Gwen
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The Rosary in the 15th C.- a summary

The two fifteenth-century monks who created this work were devout members of the Carthusian religious order. At a time when discipline in most other orders had become lax and spirituality was badly in need of renewal, Carthusians were considered models of piety and frequently called on to aid in reform efforts. Within Adolf and Dominic's own order an innovative prayer exercise was at this time generating considerable enthusiasm: a new kind of rosary, one to which a set of meditations reviewing Christ's acts of redemption had recently been added. Adolf and Dominic's prior, the reform-minded Johannes Rode (d. 1439), advocated this new exercise as an aid to achieving deeper spirituality, and their fellow Carthusian brothers at Trier are said to have made more than one thousand copies of the prayer, which they circulated among their own houses as well as to many Benedictine convents that Johannes Rode was tasked with reforming.

Adolf and Dominic could not have foreseen that their rosary and other new forms of it would rapidly spread beyond the cloister to be taken up by the laity. Soon the rosary would spawn a brotherhood that claimed a million members (both living and deceased) on the eve of the Reformation.

To the basic form of the prayer—"Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb"—that had emerged in the twelfth century, more elements continued to be assimilated. In the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the name "Jesus" was appended to the prayer, and in the sixteenth century the phrase: "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death,~' plus also the Creed, and finally the Gloria. The most distinctive feature of the devotion today is its combination of oral repetition with serial mental meditations.

The 150 Aves—divided into three sets of fifty—are recited orally in groups of ten punctuated by an Our Father. During each set of ten Aves the worshiper meditates on one of a series of fifteen mysteries, events in the lives of Christ and Mary that comprise five joyful, five sorrowful, and five glorious episodes. The joyful mysteries recount: (1) the Annunciation, (2) the Visitation, (3) the Nativity, (4) the Presentation, and (5) the Lost Child Jesus Found in the Temple.5 The sorrowful events comprise: (1) the Agony in the Garden, (2) the Scourging, (3) the Crowning with Thorns, (4) the Carrying of the Cross, and (5) the Crucifixion. The glorious mysteries celebrate: (1) the Resurrection, (2) the Ascension, (3) the Descent of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles, (4) the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, and (5) the Coronation of the Blessed Virgin Mary as Queen of Heaven (earlier the Last Judgment or the Joys of Paradise).

Why this particular prayer—of all the medieval experiments in devotional exercises—succeeded so dramatically has to do not only with its form but also with developments in popular religious piety, in an age when, as Steven Ozment states, the forms of piety were "never before so numerous or varied.'' As a devotional exercise, the rosary combined elements from three older kinds of meditations to create a new, more engrossing prayer that was particularly suited to the spiritual needs of the lay faithful. As a religious practice, it influenced as well as responded to the demands of the laity for new, more individual and private forms of religious observance.

Its effect on extraliturgical piety was far-reaching. It generated (and, in turn, was affected by) a secondary literature of its own, as rosary books, testimonial anecdotes, exempla, legends, songs, and poems about it were composed. In the visual arts, it provided the theme for large numbers of devotional paintings, altars, sculptures, and block prints. To laypersons it provided a new source of spiritual guarantees, mediated by lay associations and dispensed outside of the corporate liturgical offices of the church.

As the "layperson's breviary" or "common man's hours," this private devotion served as an imitation of the monastic hours. It answered both the need for a meditative exercise to supplement the mass that could be practiced in private and also for a prayer to be said during the mass by those who were not able to follow the Latin text of the celebrations. Confraternity members could recite the devotion at home privately and at the same time participate in a large spiritual brotherhood. They could share not only in the collective spiritual credits amassed by other members, but also in the benefits offered by the religious order of the Dominicans, which sponsored the confraternity and said special masses for its adherents.

The religious confraternity that was spawned by the devotion also participated in the shaping of the practice. Officially established at Cologne in 1475, it enrolled 100,000 members within the first seven years. From there it grew exponentially to become within a short time the largest such organization. Unlike most confraternities, the rosary brotherhood cost nothing to join, had no required meetings, and accepted everyone. Even deceased persons could be enrolled and prayers said on their behalf. Just as compelling as the opportunity to give aid to friends languishing in purgatory was the assurance that through this kind of self-help alliance members could guarantee prayers to be said for their own souls after death.

More than anything else, the reason so many people wanted to join the brotherhood was the acute need to provide greater security for their souls in the face of the threat of purgatory. Ironically, however, it was because of the granting of ever-greater special indulgences that the devotion fell victim to its own success. Spurious claims of indulgences for saying the prayer ballooned to outrageous proportions of up to 120,000 years. Increasingly, the exercise came to be exploited as a way to stockpile insurance against prolonged suffering in purgatory. The devotional narrative meditations that had earlier been the focus of the prayer when it was promoted by the Carthusians became submerged in a host of other sets of complicated, numerical, and non-narrative meditations. Increasingly, the practice became the vehicle for a kind of legalistic "arithmetical" piety. This mechanical and quantitative aspect of the exercise left it open to attacks by Protestant reformers who vigorously rejected the entire practice as fraudulent along with the indulgences and the doctrine of purgatory itself.

To be sure, there were excesses to criticize. Yet, despite the general mood of anticlericalism and dissatisfaction with religious institutions, most people still continued to accept the faith taught by the church as true.Is The late medieval period was, in fact, a time of intense popular religious fervor. Bernd Moeller has argued that in Germany, at least, the fifteenth century was "one of the most churchly-minded and devout periods of the Middle Ages." Moeller identifies this intense pious fervor and the "deep respect for the authority of the church" as prerequisites for Luther's success and as an explanation for why the Reformation took place in Germany, ``a sluggish, medieval country where authority was still respected, rather than, for example, in France.''

Other scholars, like Stephen Ozment, agree that fifteenth-century religiosity was fervent, yet characterize it as "flawed" and "unsatisfying" because of the church's failure to provide a distinctive model of spirituality suited to the needs of the laity, a failure that—if one accepts Ozment's view—also played a role in the rosary's extraordinary success. In a similar vein, Francis Oakley has suggested that while the intensity and vitality of late-medieval piety may not be in doubt, there remain many questions yet to be answered about its ''quality.'' This study will address some of these "quality" questions by looking at notions of spirituality as conveyed in vernacular writings about the rosary: the songs, statutes, exempla, and handbooks of the newly founded rosary brotherhood.

Early Rosaries
In the fifty-five volumes of medieval Latin religious Lyrics collected in the Analecta hymnica, rosaries and Marian Psalters alone take up the better part of three volumes.1 The large number of prayers designated by these names is evidence of two things: that they were popular forms and that there was not just one rosary in the Middle Ages. But how are Marian psalters and rosaries related to each other? And how are they connected to the one(s) that the brotherhood was founded to promote? Out of so many options, how did the prayer that is said today become the "official" or standard form ?

As indicated, the earliest form of Hail Mary is composed of two salutations: the Angel Gabriel's greeting to Mary in Luke 1:28 and her cousin Elisabeth's greeting in Luke 1:42. In the West, the earliest linking together of these two passages occurs in a seventh-century antiphon of the offertory of the mass for the fourth Sunday of Advent that was traditionally attributed to Gregory the Great. By the eleventh century, the greeting had become well known because of its inclusion in the extremely popular Little Office of the Blessed Virgin, where the words "Ave Maria" were invoked repeatedly. Marian legends and anecdotes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries tell of pious individuals reciting chains of 50, 60, 100, or 150 repetitions of the prayer as a religious exercise or gesture of devotion to the Virgin. It was believed that hearing these words brought Mary delight by recalling to her the joy of the Incarnation.

Often these repetitions were counted on knotted cords or strands of beads. Prayer counters of beads and other materials are, of course, not unique to Western Christianity but common to many world religious.

While it has been assumed that the Christians first brought back prayer counters from the Holy Land at the time of the Crusades, devotional beads were actually in use in Europe before the time of the Crusades. The most prominent example is that of the famous Lady Godiva of Coventry (d. 1041) who bequeathed to the Benedictine priory she founded a set of gems threaded on a cord that she used to recite her prayers.6 At Nevilles in Belgium another chain has been preserved that reputedly belonged to Abbess Gertrude (d. 659), daughter of Pippin I. Still older accounts tell of how Christian hermits Paul of Thebes (c. 234-347) and Saint Anthony (251-356) in the deserts of Egypt and Syria employed pebbles and knotted strings to keep track of the prayers they chanted unceasingly.

Thus, while it is not known exactly how old the first prayer counters are, it is clear that the beads predate the Hail Mary and that other devotions were said on them first. Among the earlier prayers were repetitions of the Our Father from which they derived the popular name Paternoster beads, or simply paternosters. Repetitions of Our Fathers were used, for example, by lay brothers of the Carthusian and Cistercian orders as a replacement for the prayers of the Divine Office. Other laypeople said Paternosters or Hail Marys as acts of devotion or penance. Thus Caesarius of Heisterbach (1180-1240) reports the case of a matron who regularly recited fifty Hail Marys and experienced a taste of wonderful sweetness in her mouth. Two Marian miracle stories of the twelfth century tell of a knight who prayed one hundred Hail Marys a day in order to rid himself of an unhappy passion for his master's wife and of "a wife" who succeeded in ridding her husband of his mistress (although it was the mistress who prayed the devotion!). Other legends tell of people reciting the Hail Mary 150 times over.

In a Middle Low German code of Laws from 1220/35 the beads used for keeping track of these prayers are called a “zapel" (chaplet or corona). At Ghent in 1242 beguines were required by their regulations to pray three "chaplets" (“hoedekins") of 50 Aves daily. Other religious devoted themselves to marathon repetitions of the prayer. Thomas Esser reports that certain Dominican nuns at the cloister of Unterlinden in Colmar prayed a thousand Hail Marys each day, and on special days two thousand.

But the chains of Hail Marys by themselves do not yet constitute a rosary in the modern sense; that is, a combination of verbal prayer and an accompanying set of mental meditations. This development arose out of the recitation of the 150 Psalms of the Old Testament in private devotions imitating the canonical hours. In "Marian psalters," which originated around 1130, the antiphons that preceded each Psalm in the liturgy of the Hours and announced its theme were replaced by short verses that interpreted each of the 150 Psalms as a reference to Christ or Mary. Gradually the devotion was shortened to recitation of the antiphons alone and either Paternosters or Ave Marias. Without the Psalms, the connection that the antiphons had to a specific theme was lost. As a result the antiphons themselves came to be replaced by rhymed free paraphrases or simply by a litany of 150 verses in praise of the Virgin. Partly for ease of recitation, the Marian psalters were subdivided into three sets of fifty stanzas, each set of which was also designated as a chaplet (later a "rosary").

That meditating sequentially on the life of Christ would eventually be joined together with the Hail Mary seems in retrospect almost inevitable given the emphasis in the late Middle Ages on reenacting the life of Jesus—particularly the Passion—in spiritual exercises and in religious pageants. Since the average layperson was regarded as incapable of higher order imageless contemplation, reviewing the stations in the life of Jesus storywise was the form of devotional exercise recommended for the laity. And keeping the Passion ever before the mind was the primary way of training the heart in Christian virtues and of conforming the individual to Christ's example. Pausing at intervals during the day to pray and reflect on the stations of the Passion was for some a part of the rhythm of the working day. The midday bell was rung (at first on Fridays and eventually every day) as a reminder of the hour of the Crucifixion. Other bells called to mind the specific scenes commemorated in the liturgical Hours, depicted in pictorial works and taught in sermons and mystery plays. By serially picturing and reflecting on the stations of Christ's life and death, the laity could both sanctify daily life and participate in the collective prayer of the church at the liturgical hours and during mass. Thus the mental habit of moving progressively point by point through the life of Jesus seems a natural complement to the devotional act of reciting a series of Hail Marys.
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Excerpts from “Stories of the Rose- The making of the Rosary in the Middle Ages”
Anne Winston-Allen
ISBN 0-271-01631-0