Rosaries: East and West

 By: Christine Corcoran 

A rosary and a komvoschinion 

Whether swinging from a rearview mirror or balled in a penitential fist, the rosary is one of the most quintessential forms of Catholic iconography. This humble beaded cord harkens images of musty stained glass windows, stinging incense, and pipe organs.  

The rosary is one of the only items that has remained exclusively Catholic throughout the millennia. 

Right?

Rosaries attained widespread popularity in the high Medieval period, but the Catholic Church was not alone in its use of a looped prayer cord. As the rosary took off in Medieval Italy, France, and Britain, its Orthodox counterpart had already spread in Greece and Turkey. 

To truly understand the history of this beautiful prayer device, we must examine its history and usage in the early Catholic and Orthodox traditions.

Rosaries followed a long tradition of domestic prayer in Medieval Western Europe. They actually superseded the previously dominant form of at-home prayer, an artisanally crafted prayer book called a Horae, or Book of Hours. Initially, the Horae’s short hourly liturgies primarily attracted thirteenth-century elite women who aimed to emulate the devotion of monks. 

But why would wealthy women want to worship constantly like monks?

Since upper class women were strictly bound by expectations of appropriate behavior, very few activities were considered suitable for these women to do. The first obligation was to birth and raise a family. They might also contribute to the household by spinning or weaving – though in wealthy homes these tasks were usually done by domestic servants. 

But women were also allowed and even encouraged to pray – so, many did. Religious devotion offered women an opportunity for intellectual stimulation during a time when their education was not popularly supported. 

Christianity was so ubiquitous that even women without familial or domestic duties were still welcome to practice religious devotion, so worship within the home became incredibly accessible and popular. The practice of religion within the home was so common that many manors would have a chaplain or priest who would live on-site in order to pray with the family and help the Lady of the house with the liturgy of the Horae.

As with many trends, the tastes of the wealthy trickled down to the commoners, and by the early sixteenth century, the Horae was everywhere. As the exclusivity of the Horae was waning in the fifteenth century, rosaries took their place. 

Like the Horae, the rosary is used to pray outside of a traditional church service. The Horae, however, contained different prayers, psalms, and readings that were recited every hour and depended on the liturgical season, making them very difficult to memorize. The rosary, in contrast, has only a handful of prayers, corresponding to each bead on the cord, which made them much easier to remember without the aid of a book. 

The most iconic prayer associated with the rosary is the Hail Mary, and indeed many of the rosary prayers are dedicated to the Virgin Mary. This association between rosaries and the Virgin Mary alludes to the initial audience for the items: women worshiping within the home. Shorter and easier to memorize, rosaries were more accessible to the illiterate or semi-literate women of the lower classes who didn’t have the time to pray every hour. Their accessibility made rosaries an intimate item of worship in the everyday lives of women and men alike.

One century before the popularization of rosaries in Western Europe, the komvoschinion was spreading among Greek monasteries in Orthodox Byzantium – a wealthy kingdom spanning the southern Balkans and coastal Turkey. Like the rosary, a komvoschinion is a braided, knotted, or beaded cord used in prayer. Komvoschinia grew especially popular in the burgeoning fourteenth century tradition of hesychasm, especially among the monastic hub on Mount Athos in Northern mainland Greece. Hesychasm is an extreme form of religious devotion that emphasizes spiritual connection to God through the repetition of short simple prayers. The most popular of these prayers was the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me.” Like with a rosary, a komvoschinion would be used during the Jesus Prayer to keep track of the number of prayers recited. 

Hesychasm (and the usage of a komvoschinion) was practiced exclusively by monks. In fact, women were banned from Mount Athos (including its hesychast centers) during this period, and still are today. 

The difference in the gender of the audiences between rosaries and komvoschinia reflects the shared social expectations of both Eastern and Western Europe: women practiced worship within the home, and men practiced worship in ecclesiastical settings. In Western practice, the rosary was a reflection of interior devotion and spirituality. Although it still symbolized those virtues, since the komvoschinion was used in the group setting of a monastery, it had a more exterior function and significance. 

Rosaries and komvoschinia seem nearly identical in both appearance and function, however each fits into a larger and more complex culture. The Byzantines had been using icons in women-dominated domestic worship for over half a millennium by the time of the komvoschinion’s introduction in the fourteenth century, and they still serve a prominent function in Orthodox worship today. Likewise, Catholics did not develop a form of minimalist worship among its clergy in a similar fashion to hesychasm, so they did not need a rosary to keep track of their repetitious prayers. This goes to show that even within a unifying religion, there is still wide variation between culture and practice between Eastern and Western worship traditions.

 

Works Cited 

Cross, F. L. and E. A. Livingstone. “Hesychasm.” In The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, edited by F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Cross, F. L., and E. A. Livingstone. “Jesus Prayer.” In The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, edited by F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Cross, F. L, and E. A. Livingstone. “Komvoschinion.” In The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, edited by F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Cross, F. L. “Rosary.” In The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, edited by F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Duffy, Eamon. Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers 1240-1570. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.

“100 Knots Black KOMBOSKINI Men Orthodox Prayer Rope Rosary For Son Christmas.” Ebay. Accessed on February 26, 2024. https://www.ebay.com/itm/125662166491.

Gilsdorf, Sean and Brian FitzGerald. “Christian Liturgy: A Short Introduction.” History and Literature 10AB: Introduction to the Medieval World. Class lecture at Harvard College, Cambridge, MA, February 08, 2024.

“Hypertext Book of Hours - Introduction.” Accessed February 20, 2024. https://medievalist.net/hourstxt/home.htm.

Panneton, Daniel. “How Extremist Gun Culture Is Trying to Co-Opt the Rosary.” The Atlantic (blog), August 14, 2022. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/radical-traditionalist-catholic-christian-rosary-weapon/671122/