Origin of rosaryThe
origins of the rosary lie with those of repetitive prayer. Telling
repetitive
prayers on beads is much older than Christianity. Its origins are
as old as
cultures that pray, and so is the habit of counting those prayers
on beads
tied together with a string. We find the origins of Catholic
repetitive prayer
in the early Middle Ages. We have records from the ninth
century of the Kyrie
being repeated and from the eleventh of the repetition
of the Our Father.
Psalms were repeated in the monastic orders, but for
this the monks had to
be educated enough to read. Some method of prayer was
needed to replace the
Office hours for the illiterate lay brothers. So the
lay brothers were taught
to repeat the Our Father in groups of fifty at the
times of the Holy Office.
They kept track of these prayers with what became
known as paternoster cords,
the origins of our present day rosary. The
origin of the Hail Mary prayer
itself was something called the Little Office
of Our Lady that grew popular
in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, where
the words of the angel Gabriel
were said as an antiphon. Eventually it
followed the way of the psalms and
the Our Father and began to be repeated
by itself in groups of fifty. This
grouping of prayers by fifties is the
origin of our five decades rosary. Catholic
rosary beads have their origins
in the Paternoster (Our Father) cords that
were commonly carried around by
the laity by the twelfth century. By the sixteenth
century, there were a
wide variety of beads made, each for a different grouping
of prayers, the
Hail Mary among them. The origin of our modern day Marian
rosary was
probably in fourteenth century England where the Carthusian Heinrich
Eghar
claimed to have had a vision of Mary in which she asked him to say an
Our
Father and ten Hail Mary¹s and to repeat this fifteen times. This
devotion
spread widely throughout England. The origin of the rosary devotion
would
not be complete without a word about the Dominicans. The Dominicans
propagated the rosary by founding rosary societies in which the only
membership
requirements were to sign your name and to pray. Many lay people
joined these
societies, and Marian devotion grew throughout Europe. There
is much more
of course to the story of the rosary¹s origins. One good
source that
was used for this information is ³Beads and Prayers, The Rosary
in History
and Devotion² by John D. Miller, published in 2002 by Burns &
Oates. |
