Tonsure scissors

The Liturgical Arts Journal has a short but informative article from J.P.Sonnen about liturgical scissors used for conferring the first tonsure. As I understand it in more recent centuries this was somewhat attenuated to snipping small lock or piece of hair from the head of the candidate. Chateaubriand describes receiving the ‘first tonsure’ in a such a manner in his Memoirs.

Sonnen’s article can be seen at Tonsure Scissors for Liturgical Rites

As I understand it the tonsure originated as an adaptation of the Roman custom of shaving the heads of male slaves to indicate their status, and monastics adopted it as a symbol of their subjugation to Christ, with, in the best known form, the remaining ring of hair as a reminder of the Crown of Thorns. The practice was then taken up by the secular clergy.

The Catholic Encyclopaedia has a short account of the tonsure, including an explanation of its disappearance in the English speaking world at Tonsure

An illustrated article in Ancient Origins takes the story down to its official abolition in 1972 and can be seen here

The full tonsure largely disappeared in the Tridentine era for most clergy, secular or religious. As we know from the Venerable Bede different styles of tonsure were seen as distinctive marks of confessional orthodoxy by Roman and Irish clergy in the seventh century.

In the high and later middle ages the more austere Orders, such as the Carthusians retained the idea of the shaven head. Fra’ Angelico in the mid-fifteenth century depicts his fellow Dominicans with just a circle of hair surrounding a shaven pate. 

Melozzo da Forli and Pintoricchio depict Pope Sixtus IV and his Curia and Pope Alexander VI respectively with large tonsures but with their hair falling forward similar to contemporary lay styles

Small tonsure of The secular clergy in later medieval England are depicted on brasses and effigies with a much smaller tonsure. This can also be seen in the symbol used in early printed Missals for guides to ordering processions. In these a cleric is depicted by a circle of hair around a small tonsure in what is intended as a bird’s eye view.

I recall reading many years ago in a book about St Paul’s Cathedral that in the treasury one of the cathedrals in Belgium is a metal circle designed to be a guide when shaving the tonsure on a cleric’s head that is believed to have originally been at St Paul’s.

In the age of clerical wigs it was the custom in Catholic countries to create a small tonsure with seed pearls on the top of such wigs.

My friends the Canons Regular of the New Jerusalem wear a tonsure very much in the tradition of Fra’ Angelico and I also knew an Anglo-Catholic cleric who wore a very small one, like a late medieval English secular priest.

I decided some years ago that my thinning crown was my “Grow Your Own Tonsure Kit”…..