Medieval Brass Rubbings on My Wall

            On the living-room wall of my new house hang two art pieces reminiscent of the nineteen-sixties, when I was studying at Cambridge University. They are brass rubbings, the art of reproducing in outline form the image incised on a brass slab, usually set on the floor of a medieval church, in commemoration of a deceased person. 

Having a brass made was popular with the English aristocracy of the late Middle Ages. In the twentieth century, the popular thing was to do rubbings from brasses – to tape butcher paper over the brass slab and rub with a crayon or piece of charcoal or chalk to capture a surprisingly detailed image, often an effigy of the deceased person clothed in his or her most elaborate medieval dress. It took both patience and flexibility to stay on my knees for the hours required to do a good job, but the gradually emerging image, appearing like invisible ink made visible as I rubbed; the feeling of sinking back into medieval centuries, when the person whose image was appearing was recently deceased; and the hushed, cavernous, lofty space of the cathedral or church where I was working, made the art a meditative pleasure.

            When my mother came to visit, I thought that because she was an artist, she would enjoy brass rubbing, so I took her to Ely Cathedral, outside Cambridge, to introduce her to it. She went home enthusiastic about the art.

            Unfortunately, brass rubbing subsequently became so popular it was damaging the brasses themselves, blurring the sharp incisions of the image, so it isn’t allowed in most places any more. Instead, the brass rubbing artist can find replicas of the original plaques in brass rubbing centers all over England.

            Some years after my mother’s trip to Ely Cathedral, she somehow – I’m unclear on the details – discovered that a friend of hers had a collection of these replicas, and whether she bought them from her or was given them or was bequeathed them, they ended up in my mother’s basement art studio. Later, when I came to visit, she showed them to me, and, in a reversal of my offering brass rubbing to her at Ely Cathedral, she set two of them on the floor of the basement, taped black paper over them, and gave me copper colored wax to do my own rubbings. (The tools of the art had improved since the sixties.) The atmosphere in the concrete-floor basement, crowded with my mother’s paints and objects for tole painting, didn't exactly duplicate that of a medieval church, but the mother-daughter connection was a reciprocal experience.

            I did two rubbings, of a husband and a wife of the fourteenth century. The wife’s hands are at her waist, palms forward, fingers pointing up. She is wearing a complicated wimple that flows back from her head at an impossible angle.

A long dress of elaborate floral print falls in folds around her feet. She has a long, thin neck and distinctive features.

Her husband wears a knight’s regalia: armor, gloves, boots with spurs, a sword on his belt. It’s hard to tell whether he is wearing a hat or a hairdo. The eyes are very much in the artistic style of the day, but the shape of the nose and the mouth must have captured, again, a good likeness.

            I brought the rubbings home to Oregon, carefully rolled into a tube, but I lived in a tiny house with little wall space, and each rubbing, even unframed, measured 34 by 18 inches. I had no place for them in my house, and, anyway, I hadn’t done them so much to have them as to do a project with my mother, so I gave them to some friends. They had them beautifully set in gold speckled frames and hung them over their bed.

            When I moved from my tiny house into this more spacious house a few years ago, Tracy returned to me the brass rubbings as a house-warming gift. They are even more significant to me now, after my recent doctoral studies on medieval England. I replaced the glass on the wife with non-reflective glass. (The husband awaits funds for his new glass).

Hanging on the wall in my new house, these brass rubbings embody the Cambridge of the twentieth century as much as that of the fourteenth, my mother’s basement studio, with its smell of turpentine and paint, as much as Ely Cathedral, with its smell of incense, old stones, and sun-warmed air high above me in the clerestory windows.