The Origins of the Rosary

Origins of the Rosary

(original post: http://www.secretummeummihipress.com/ )

St. Dominic did not “create” the Rosary. He died in 1221, and the earliest recorded rosary similar to what we know today was dated in the 1300s. It is possible that he taught people to recite the first half of the Hail Mary. St. Peter Damian (1007 – 1072) told the story of a priest with only one virtue – saying that Angelic Salutation daily. (Luke 1:42a)

Soon, it was called the "Psalter of Our Lady", with peasants reciting the Angelic Salutation 150 times in a row as an imitation of the 150 psalms of the Divine Office. The rest of the Hail Mary (or in Latin, Ave Maria) was a monastic addition.

Several Cistercian orders developed some meditations on the life of Christ, divided the “Aves” into groups of ten, punctuated with a “Pater Noster” (Our Father). Finally, another Dominic, a Carthusian monk of Polish descent, popularized his version with 50 meditations to keep wandering minds focused on the task at hand. This version dates to the early 1400s, and was called a Rosenkranz – a garland of roses.
Knotted cords and beads for prayer counting predate the Hail Mary. They were also used to count “Paters.”
The genius of the Rosary was that anyone could say it. The rosary confraternities were free, and open to all. (Other religious confraternities had membership dues and requirements that suited only the nobility.) The Carthusians and their Dominican confreres were simply concerned with providing spiritual succor to their flocks, all of whom were reeling from the effect of the Hundred Years War and bubonic plague.

The Rosary also satisfied the need to idealize love and relationships. In Stories of the Rose, historian Anne Winston-Allen says, “Like most works of the devotional allegory genre, it calls up the language and images of the Old Testament Song of Songs and fuses them with the conventions and terminology of courtly love.”

Woodblock prints were widely used to disseminate popular religious images to those who couldn’t read. Rosary books, devotional paintings, and sculptures abounded on the rosary theme. At the same time, most peasants said the Rosary using a knotted cord. The first Rosary woodblock print dates to 1483, in Ulm. Each picture is framed in ten roses, one for each Ave.

Easy, artistic and free-- the Rosary endures as a devotion for rich and poor.

-- by Kristen West McGuire