The Medieval Latin Hymn

by Ruth Ellis Messenger

IV. Liturgical Collections

To determine the actual usage of the hymn or sequence rather than its mere existence as a specimen of religious verse, the liturgical collection is indispensable. The old hymnaries and psalters and other books used in the offices were examined by liturgists of the period who compiled the breviaries of the later Middle Ages. Working under episcopal or monastic authority they subjected the hymnic material at their disposal to a selective process which necessarily discarded many hymns in favor of those rendered sacred by their inclusion in the old cycles, or of hymns of recognized merit. The Mozarabic Breviary had been compiled and its hymns determined by this process in an earlier century. After the re-conquest of the Spanish peninsula and the introduction of the Roman Rite in 1089, a version of the Roman Breviary was introduced. Episcopal centers in England, such as Hereford, York and primarily Salisbury, compiled their service books and developed them continuously to the close of the Middle Ages. The process was repeated throughout Christian Europe.

From the troparies and local collections of sequences the selections for the gradual and missal were made, just as the hymns had been for the breviary. These liturgical sources offer to the modern student the range of medieval hymnody at its best. The episcopal rites are, perhaps, more official and authoritative in their selection of hymns and sequences but the monastic rites often reveal the legends of local saints or the more intimate flavor of traditional piety. It should be understood that in countries where the Roman Rite prevailed there was no departure from its authority in the matter of hymnody. At the same time the greatest latitude was observable. A fine illustration is provided by the books of the Rite of Salisbury, England, or the Sarum Rite, which were compiled and developed by great liturgists from the time of Bishop Osmund in the eleventh century to the close of the Middle Ages. The Sarum Breviary contains 119 hymns, 25 of which were written after 1100 and the Missal contains 101 sequences, 54 of which were written about 1100.[12] The figures are revealing in the case of hymns, of the influence of the older cycles and in the case of sequences, of the multiplication of feasts in the later centuries of the Middle Ages.

The Processional book as a bearer of hymns will be treated in the following chapter. It remains here, to mention the Books of Hours or medieval Primers which also contained their quota of hymns. The Horae may be defined as a series of devotions, at first additional to the Seven Hours of the daily office but in the twelfth century elaborated in a separate book. Specifically the additions consisted of the penitential psalms, the Office of the Dead, the Cursus of All Saints, that of the Holy Cross, and that of the Blessed Virgin. Even before its separation from the Canonical Hours, the Cursus of the Blessed Virgin had assumed an importance which gave to the new collection its characteristic title of Horae or Hours of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In the fourteenth century the single volume came to be known in England as Primarius Liber or Primarium from which the more familiar name Prymer or Primer is derived.[13] Its popularity may be judged by the fact that 265 printed editions were later known in England and 1582 on the continent.[14] Hymns are interspersed throughout the Horae. In the York Hours there are eighteen hymns and sequences of varied periods of which thirteen are centered in devotion to the Virgin.[15] In other words, the hymns which were chosen for these books of popular devotion are representative of later medieval favorites in hymnody, indicating to what extent the older hymns were known and loved and to what extent later poems had been accepted by lay folk as well as clergy. The Horae are primarily valuable as a source for the later Marian hymns upon the themes of the Joys and of the Sorrows of the Virgin. The appearance of the beloved Stabat mater dolorosa, without doubt the finest expression of the poetry of sorrow, bears witness to the discriminative process by which the Horae were compiled. It seems remarkable that the liturgists of the later period, in which the Latin hymn was beginning to show signs of deterioration, were able to skirt as successfully as they did, the limits of trashy sentimentality and worse poetry which were passing current under the name of hymnody.

To those who are interested in the relations between literature and the fine arts an examination of the Virgin hymns, as of the Dies irae, will yield similar interrelations. The hymns which were written from the twelfth century onwards upon the Virgin theme may be closely correlated with the sculptured forms which portray the Mother apart from the Son in her Sorrows and more particularly in her Joys, laden with her distinctive honors and regnant as the Queen of Heaven.