Hymns which deal with much greater themes are the metrical antiphon, Veni, sancte Spiritus, Reple, whose early translations hold a high place in German hymnology; the Recolamus sacram coenam, which Mone well characterizes as a side-piece to the great communion hymn of Thomas Aquinas, Lauda, Sion, Salvatorem. Like that, it aims at stating the doctrine of Transubstantiation in its most paradoxical form (stat esus integer). The century furnishes several pretty Christmas hymns—En Trinitatis speculum, Dies est laetitiae, Nunc angelorum gloria, Omnis mundus jucundetur, and Resonet in laudibus—all of German origin seemingly and early known to the German people by translations. This is the festival which the childlike and child-loving Teutons always have made the most of; and these hymns, with others of the next century, are among the earliest monuments of the fact. To this, or possibly the next century, belongs the mystical prayer-hymn, Anima Christi, sanctifica me, which came to be ascribed to Ignatius Loyola, because it was a favorite with him.
The most notable hymn-writer of the century is Conrad, prior of Gaming, a town in Lower Austria, where he lived during the reign of Charles IV. (1350-78). We have his manuscript collection in a copy made in the next century and preserved at München. It contains thirty-seven hymns which probably are his, and many of them certainly so. Some certainly are recasts of earlier hymns. Thus he has tinkered Hildebert’s great hymn, without at all improving it. Most of his hymns relate to Mary, the apostles, and the other saints of the Church. His hymns show a certain facility in the use of Latin verse, but no force of original inspiration. They are correct metrically and, from the standpoint of his Church, theologically. The O colenda Deitas is the most notable.
From the same quarter of Germany and the banks of the same Ems River, Engelbert, Benedictine abbot of Admont in Styria (died 1331), offers us a Marian psalter, which has been ascribed to Thomas Aquinas, but of which two verses content even Mone. Aegidius, Archbishop of Burgos in Spain, from 1295 to 1315, has written a hymn to the alleged portrait of Christ impressed on the handkerchief of Veronica. It is in the rollicking Goliardic metre, but the subject is handled with skill and success. It has been conjectured that he is the author of the Patris sapientia in the same metre, which some put back to the twelfth century and others ascribe to Pope Benedict XII., who died in 1342. This is one of the many hymns to whose recitation an indulgence was attached.
That the fifteenth century saw the invention of printing is a cardinal fact for the hymnologist. It was especially in the service of the Church that the new art found employment, and more missals, breviaries, and other Church books were printed between its discovery, in 1452, and the beginning of the Reformation, than of any other class of books. From this time, therefore, we have to deal with both written and printed sources, and printing was the means of saving a multitude of good hymns and sequences which else might have been lost utterly. The century also witnesses that great revival of learning to whose advancement printing contributed greatly, and which in its turn prepared men for the Reformation. We have seen in the chapter on the two breviaries how it affected the editing of old hymns and the writing of new. But this does not begin until the sixteenth century.
As in the case of the preceding century, we are embarrassed by the abundance of bad, mediocre, and middling good hymns, by the fewness of those which are really good, and the absence of such as would be entitled to take the highest rank. The best of the anonymous which we can trace farther back than to the printed breviaries are the continuation of the series of German Christmas hymns, whose beginning we noticed in the fourteenth century. Such are the In natali Domini, the Nobis est natus hodie, the Quem pastores laudavêre, the Puer nobis nascitur, the Eia mea anima, the Verbum caro factum est, and the Puer natus in Bethlehem. Of the last, Dr. A. R. Thompson’s translation is as follows:
PUER NATUS IN BETHLEHEM.
The child in Bethlehem is born,
Hail, O Jerusalem, the morn!
Here lies he in the cattle-stall
Whose kingdom boundless is withal.