dive backward into the labyrinthine worlds of home, where Conall is the center, into the maze of love, where Conall seeks and strives with his soul-mate, and into the maze of imagination, with its population of weapon-wielding heroes and local-color Texans…and then on, into the maze of childhood, where time seems illusion and all the threads and stories start. Red for the blood of frontiersmen and Indians, Conall thought, red for the blood of proven heroes and mother, the martyr of Cross Plains. Maze for the looping coils of a snake that ended in a rattle that shook out revolutionary warning: don’t tread on me! Maze for veins of blood. Maze for family. In Conall Weaver, the mundane world and the wonders of the imagination collide and shoot out sparks. Inspired by the life of pulp writer Robert E. Howard, MAZE OF BLOOD explores the roots of story and the compulsions and conflicts of the heart in a Southern landscape. “Marly Youmans is a great writer. Her prose is immaculate.” —Laird Barron “Marly Youmans is a novelist and poet out of sync with the times but in tune with the ages.” — First Things “I cannot recommend an author more than Marly Youmans, whose fantastic prose is absolutely gorgeous and haunting.” —Seb Doubinsky 

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One of the gorgeous division pages
with art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.