Beautiful Antique miniature silver Rosary In a wooden Egg

Beautiful Antique miniature silver Rosary In a wooden Egg

Italy end 1800s

Size: Rosary 11.5 cm L

Size: wooden Egg 4 cm H

Weigh: 4 gr.

The rosary is an ancient object, a prayer tool of the Catholic religion, perhaps of Indian or Muslim, or even Assyrian origin.

The practice or custom of counting prayers with a knotted string was already widespread in the first centuries AD, at the time of desert monks who lived as hermits, in an era before the Crusades.

It is said of an ancient Eastern hermit who used 300 stones and threw them one at a time after reciting a prayer, thus using a sort of loose rosary.

The word "rosary" derives from a medieval custom of placing a crown of roses on statues of the Virgin Mary, symbolizing prayers addressed to Mary.

Thus was born the idea of using a string of beads (crown of roses) as a devotional and contemplative prayer of a litanic and reiterated nature, typical of the Latin rite of the Catholic Church of the time.

In the 11th century, the Dominican Order spread devotion to the rosary and began to feel the need to involve lay people and faithful who could not read and write Latin in praying the Psalter (i.e., the recitation of the 150 psalms).