Unlike prayers with a single identifiable author or composition date, the Angelus emerged gradually across the medieval and early modern periods from several separate devotional customs, including monastic bell-ringing practices calling for a pause of prayer and popular devotions to the Annunciation, which historians of liturgy have traced merging into something like its current three-part structure only by the fifteenth or sixteenth century. Its name derives from its opening Latin word, Angelus, referring to the angel Gabriel, and its structure alternates three short scriptural verses recalling the Annunciation, each followed by a Hail Mary, before closing with a versicle and a collect asking that, having known Christ's incarnation through the angel's message, the faithful may be brought by his passion and cross to the glory of the resurrection.
The custom of ringing a bell, traditionally at six in the morning, noon and six in the evening, to signal the moment for reciting the Angelus became so widespread in Catholic Europe that the bell itself, sometimes still called the Angelus bell, remained a fixture of parish life in many regions well into the twentieth century, marking the day's rhythm for communities regardless of whether individuals actually paused to pray at each ringing.