The Bar Convent and Esopus arma Christi rolls and women’s devotions

As she sorted the contents of a box of uncatalogued documents from the 1980s at Bar Convent in York, Dr. Hannah Thomas, the convent’s special collections manager, discovered a 6-in. wide medieval roll curled up in a corner. Thomas’s subsequent research has revealed that England’s oldest post-Reformation Catholic convent owns a rare arma Christi roll, identified through its Middle English poem “O Vernicle” and its accompanying images of the arma Christi, the weapons that tormented Christ in the Passion. The roll’s first image, a portrait of Saint Veronica displaying the vernicle or “veronica,” the cloth that she pressed against Christ’s skin to stop his bloody sweat and that retained the imprint of his face when he returned it to her, honors Saint Veronica as the giver and keeper of one of medieval Rome’s most precious relics. Previously, only ten arma Christi prayer rolls were known to have survived Henry VIII’s destruction of Catholic monasteries, shrines, books, and devotional objects. The Bar Convent roll’s script and illustrations suggest it was made between 1475 and 1500. Thomas narrates and introduces the roll in an introductory video at https://barconvent.co.uk/the-arma-christi/.

Arma Christi images not only inspired confession and penitence but also functioned as childbirth protection. Prayers on the back of the earliest arma Christi roll, made about 1390 and now MS olim Esopus owned by Philadelphia’s Redemptorist Archives, also identify it as a birth girdle, a parchment or paper roll that a woman could wrap around her abdomen during labor to protect herself and her unborn child. The prayer roll could be used as a devotional double for private or household worship and in the birthing chamber. “These arms of Christ,” a vernacular poem also appearing in two other arma Christi rolls, tells women anticipating childbirth that viewing the arma every day will protect them when they “travail of their childe.” The “O Vernicle” images on the front of the Esopus roll became the perfect medium. A childbirth protection unit dedicated to Saints Quiricus and Julitta, a martyred son and his mother, consisting of one Middle English and two Latin prayers, follows the poem on the back of the roll. The vernacular prayer’s first line instructs readers to mentally “measure” the tau cross inserted into the roll’s left border to calculate the height of Christ, a childbirth protection known as a “metric relic.” I consider both the arma Christi and birth girdle aspects of the Esopus roll in Chapter 1 of my book, available through your institution or for purchase at doi.org/10.1515/9781501513909-002.

The signature of “Elynor Sybsay” in the British Library’s Additional MS 22029 proves that women indeed owned arma Christi rolls. Elynor’s roll, along with the Bar Convent, Esopus, and two other arma Christi rolls, are the only “O Vernicle” witnesses with an image of Veronica. By the late fifteenth century, artists more usually depict the vernicle as a stand-alone object that does not require human hands to display it. In contrast, the five arma Christi rolls portraying Saint Veronica suggest that women constituted a target audience for the rolls, not only for devotions but because they also could rely on the arma Christi for childbirth protection. 

Rubrics inked in red after each “O Vernicle” verse in the Bar Convent roll instruct readers and listeners to pray the “Pater Noster” (Our Father), “Ave Maria,” or other prayers before proceeding to the next verse. The rubrics seemingly imitate the verse and response pattern of church liturgies for group participation in a household setting. The iconography of Saint Anne teaching the Virgin to read presents a model for women as readers and teachers within the household. Hannah Thomas envisions a household or family reading the verses and their responses “to start their day thinking about how they can use their religious experience to live a better life.” Within the birthing chamber, we might imagine a female attendant holding the Bar Convent roll so that a laboring woman could view the images while another woman recited the poem and all women participated in the response prayers. 

When rolled up, as Thomas shows us in the video, the Bar Convent roll could easily fit a woman’s small hand and could just as easily be hidden away if Protestant authorities ransacked a recusant household in their search for evidence of forbidden Catholic services. If its owner were indeed a Catholic recusant laywoman, she must have believed that entrusting her precious arma Christi roll to Bar Convent, a religious institution secretly founded in 1668 and administered by recusant nuns would provide its best chance of survival.