I've been browsing through Paternoster Row, a site that's all about historical rosaries and paternosters. It's completely fascinating. Here's an excerpt from the site's home page:
From at least as early as A.D. 1000, rosaries, paternosters or similar strings of prayer beads have been a common accessory carried by men and women, old and young.
Indeed, the small round objects we know in English as "beads" were named from this practice; the root of the English word bead is the same as for the word bid, and originally meant "to pray or request." Chaucer speaks of a woman "bidding her bedes."
The practice of counting prayers using a string of beads is very old. There are legends of St. Anthony in the desert counting his prayers with pebbles in the third century, and a string of beads is preserved in Belgium that is said to have been buried with the saintly Abbess Gertrude (d. 659). Other religions use prayer beads as well, but we cannot be certain whether Christians, Muslims and Hindus invented the idea independently or borrowed it from each other. [continue]
Paternoster Row includes pages on looped rosaries, linear rosaries, and a few photos of replica rosaries.
The site's author, Chris Laning, has a blog, too: Paternosters. I signed up for the RSS feed, and hope for frequent updates. Perhaps there will be more entries as interesting as mystery hands and this one on Balthasar's acorns.
Related sites
Dictionary.com: beads
The Rosary - Catholic Encyclopedia
Use of Beads at Prayers - Catholic Encyclopedia
Rosary - History - EWTN.com
Related Mirabilis.ca content:
Museum of Antique Rosaries
Related book
Stories of the Rose: The Making of the Rosary in the Middle Ages - amazon.com
Stories of the Rose (publisher's page) - psupress.org