Mary Wellesley

Mary Wellesley’s Hidden Hands was published in 2021.

‘St Jerome in His Study’ (1521)

AlbrechtDürer arrived in Antwerp in August 1520. The journey from his home in Nuremberg had taken just under a month and he had recorded it in his journal. His main concern was to itemise his expenses. No expenditure was too small to note: ‘Ten pence for a roast chicken … I paid one stuiver for a pair of short...

Naked Hermit: Blessed Isles

Mary Wellesley, 5 March 2020

Medievalstories of paradisal islands had common tropes: the temptations of delicious food and delicious women; magical flora, like golden fruit trees; improbable constructions – ships made of crystal or bridges made of glass. A persistent theme is the unheeded warning. Characters are told not to kill cattle, not to eat the food offered by the host, not to come ashore, not to steal,...

The cell was the size of a large cupboard. There wasn’t enough room to lie down. I’d come late on a winter afternoon; the light was seeping away. What light there was came through the ‘squint’ – the small window that looked onto the sanctuary. It was a cruciform shape and through it I could see a single candle standing on the altar. I turned on the torch on my phone. In front of the squint was an oak shelf with a dark circle on its edge where the wood had been rubbed smooth. Above it was a notice that read: ‘Please put nothing on the ancient sill. This was the prayer-desk of the anchorites for several centuries.’ I knelt in front of it.

From The Blog
23 April 2019

In an 11th-century English life of Saint Margaret, or Marina, of Antioch, there is a moment when she gets the devil in what martial artists call a ‘submission hold’.

At the British Library: Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms

Mary Wellesley, 22 November 2018

The earliest fragments​ of the English language are likely to be a group of runic inscriptions on three fifth-century cremation urns from Spong Hill in Norfolk. The inscriptions simply read alu, which probably means ‘ale’. Perhaps the early speakers of Old English longed for ale in death as well as life. But, as the British Library’s exhibition Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms (until...

Saint Boniface used a manuscript to shield himself when attacked by robbers; the slashes it suffered make it a relic of his martyrdom. Pages of many books are marred by dirty fingerprints, wine stains...

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