ROSARY, a popular devotion of the Roman Catholic Church, consisting of is Paternosters and Glorias and i5o Ayes. The word also denotes the chaplet of beads for counting the prayers. It is divided into three parts, each containing five decades, a decade comprising 1 Pater, 1 o Ayes and a Gloria, in addition to a subject for meditation selected from the "mysteries" of the life of Christ and of the Blessed Virgin. The Christian prac tice of repeating prayers is traceable to early times : Sozo men mentions (H.E. v. 29) the hermit Paul of the 4th century who threw away a pebble as he recited each of his 30o daily prayers. It is not known precisely when the mechanical de vice of the rosary was first used. William of Malmesbury (De gest. pont. Angl. iv. 4) says that Godiva, who founded a re ligious house at Coventry in 1043, left a string of jewels, on which she had told her prayers, that it might be hung on the statue of the Blessed Virgin. Thomas of Cantimpre, who wrote about the middle of the 13th century, first mentions the word "rosary" (De apibus, ii. 13), using it in a mystical sense as Mary's rose-garden. Jacob Sprenger, a Dominican, founded the first confraternity of the rosary at Cologne in 1474. The feast of the Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary was ordered to be observed on the first Sunday in Oct. in such churches as main
tained an altar in honour of the rosary. Clement XI., by bull of Oct. 3, 1716, directed the observance of the feast by all Chris tendom.