I have a little bit of a bone to pick. I think it’s well-established that the Holy Rosary has a few different origin stories and some of them are downright off, contradictory, or are really a lazy attempt to fill in the history where we find blanks.

Let’s start with the basic version: Modern books love to tell a charming tale about illiterate laypeople who, unable to read the 150 psalms monks recited daily, were given simple prayers to repeat instead. And these of the faithful imagined this: a prayer chain of 150 “Hail Marys” and “Our Fathers” on a string of knots. The idea was to create something comparable to the monks’ daily routine, minus the Latin and the heavy-duty memorization. Eventually, those knots were swapped for beads — because, let’s face it, knots were never going to be the next big thing in fashion.

This version is peppered with some truth, but has some major inaccuracies. First of all, not all monks prayed all 150 Psalms. Synods, councils and bulls would address the standardization of the Divine Office well after the Rosary skyrocketed in popularity in the 13th century.

The more widely accepted version of the Rosary’s origins comes straight from medieval France, where St. Dominic de Guzman found himself in the midst of one of the most intense religious debates of the time. The Albigensians, or Cathars as they were known, had popped up in the region, spreading their dualistic theology and Gnostic heresy. They were anti-Catholic in the extreme, rejecting marriage, childbearing and even baptism — unless death was right around the corner. And while they claimed to shun violence, their version of peace looked suspiciously like forced submission.

The Cathars — who acted like the holier-than-thou Pharisees of the Old Testament — appeared to offer a counterpoint to the lavish lifestyles of some Catholic clergy. As one might imagine, this created a religious and political storm. Enter St. Dominic, a canon from the Spanish Premonstratensian monastery of Santa María de La Vid. Dominic was known for his preaching but he didn’t just preach — he engaged in debates with the Cathars, and his combination of passionate evangelization and a humble life led many to reexamine their beliefs. He was on a roll.

It was in 1208 that tradition tells us that the Blessed Virgin appeared to Dominic and gave him a spiritual “secret weapon” — a prayer that would help Catholics fight heresy and grow closer to God. Our Lady revealed the form of the devotion and the layout of the holy mysteries of the life of Christ and Mary which would repel heresy and propel any believer into faith-filled piety. And thus, the Holy Rosary, a meditation on Christ’s life through 15 distinct mysteries, was born. Dominic and his followers began to spread this powerful new prayer, and, before long, the Cathars were being driven out of Europe.

Soon, the Dominican Order was officially approved by Pope Honorius III, becoming a powerhouse in preaching the Rosary and eradicating the Albigensians.

Can this version of the history be proven? That is the big question. I will answer with a firm and confident “Yes.”

What the Dominicans lack is a written history of these events. There is a deep gap in contemporary history on the Rosary no matter what version of the story is being pushed onto the pages of books and magazines. But it doesn’t mean there isn’t evidence to piece together. (There certainly is.) And it doesn’t mean we cannot make some logical arguments for the traditional story.

As I mentioned, we lack a definitive corpus of extant writings on the Rosary. It isn’t until the writings of Blessed Alan de la Roche in the late 1400s that we read a thorough version of the tradition of the Blessed Virgin instructing Dominic. That’s a near-240-year gap! Poor record keeping, thus, is the running joke in Dominican circles. I knew of this as a Lay Dominican long before I began the research on the topic. De la Roche is sadly pegged as the real author of the Rosary.

But here’s what it comes down to: We see zero evidence of anything that resembles the Rosary before St. Dominic, and an explosion of Rosary use in the time immediately after Dominic.

The multiple recitation of shorter Christian prayers was a general practice of Christians for centuries before Dominic. No place was this more evident, however, than in England, where a “belt of Pater Nosters” (Our Fathers) was to be prayed at funerals, and in Paris, where historians have laid out the manufacturers of these apparent strings of beads or knots.

What we do not find, however, is much of any recitation of the Angelic Salutation (the Hail Mary), a doxology, the Creed, or meditation on the life of Christ in a structure. And these are the core of the Holy Rosary. It is as much a teaching apparatus as it is a devotion of faith.

Jean Mabillon, a French Benedictine monk of the 17th century, was a famed compiler — a fancy word for historian. He records in his Acta Ordinis S. Benedicti multiple ordinances of bishops of Dominic’s time that instruct the faithful to pray using the Angelic Salutation and the Apostle’s Creed in successive repetition — and not as a means of supplanting the Our Father, but supporting it, since many sects of the time like the Cathars where sowing seeds of doubt in the Incarnation.

Can we be content with this in demonstrating that even a basic form of the Holy Rosary did not exist before Dominic? Yes, we can. However, may we also suggest that there were preludes to the structure of the Rosary as preached by Dominic and his successors? Yes, I think it is safe to say that both of these can coexist well.

Then what for the time anterior to St. Dominic? Alan de la Roche was not the only 15th-century writer to make mention of the Rosary’s immediate relation to St. Dominic. Another interesting source comes up: Thomas à Kempis (1380-1471). Kempis mentions in the chronicle of the Monastery of St. Agnes that, “[the Rosary] as preached by the holy Father St. Dominic,” adding, “although for time it had fallen into neglect.”

These are supplemented in great strength by the popes of the time, too. Innocent VIII, Alexander VI and Sixtus IV each credit the Rosary to the Dominic and its popularity to his successors.

A 1234 statute from a beguinage in Ghent directs its faithful to pray “three coronas [crowns] forming the so-called Psalter of the Blessed Virgin” and it interpreted that these “coronas” are the sets of mysteries. We know these from arguments the Bollandists of the Reformation attempted to use against the Church’s prayers for Mary’s intercession.

Jean de Mailly chronicled the diocese of Metz in 1243 and included that it was a widely-held practice to pray 150 Angelic Salutations, especially among women. And finally, we find in the collection of writings of the bishop of St. Gall of modern-day Switzerland, dating to 1454, a near-exact description of the Rosary as “three times 50 Ave Marias under the title of the Psalter of the Blessed Virgin, counting their prayers on the beads of a chaplet which they held in their hands, and meditating at the same time on the Mysteries of the Life and Death of our Lord.” We know this from the unquestionable scholarship of Augusta Theodosia Drane. The reference Drane makes may be centuries later than other, earlier testimonies, but the point of this, and all of these, is that Alan de la Roche was assuredly not the first author to refer to the Rosary, then known as the Psalter of the Blessed Virgin.

What can we make of this? I am persuaded to conclude that there was a Rosary preached by Dominic and his successors. Dominic probably didn’t sit down one day and go back to the convent and say, “Here’s the Rosary we’ll use forever,” but he certainly planted the seeds for what would become the Rosary as we know it today. We know that Pius V issued the bull Consueverunt Romani Pontifices, which secured the Rosary in its current form. But he was only one in a long and secure line of popes who ascertained its history and attributed this to St. Dominic. The references provided to them must have been enough to persuade them, too, given the universal impact of their guidance to the Church.

So the early history of the Dominicans shouldn’t be the only thing we look at when determining the origins of the Holy Rosary. Readers of the annals of this period will agree that it was a short period of decline for many religious groups, and the making of histories was not at the top of the list for many. Is it prejudicial to hold the people of yesterday to the standards of today?