Richard III Remembered With Embroidery

Yesterday the body of England's King Richard III was reburied in Leicester cathedral, over 500 years after his defeat and death at the Battle of Bosworth Field. Archaeologists found his makeshift first grave under a parking lot in 2012. (It's deliciously ironic how "found under a carpark" is now the phrase that must appear in all news coverage of a man who once wore a crown.) Although Shakespeare and history books have focused on Richard's bloody role in the War of the Roses, the proceedings this week were about his historical significance and also his vulnerable humanity.

Perhaps most poignantly, earlier this week Roman Catholic Cardinal Vincent Nichols said a special requiem mass for the dead king. A moment of remarkable Anglican-Catholic cooperation, it also symbolized how even the most powerful people on earth still need God's redemptive grace.

Better still, Cardinal Nichols wore an historic chasuble believed to be from Richard III's royal wardrobe. Dating to the late fifteenth century, the embroidered robe is now in the collection of former Catholic seminary Ushaw college. The UK Catholic Herald described its embroidery detail:

The Westminster Vestment is an example of Opus Anglicanum (English work), the rich, complex and beautiful works of ecclesiastical embroidery for which England was famous during the Middle Ages. It has been made from velvet cloths of tissue linked together with silver-gilt brocading thread, with the figures cut from coloured silks and attached to a golden background. The chasuble depicts the Crucified Christ with the Roman soldier Longinus expressing his belief that Jesus is the “Son of God”. It features depictions of St Nicholas, St Catherine and St Pancras, the teenage Roman martyr whose relics were brought to England by St Augustine of Canterbury.

Image via Catholic Herald

It's truly magnificent, and a great example of church vestments of its era. Velvet, metallic thread, and highly symbolic embroidered scenes are all hallmarks of opus anglicanum. The motif of angels collecting Christ's blood in chalices while He hangs on the cross is a particularly popular recurring image, emphasizing the Eucharist's connection to calvary.

Intricate chasubles and copes fell out of favor after the English Reformation. Centuries later, as I discovered in my master's thesis research, Anglicans and American Episcopalians would rediscover the beauty of medieval English needlework and try to replicate its prestige in their own churches. 

It's interesting how the black pall covering Richard's simple coffin while it was on view this week also featured embroidered figures, including a six-winged seraph. It appears that opus anglicanum has come full circle, once again an important element of royal religiosity in England. As Cardinal Nichols pointed out in his homily, Richard III lived and died as a Catholic, whatever his sins. While some of his successors would have cringed to see such liturgical ceremony, he would have acknowledged the symbolic significance of copes and chasubles.

Whether Richard and his Gilded Age imitators were using that liturgical beauty to pad their own egos is definitely possible. But in the end, everyone dies and ends up helpless under a liturgical cloth.    

Via Getty Images

Today opus anglicanum pieces are treasured artifacts in museums, including the V&A in London and from the same time period, like this elaborate velvet chasuble, at The Cloisters in New York City.If you ever visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art's castle on the upper West Side, be on the lookout for this velvet chasuble and other amazing vestments.

What PBS Taught Me About Our Daily Bread

Baking has been on my mind a lot lately, thanks to several holidays. This month I've made Irish soda bread and Pi day apple pie on a whim. I've also been trying my hand at yeast bread. One of my Christmas gifts was Gluten Free Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes A Day, and I spent a couple snow days testing it out.

The good news is, you don't have to knead gluten free bread dough; assembly is like making brownies. The bad news is that title is a lie. It really means "In 5 minutes of active prep time, after you spent 2.5 hours the day before weighing flours and bringing the dough to a slow rise. And then you have to bake it for an hour. So yeah, carve out some time."

After all that weighing, mixing, and waiting, the results have been surprisingly delicious, although not practical for sandwiches. My loaves still aren't perfect, though. The dough is too dense, the rise too low, the crust too tough. I keep thinking about what I should do differently next time. Should I add less water? Does my pie crust need a higher fat content?

My first attempt at artisan bread. 

Still, I think all my experimenting has helped me understand the process better, even if that batch of bagels turned out flat and lumpy. While visiting my in-laws in New Orleans for Mardi Gras, I went back to the old puzzle of king cake. I attempted it several times the year we got engaged, but I never matched the Haydel's cakes the Southern Baron grew up on. This year, though, I took a long look and a light bulb went off. Eureka, it's a brioche! I just have to make a sweet bread dough enriched with eggs.

The same day as my king cake epiphany, we ended up watching the Great British Baking Show while we waited for Downton Abbey to air. I thought I was over baking competition shows - how much drama can you manufacture out of cupcake decoration anyway? But this show was different. The contestants were doing some serious, complicated stuff involving lots of rising time.

I ended up glued to the screen in suspense, hoping each person would have long enough to proof their dough AND bake it completely. Will the doughnuts puff up enough? Will the layered swirls of the Croatian coffeecake maintain their integrity? Will the fruit bread be raw in the center? (Spoiler alert: it was.) Even though the bakers had the luxury of a personal Kitchen Aid mixer plus a fancy proofing drawer (which I covet), their work was still a delicate balance of math and luck. If they didn't plan out everything perfectly, the results would be messy.

You have to assemble your flours before you make the dough.  

All this baked good suspense made me think about how we pray to God for "our daily bread." It sounds like the most basic, bland food. Sure, bread and milk are what everyone runs to get in a snow storm, but they aren't super exciting. But the actual process of making bread is a complicated scientific reaction.  If any factor goes wrong, it won't work. A round, fluffy loaf is actually kind of a miracle. It's appropriate that the Passover "bread of haste" is bread that doesn't bother to be leavened.

Daily life can feel like a maddening balance too. My routine is a pile of deadlines dependent on each other. I must leave the house no later than 7:32 am, or I'll miss the train. If I don't put my phone in airplane mode while I'm underground on the subway, the battery will drain to nothing. A letter template must be formatted perfectly, or the 250 letters I'm mailing will look terrible. 

Just as the Father wants to give us the food we need to live, we can also ask Him to give us success in our daily tasks so that life rises into a cohesive whole. The unleavened bread of Passover and the Eucharist symbolizes taking time away from the rat race demands of the everyday. We put aside complicated dough proofing so we can focus on heavenly things instead.