The mysteries are grouped into sets. The Joyful mysteries dwell on the incarnation and childhood of Christ, the Sorrowful on his passion and death, and the Glorious on his resurrection and the exaltation of Mary; in 2002 Pope John Paul II proposed a fourth set, the Luminous mysteries, on Christ's public ministry. A full Rosary meditates on a complete set, and the beads are structured to carry the worshipper through them.
The devotion took shape gradually across the medieval period, drawing on the monastic practice of reciting the psalms, for which the unlettered substituted counted repetitions of simpler prayers, and on the counting of beads that Christians shared with other praying traditions. It came to be strongly associated with the Dominican order and with a series of papal endorsements, and by the modern period it had become one of the most characteristic and beloved of Catholic devotions, prayed privately and in groups, and central to the Marian apparitions and popular piety of recent centuries. The counted, repeated prayer on beads links it, as a technique, to the rosaries and prayer-cords of many traditions, while its meditative content is wholly Christ-centred.