Rosary rosaries prayerThere have been many ways of praying
the rosary throughout the centuries,
though most people today are only familiar
with one. Rosaries were
initially ³paternoster cords² and were used,
as the name suggests, to count
a series of fifty ³Our Father² prayers.
In fact, the first rosaries used in
prayer were actually knotted cords. These
are still passed down today in
monastic orders of the Eastern and Coptic churches.
The repetition of the
³Our Father ³ prayer definitely preceeded
that of the ³Hail Mary². 1
There are even earlier accounts, before
1000 A.D., of other prayers and
psalms being recited in repetition but no
hard evidence of actual rosary
beads. We have evidence of beaded rosaries
being used for the first time in
England, in the eleventh century, where they
grew in popularity until the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when they were
outlawed by the Reformation
and so became a badge of Catholocity. 2 However,
rosaries still differed
from each other in the amount and division of beads,
in the eleventh
century, depending on the prayers for which they were to be
used. The
earliest printed rosary book, giving instruction on the modern day
telling
of rosaries, appeared in 1475, and included 50 meditations on the
life of
Jesus, one for each ³Hail Mary² prayer, by Dominic of Prussia,
a Carthusian
monk. 3 This marked a change in the nature of the repeated Hail
Mary prayer
on a rosary. Now it was a prayer to remind us of Jesus more than
one to the
Virgin. A 1483 rosary book, written by a Dominican, reduced the
meditations
to 15, almost exactly the same fifteen meditations we use today.
4 The
Dominican Order is credited with the spread of the rosary prayer and,
with
it, the physical structure of rosaries as we know them in modern times.
The
Dominicans helped form communities of people bonded only by the recitation
of the rosary prayer. The use of rosaries among lay people began to
increase,
because it took no formal education to be able to say it, until
the rosary
became known as ³the office of the laity² 5 due to its
popularity.
The nineteenth century saw the rise of the Marian movement, and
even more
use of rosaries, partly fueled by the series of Marian apparitions
during
that time. Rosaries are not so popular as they were in our parents¹
day,
but there continue to be Catholics devoted to the rosary who will never
let
it die out.
1-5 ³Beads & Prayers, The Rosary in History
& Devotion.² John D. Miller.
Burns and Oates. 2002.
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