Then in the eleventh century, people also began praying Gabriel’s salutation to Mary with her name inserted: “Ave Maria, gratia plena.” A hundred years later, St. Initially, the Our Father was the prayer repeated on medieval beads. Paternoster Row and Ave Maria Lane in London are examples of places connected with this industry.īut strings of prayer beads had not yet evolved into the rosary. Luxury versions added tassels, pomanders, or extra devotional ornaments. Strands of these were worn around the neck or arm or, as men preferred, clipped to the belt. They made prayer beads from wood, glass, bone, horn, shell, ivory, jet, amber, or gems. The demand for such devotional aides was so great that “paternoster-makers” constituted a profession by the thirteenth century. There are even late medieval paintings of Baby Jesus or Mary holding prayer beads. Duchess Catherine of Cleves had her own beads of coral, pearls, and gold painted in her Book of Hours (ca. 659), supposedly owned prayer beads as did England’s famous Lady Godiva (d. Western monastics and laity also copied this practice. The prayer ropes/ladders of Eastern Christendom stem from such devices. Illiterate monks used pebbles or pegs to tally the 150 Our Fathers they said instead of the 150 Psalms recited by monks who could read. Christian prayer-counting seems to have originated among the Desert Fathers around the fourth century. Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims also pray on rosaries to honor gods, the Buddha, or Allah. Counting prayers with beads, pebbles, or other markers is not unique to Christianity. To begin at the very beginning, prayer beads are older than our rosary. It owes its final form to choices made by the praying public, simple and learned alike.
Our rosary was slowly shaped by many hands over the course of many years. So, the question remains: how did our familiar rosary of fifteen decades of Hail Marys spaced by Our Fathers and divided into three sets of Mysteries originate? No one person devised it. Dominic.” Countless artworks 2 would reproduce this error over the years as Dominicans became the chief promoters of both rosary and legend. He proved so persuasive that by 1480, a Dutch Dominican friary had commissioned a painting illustrating “The Legend of the Rosary of St.
1221) until a Dominican named Alanus de Rupe (d. 1 No early lives of the saint, no evidence collected for his canonization, no records, documents, treatises, sermons, or artworks originating with the Friars Preachers connect the rosary with Dominic (d. Dominic in the thirteenth century was thoroughly debunked more than a hundred years ago. The familiar story that Our Lady herself gave the rosary to St. But where did it come from?Ĭontrary to pious belief, it did not descend ready-made from heaven. The rosary is the best-loved devotion in the Catholic Church.
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