medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
John Briggs wrote:
>I'd be inclined to disagree - although I suppose the point about the Hail
>Mary depends on when the Ave Maria got attached to the Rosary (when a
>Paternoster became a Rosary, I suppose - a subject about which I am totally
>ignorant...)
Short version: The rosary was a product of gradual evolution, and we have records of beads being used to count repetitions of the Ave Maria well before 1400. The rosary solidified in its present form in the mid-1400s. (Long version: Read my book <grin> or better yet, Anne Winston-Allen's _Stories of the Rose: The Making of the Rosary in the Middle Ages_)
>But the illiterate (by which I think we mean those who
>didn't know Latin) were expected to recite the Lord's Prayer etc, if they
>couldn't follow the Latin of services, and if they did it in Latin it would
>kinda defeat the object of the exercise...
Not necessarily that last, all that would be required is to know the words by heart and be able to repeat them -- the point being to occupy oneself doing *something* devotional.
But see, this behavioral question is the sort of detail that doesn't "fossilize" very well, since it's such common knowledge at the time that nobody bothers to write it down.
(BTW, I'm still on a quest to discover exactly *how* and when people made the sign of the cross on themselves -- nobody ever bothers to describe the gestures in detail. This list did provide some helpful answers awhile back. And I did find some more references to *when* people crossed themselves in _Religion and the Decline of Magic_ the other day, where I hadn't previously thought to look. I'm especially interested in how long the habit persisted in England in the decades after the Reformation.)
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0 Chris Laning
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+ Davis, California
http://paternoster-row.org - http://paternosters.blogspot.com
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