The following is quoted from the booklet entitled "A Scriptural Rosary". My first serious introduction to the Rosary, it was found on a little private retreat in the bookstore of the Dominican Center in Grand Rapids, MI. The concise historical background section is very readable and informative. May it bless you as well.
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The story of how the
Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary originated, and how it has developed and
changed over the centuries, is one of the most interesting but little known
chapters of the history of our Faith. A
brief look at this curious story will show that the Scriptural Rosary presented
here is actually very similar to the form of the Rosary that was once in
universal use during the late Middle Ages.
An Outgrowth of the 150 Psalms of David
Most historians
trace the origin of the Rosary as we know it today back to the so-called Dark
Ages of ninth century Ireland. In those
days, as is still true today, the 150 Psalms of David were one of the most
important forms of monastic prayer.
Monks recited or chanted the Psalms day-after-day as a major source of
inspiration.
The lay people who
lived near the monasteries could see the beauty of this devotion but because
very few people outside the monasteries knew how to read in those days, and
because the 150 Psalms are too long to memorize, the lay people were unable to
adapt this prayer form for their own use.
So one day in about
the year 800 A.D., one of the Irish monks suggested to the neighboring lay
people that they might like to pray a series of 150 Our Fathers in place of the
150 Psalms. Little did he know that his simple suggestion was the first step in
the development of what would one day become the most popular non-liturgical
prayer form of Christianity.
At first, in order
to count their 150 Our Fathers, people carried around leather pouches which
held 150 pebbles. Soon they advanced to
ropes with 150 or 50 knots; and eventually they began to use strings with 50 pieces of wood.
Shortly afterwards
the clergy and lay people in other parts of Europe began to recite, as a
repetitive prayer, the Angelic Salutation, which makes up most of the first
part of our Hail Mary. St. Peter Damian,
who died in 1072, was the first to mention this prayer form. Soon many people were praying the fifty
Angelic Salutations while others favored the fifty Our Fathers.
Origin of the Mysteries
Then during the
thirteenth century another prayer form, which would soon give the Rosary its
Mysteries, began to develop. Many
medieval theologians had long considered the 150 Psalms to be veiled prophecies
about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. By deep meditation and skillful
interpretation of the Psalms certain of these men began to compose Psalters of
Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. These
were series of 150 praises in honor of Jesus, based upon interpretations of the
150 Psalms.
Soon Psalters
devoted to 150 praises of Mary were also composed. When a Psalter of Marian praises numbered 50
instead of 150 it was commonly called a rosarium, or bouquet.
Thus, during the
thirteenth century there were four distinct Psalters in use at the same time:
the 150 Our Fathers, the 150 Angelic Salutations, the 150 praises of Jesus, and
the 150 Praises of Mary. In an age when unity
was held in such high regard, perhaps it was inevitable that these four prayer
forms should eventually be combined.
The Carthusians Combine Prayers and Mysteries
The first step
toward the combination of these four kinds of psalters came in about 1365 A.D.
when Henry of Kalkar, the Visitator of the Carthusian Order, grouped the 150
Angelic Salutations into decades and put an Our Father before each decade. This combined the Our Father and the Hail
Mary for the first time.
Next, in about 1409,
another Carthusian, Dominic the Prussian, wrote a book which attached a Psalter
of fifty thoughts about the lives of Jesus and Mary to a Rosary of 50 Hail
Marys. This was the first time that a special
thought was ever provided for each Hail Mary bead. Eventually the 50 Hail Mary thoughts of
Dominic the Prussian were divided, as Henry of Kalkar had done, into groups of
ten with an Our Father in between. Many
variations of this form were composed between about 1425 and 1470, but the
changes were gradual, not sudden.
The Dominicans Popularize the Special Hail Mary Thoughts
By 1470, when the
Dominican Alan of Rupe founded the first Rosary Confraternity, and thereby
launched the Dominican Order as the foremost missionaries of the Rosary, he
could refer to the Rosary with a special thought for each Hail Mary bead (which
was the form he favored) as the new Rosary, while he referred to the form with
the Hail Marys and no accompanying statements as the old Rosary.
Through the efforts
of Alan of Rupe and the early Dominicans this prayer form (150 Hail Marys with
a special thought for each bead) spread rapidly throughout Western Christendom.
It is important to
note that this form of Rosary (the form which Alan of Rupe promoted so
successfully as the Rosary of St. Dominic) is the model upon which the new
Scriptural Rosary is based, that is, a Rosary with a special thought for each
of the Hail Mary beads.
But the fifteenth
century was a time of change and this successful medieval Rosary form was
gradually abandoned as the Christian world moved out of the Middle Ages and
into the Renaissance.
Picture Rosaries Introduce the Short Rosary We Use Today
The abandonment of
the medieval Rosary form, the form which provided a special thought for each
Hail Mary bead, came about in this manner: In about 1500 it became possible to
reproduce woodcut picture prints inexpensively for the first time. Since the vast majority of people still could
not read, these picture Rosaries became immediately popular. But since it was difficult and expensive to
draw and print 150 different pictures, one for each Hail Mary thought in the
medieval Rosary, the new picture Rosaries usually showed only fifteen pictures
or one for each Our Father bead. At
first the ten Hail Mary thoughts were printed around each Our Father
picture. Perhaps the most beautiful
picture Rosary of this sort was the one first published in Venice by Alberto da
Castello, O.P., in 1521. But during the
16th and 17th centuries the use of the special Hail Mary thoughts gradually
died out, and there remained only the fifteen brief Our Father thoughts which
have survived as the fifteen mysteries we know today.
(As an interesting
historical footnote, the only place in the world where the old medieval Rosary
with 150 Hail Mary thoughts is known to survive today is in the isolated little
mountain village of Schrocken, high in
the Vorarlberg Alps of Austria. Here the
villagers still come together as they have since the Middle Ages to pray the
Rosary the way it was once prayed throughout the Christian world.)
As soon as the short
Rosary of fifteen Mysteries and no Hail Mary thoughts had replaced the medieval
form, people recognized the need to augment the fifteen brief Mystery
statements. Supplementary prayers
usually took the form of narratives or meditations to be read before praying
each decade. One of the most popular of
these sets of fifteen meditations was written by St. Louis de Montfort in about
1700. Most of the currently popular
novena meditations follow this format, that is, an introductory paragraph of
devotional thoughts to be read before praying each decade.
First Stirrings of a Return to the Medieval Rosary Form
Then beginning in
the early 20th century, there appeared the first signs of a return to the
medieval method. Provost Walter of
Innichen published a series of thoughts for each Hail Mary in German. In 1920 Father Kilian Baumer composed another
series of Hail Mary meditations which were published in Fribourg,
Switzerland. The most recent printed
work with special thoughts for each Hail Mary is that of Dr. Magnus Seng, a
Canadian surgeon, published in 1946.
Each of these recent
writers composed pertinent statements,
or thoughts, to be read before or after praying each Hail Mary of the Rosary.
The Scriptural
Rosary presented here differs from these recent compositions, as it differs
from the medieval version, in that it is composed almost entirely of direct
quotations from the scriptures. These
quotations are blended to tell the story of each Mystery in ten consecutive
thoughts.
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