Devotionals Past and Present

 

Some of these devotionals I have come across in antiques stores are rather recent (like starting in the 19th century) devotionals that were popular until about the middle of the 20th century but now seem to have died out. Some of the older ones, like the Rosary and the brown scapular, have endured for centuries, but it seems like in the 18th century there were a spate of (mostly women) religious and mystics who had private revelations that led to things like the Sacred Heart scapular and the Seven Sheddings of Blood chaplet. People still wear the brown scapular and pray the Rosary all the time, but these other ones I find in the antiques stores seem to have held people's interest for more or less a century, then they kind of died out. So people in the so-called Greatest Generation were maybe still doing these devotionals, then they died and their kids had no idea what the devotional objects were or didn't care, so they end up at antiques shops. This got me to thinking: were there devotionals in, say, the 12th century that were very popular for a century or so and then kind of died off? I wonder what they would have been? I'm probably not going to find something in an antiques shop from the 11th century, but a cursory internet search suggests that small prayer books were one of the most popular private devotional objects in Western Europe in the Middle Ages, so that's not too different than my subscription to Magnificat, except they just had one lavishly decorated book rather than a subscription to a magazine. I'd say that devotion is still going on - lots of people still pray the Liturgy of the Hours. So that one, like the Rosary and the brown scapular, has definitely stood the test of time!

Famous Hat