The Early Modern Sensorium: Rosary Devotions and the Rosary Chapel in Seventeenth-century Rome

<p dir="ltr">My purpose in this article is to explore the relationship between emotion and the senses in relation to the rosary and rosary confraternities in seventeenth-century Rome, with a particular emphasis on the experience of women. The rosary is well suited to an approach grounded in sensory methodology, as it is defined both as a prayer and as an object. As an object it was always kept close to the body. Praying the rosary was not only tactile (each bead was handled during prayer) but also auditory, as the prayer was said aloud. Scented rosaries were also common, adding an olfactory component to the ritual. The sense of sight was also important: as confraternities of the rosary obtained their own chapels, large altarpieces of the Madonna of the Rosary were commissioned as visual aids to prayer. Artists incorporated haptic and olfactory prompts into these images, knowing that the audience would be praying in front of them. The rosary, therefore, constituted a ‘sensorium’, defined here as the intertwining and interdependence of multiple sense modalities.The complex interaction in the rosary between prayer, bead and the scenes from the mysteries, developed gradually from older tradition of prayer beads, which is summarised here.</p>