‘Touching rosary manuscripts: How patterns of wear reveal devotional handling practices in two late medieval manuscripts’, Objects of Devotion: Religion and Its Instruments in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anne-Laure van Bruaene and Ethan Matt Kavaler, Early Modern Cultural Studies (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming 2024).

Late medieval Christians enthusiastically adopted the rosary as a devotional tool, perhaps because it required manipulating a physical object, which grounded prayer in the tangible. The rosary devotion required repeating prayers, using the beads to count them off. The objects helped to anchor practice, to concretize habit. Counting prayers in this way brought the believer into long-term, ritualized contact with the para-liturgical object. Votaries sought beads made of unusual materials, that would feel different from the other objects in their tactile worlds, or beads carved into intriguing shapes. One of the earliest surviving strings of rosary beads – which dates from the thirteenth century, before the era when the laity widely adopted them in Western Europe – has beads that have each been carved out of bone in the form of a miniature skull, arranged neck-to-cranium on a chain. Their owner has handled them extensively, rubbing them to high polish so that they have forfeited their surface relief. Every stroke, every lost detail, proves that ardent devotion has happened, that worship has taken place. Humans leave traces on the objects they repeatedly rub against. That signs of wear are interpretable is the essential idea behind this article.