et super crucis tropaeo dic triumphum nobilem,qualiter redemptor orbis immolatus vicerit....
(“Sing, my tongue, of a glorious battle for the prize;/Speak out a noble triumph about the
trophy, the cross:/How the Redeemer of the whole world conquered, by being slain....”)
Pange, lingua would appeal to Christian-Frankish nobles; its sacred septameter, or
“Roman Marching Rhythm,” stamped into Pange, lingua, gloriosi proelium certaminis,
would recall the glory days of Roman imperium. The iambic tetrameters or octosyllabics
in Vexilla regis prodeunt imitate the chaste rhythms and images in the hymns of Ambrose
of Milan, now in the Frankish antiphoners.
True to the Byzantine-Latin style of the kallos (poems of the “beautiful,” called laudes
in Latin), Venantius composed stylized panegyrics of persons, cities, countrysides, and
rivers. Like Ausonius, Venantius declaimed the pieces in the presence of the persons or
places, while he was traveling from Mainz to Cologne to Trier on his way to the royal
city. His occasional epithalamia and epitaphs were written for the marriages and deaths
of patrons. As bishop of Poitiers at the end of his career, Venantius formed a close
friendship with a group of noblewomen and especially with Radegund, wife of Clotar I,
who had retired from the savagery of the court into monastic life at the nearby abbey of
Sainte-Croix. Venantius’s De excidio Thoringiae is a celebration of the destruction of the
kingdom of Radegund’s father, and he versified the narrative of the murder of King
Chilperic’s fiancée, Galswintha. From Poitiers also came Vexilla regis prodeunt and
Pange, lingua.
The strange poet of Toulouse known as Virgilius Maro or Virgil of Toulouse gives
various examples of the rhythmi practiced in Gaul, and Theodofrid, abbot of Corbie, has
some anthologized verses on the six ages of the world, but the rhythmi of Venantius
Fortunatus dominate Merovingian Latin poetry.
Ernest A.Kaulbach
[See also: HYMNS; LATIN LYRIC POETRY; LATIN POETRY, CAROLINGIAN;
RADEGUND]
Raby, Frederic James Edward, ed. The Oxford Book of Medieval Latin Verse. Oxford: Clarendon,
1959, pp.74–76.
Leo, Frederick, ed. Venanti Honori Clemenianti Fortunati Presbyteri Italici opera poetica. In
Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Auctores Antiquissimi. Vol. 4, fasc. 1. Berlin: Weidmann,
1881.
Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R.Trask. New
York: Harper, 1953, pp. 154–58.
McGuire, Martin R.P., and Hermigild Dressler. Introduction to Medieval Latin Studies. 2nd ed.
Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1977, pp. 89–99.
Raby, Frederic James Edward. A History of Secular Latin Poetry in the Middle Ages. 2nd ed. 2
vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1957, Vol. 1, pp. 128–46, 153–58.
——. A History of Christian-Latin Poetry from the Beginnings to the Close of the Middle Ages. 2nd
ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 1953, pp. 86–95.
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