The dating game

Now that my name has been out on the Internet for awhile, I occasionally get questions about rosaries that people have found or inherited. I'm happy to answer them when I can, though I know much less about beads from more recent times (anything later than about 1600).

One type of question that makes me a little nervous, though, is when I'm asked about the date of someone's rosary. Sometimes this is an inherited rosary, but most often, it's a question from someone who has a rosary they would like to sell on eBay. Almost inevitably, they would like me to tell them it's very old and valuable. Unfortunately, it's usually not.

I do run across a very few rosaries with at least some real documentation of their dates. There's one currently for sale by "Church-woman Antiques", for instance (they always have delightful things) that is known to be at least 95 years old because the current owner (who is 95) remembers being told by her mother that she'd had it since before the owner was born. But such family stories are seldom written down, and memories do change and become less reliable with time, or when the story is transmitted from one person to another.

Part of the reason most of the rosaries I'm asked about turn out to be modern is pure statistics. There are a lot of perfectly nice old rosaries out there in the world, but as any archaeologist will tell you, even very common artifacts that were manufactured in large quantities have very low survival rates over the long term. I am guessing here, but I'd say that probably 99% of all the rosaries in existence right now date from sometime after 1900. Of the remaining 1%, I'd guess that at least 90% of those date from sometime in the mid to late 1800s. That means that perhaps one out of every thousand rosaries is older than 1800 -- and I suspect I'm being generous here.

Rosaries older than that certainly exist, but in much smaller numbers. I've seen a fair number of filigree rosaries from Europe, a few of which may very well be 18th century (the 1700s) -- but I'm basing that on other people's reports that that is when the style became popular, and I don't know what the evidence is. Certainly most of the "filigree" rosaries I see are made (like the one shown here) from machine-stamped components, which would put them firmly in the 19th century and the days of mass production. True filigree is hand-made from curled and soldered wire and is much rarer (and more expensive because of all the hand labor).



By the time we get back into the 1600s and 1500s, there are literally perhaps a couple of hundred surviving rosaries in museums, total -- most of them in Europe. I have no idea how many may be in private collections, but I would be surprised if the grand total in existence were more than four or five times that number -- out of all the many millions of rosaries and paternosters that must have been made in the last five or six centuries.

Another reason dating rosaries is difficult is that in some ways, styles have changed very little. Rosaries from the 1600s may have the exact same construction, number of beads, and arrangement as rosaries 400 years later. Of course wishful thinkers are going to hope that since the style dates back to the 1600s, their rosary might be that old too. A hopeful seller contacted me about a rosary he found while snorkeling in Grand Turk and Caicos(!), for instance, but I had to point out that it seemed to be made of wood and string, neither of which lasts very long in the sea.

There are a few key characteristics that at least enable us to say a rosary must date from after a certain time. Chain construction with wire links (as opposed to stringing beads on thread) can occur anytime from the early 17th century onward. I'm still not sure when the addition of the short string of five extra beads ending in a cross to the rosary dates to, but I certainly don't see it in the pre-1600 rosaries I look at, and its introduction may date from as late as the 1800s. Faceted beads, especially large numbers of faceted Ave beads, mostly became popular only after the invention of facet-cutting machinery made them easily affordable.

I've also seen several "old" rosaries (like the one below) that incorporate not just beads strung on wire links, but actual lengths of pre-made, flattened chain between the decades (called "curb chain" by jewelers) and so far all the ones I've seen like this seem to date from the 1940s or later. (Thanks to Catherine for the photo.)



Sometimes the size and shape of the beads, or the type of material they are made of, will give some clues -- glass bead aficionados can recognize "carnival" glass from the 1910s and 1920s, for instance. But most rosaries are made using crosses, beads, medals and other findings that were quite common types, and nothing is really added in the process of rosary-making (with a few exceptions) that provides any further information.

The most useful parts of a rosary for dating purposes are generally the medals or crosses. Very plain or simple ones don't change much, but often the more elaborate ones are styled like the jewelry of the same time period. Here, for instance, is a rosary with metal parts that practically shout "1960s" to the knowledgeable eye.



Medals and occasionally crosses may have engraved dates, though all the date means is that the rosary was made sometime after that date, and not necessarily very soon after. Many rosaries have the "Miraculous Medal," for instance, which has the date 1830 on it because that's the date of the vision on which the medal is based. But rosaries with that "1830" medal are still being made today.

So anyone hoping to obtain fabulous riches from old rosaries is likely to be quite disappointed. But rosaries from the 20th and late 19th centuries are often interesting for reasons of their own, and many collectors are quite happy to find a nice one, especially one that has been well loved or has a story attached.

The #1 question

The most common question I get from people who have found my website or the Paternosters mailing list is: "What type of rosary would be appropriate for a [#]th century person from [place]?"

Unfortunately it's not an easy question to answer.

The major reason is that there's not a whole lot of specific evidence to go on. There are very few surviving sets of beads; none, as far as I know, are complete any earlier than the late 15th or early 16th century. Evidence from portraits is almost entirely from the 15th and 16th centuries as well, and I've only begun to collect evidence from wills and other documents. I am sure there's lots more evidence out there, but it seems to be very spotty and it doesn't seem that anyone's collected it all in one place.

I can say that what I have isn't nearly enough yet to let me detect any differences according to what country something comes from. It may very well be that there isn't much difference by country; certainly in clothing fashions, there are times and places where people in several widely spread countries are wearing pretty much the same things. On the other hand, I may just not have enough data for trends or differences to become apparent. I do see special "types" being prevalent at certain times and places -- the large coral rosaries in 16th-century Germany, for instance. But aside from those, I really can't say anything useful about (for instance) French rosaries versus English rosaries versus Dutch rosaries.

There is also, of course, not just one "correct" type for a given time and place. We have documentation in the 15th century, for instance, for straight strings of twenty beads or so and loops of fifty with "gauds" or marker beads, among other types. Even after the Council of Trent (1569) we see several different types in use: short strings of ten beads, loops of fifty or sixty with gauds and a cross, and loops of fifty with the "tail" of five added beads that are universal on today's rosaries.

However, clearly there's a need for information by century, even if it turns out that the information includes several "right answers" instead of just one. So in the medium-to-long-range plans for the Paternoster-Row website, a series of "century pages" or the equivalent will definitely have a place.

I'm really just at the beginning of trying to tap into all the information that is out there, so who knows what I will find!

The 1830 trap

Once in a while there are people selling rosaries on eBay who aren't very familiar with what they've got. You can get some good bargains, that way . . . or you can, I imagine, get people wondering why their $50 piece doesn't sell (when it's something that's actually worth, say, $10).

For the most part, sellers on eBay are not happy if you tell them something isn't as old or valuable as they think it is. So it's something I rarely do. But there's one particular mistake I see about once a month. That's a seller who thinks they have a rosary from 1830.

The "1830" trap is easy to fall into if you don't know what you're looking at. Here's where you see it:



This is the front of a very popular Catholic medal, called the "Miraculous Medal," which turns up fairly often attached to, or as the centerpiece of, a 20th century rosary. There was a large upsurge of devotion to the Virgin Mary in the second half of the 19th and early 20th century, so there are lots and lots of these medals floating around. The date "1830" appears on all of them.

What "1830" represents is the date of the vision that inspired the medal: an apparition of the Virgin Mary to Sister (now Saint) Catherine Labouré, in the convent at Rue de Bac, Paris.

In a preliminary vision, Mary greeted Catherine familiarly and talked to her for a long time. A later vision showed Mary standing with her hands outspread, exactly as you see on the medal, with glowing letters surrounding her saying "O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee." The vision then rotated to show the design for the back of the medal:



A voice told Catherine to have a medal struck after this pattern, and promised that many graces would come to those who wore it. To make a long story short, while Catherine herself remained unknown to the public most of her life, she succeeded in persuading her confessor and superiors to produce and promulgate the medal, which became instantly popular. Reports of miracles soon began to come in, leading to the popular name "miraculous" for the medal. It can be easily identified because the back is always the same "official" design.

The popularity of the medal, then, dates from the mid-19th century, as does (I think) the popularity of this particular pose for the Virgin, with her hands spread and "rays of light" radiating from them, representing graces. By itself, this pose is known as "Our Lady of Grace." Miraculous Medals have been struck with the 1830 date for more than 150 years now, and are still being manufactured today, so the presence of this "1830" medal doesn't mean the medal, or any rosary to which it may be attached, is anywhere near that old.

In point of fact, the vast majority of the "very old" "antique" and "vintage" rosaries on eBay are 20th century. Once in a while one does turn up that's clearly from before 1900, but it's not at all common, even for rosaries owned by someone's grandmother, or rosaries that are heavily worn.