Come, thou the one renown
Of all that live;
Come, thou the single trust
Which death can give;
Come, Holy Spirit!
Another Anselm of this century is the Bishop of Lucca, who died 1086, and to whom is ascribed a long meditative poem on our Lord’s life, in a kind of rhymed verse which is much more frequently met in the narrative or humorous poems of the next century, called Goliardic. It does not belong to the lyric poetry of the Church, although a spirited hymn has been extracted by Herbert Kynaston from the passage given by Trench. (See Lyra Messianica, pp. 283, 284.) Anselm was a weak man caught in the storm of the controversy over investitures, and would have ended his days as a monk of Cluny, if Gregory VII. had not forbidden him. It is said that, although he had written in defence of the claims of Gregory against the anti-pope Guibert, he finally joined Guibert’s party before his death.
Godefroy or Geofroy, Abbot of Vendome, is another hymn-writer who was mixed up in that controversy, but remained steadfast on the papal side. He belongs both to this and the next century, having been made abbot in 1094, and lived on till 1129 at least. Twelve times he crossed the Alps in the interest of the papacy, and was rewarded for his zeal by a cardinalate. His letters still preserve for us the picture of a zealous ultramontane churchman; but his four “proses”—one about our Lord’s mother and three on Mary Magdalene—are of less importance.
To Heribert (ob. 1042), Bishop of Eichstetten, in modern Baden (anciently part of Swabia), Migne (Patrologia, 141) ascribes a number of hymns, which previously had borne no other name in the collections. His dominant tendency as a hymn-writer is shown by the fact that he wrote five hymns beginning Ave Maria, gratia plena, none of which, however, is the well-known hymn beginning with those words. That belongs to a later century. The best of his hymns are that to all saints, Omnes superni ordines, and that to the cross, Salve crux sancta, salve mundi gloria, of which Prior Aylward has furnished a spirited version to Mr. Shipley’s Annus Sanctus. Of the author we can learn nothing more than his date and location.
The succession of sequence-writers in Southern Germany was kept up through this century by Gottschalk and the fourth Ekkehard of St. Gall. Of Gottschalk we know little more than that he studied under a master, Heinrich, in an unnamed monastery of South Germany, to whom Schubiger (Die Sängerschule St. Gallens, 1858) assigns the Ave praeclara Maris stella (see [p. 163]), on the authority of a manuscript he believes to be older than Hermann Contractus. Of Gottschalk’s own sequences there are but three which certainly are his, and they all are prosy. If he and not some French Gottschalk of this century be the author of the O Deus, miseri misereri servi, which Daniel (IV., 173) copies from Du Méril, it is better than any of his sequences. Du Méril inclines to ascribe it to the Gottschalk of the ninth century, whom we met in the history of Rabanus Maurus. Ekkehard IV. is memorable only for his Latin version of the German hymn by Ratpert in honor of St. Gall, of which the original is lost.
The twelfth century is that of the great Crusades, of Bernard and Abelard, and Peter the Venerable, and Hildebert and Adam of St. Victor. The age also of Thomas Becket, Peter Lombard, and Saladin. The Civil Law was rediscovered at Amalfi; the Canon Law digested by Gratian; the age-long conflict of Guelphs and Ghibellines began, to end only with the political ruin of Germany and the dismemberment of the Empire.