Resurrection andRenewal 325
Meanwhile, the clergy sang that great hymn of Venantius Fortunatus ( 530 –
604 ), the ‘‘Pange Lingua’’:
Sing my tongue, the glorious battle
Sing the last, the dread affray;O’er the cross, the victors’ trophy,
Sound the high triumphal lay:
Tell how Christ, the world’s Redeemer,
As a victim won the day.Bend thy boughs, O Tree of Glory!
Thy relaxing sinews bend;
For a while the ancient rigor,
That thy birth bestowed, suspend;
And the King of heavenly beauty
On thy bosom gently tend!^100Within the choir, the clergy processed barefooted to kneel and venerate their
own cross. Sometimes, as at Siena, the clergy kissed a relic of the True Cross
itself.^101 Speaking of this rite around 1200 , an anonymous Florentine com-
mentator asked: ‘‘Why do we prostrate ourselves before the cross and kiss it?
Just as Christ was humiliated and suffered death for us, we also ought to be
imitators of his death; so it is fitting that we be humbled. We prostrate our-
selves before the one cross so that the humility fixed in our minds be shown
by the posture of our bodies.’’^102 The veneration of the cross, more than any
other Holy Week ceremony, expressed the new emphasis on Christ’s human-
ity and compassion typical of thirteenth-century piety. By the 1300 s, it had
inspired some of the earliest vernacularlaude.^103 After the veneration, there
remained for the clergy a brief ceremony in the choir at which the bishop
received the Host consecrated at the evening Mass of Holy Thursday. So
that his Communion would be ‘‘complete,’’ he also took a sip of unconse-
crated wine into which a particle of the Host had been dropped, a ritual that
was probably a remnant of the ancient Christian belief that wine could be
- Verses 1 and 9 : ‘‘Pange lingua gloriosiproelium certaminis,et super crucis tropaeodic
triumphum nobilem,qualiter redemptor orbisimmolatus vicerit.Flecte ramos, arbor alta,tensa
laxa viscera,et rigor lentescat illequem dedit nativitas,ut superni membra regismiti tendas stipite.’’
English by John Mason Neale ( 1818 – 66 ), perhaps the better of the two common English translations.
101 .Ordo Senensis, 1. 165 ,p. 145. - Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale,msMagl.xiv. 49 , fols. 60 r–v: ‘‘Quare dum crux oscu-
landa est prosternimus ante eam? Ideo qui Christus humiliatus est pati pro nobis usque ad mortem si
huius mortis imitatore esse debemus. Humiliatos nos esse oportet, unum prosternimus ante crucem ut
fixa humilitas mentis per habitum corporis demonstretur.’’ - Such as the ‘‘Lauda del venerdı`santo’’ from theLaudario della Confraternita di S. Stefano d’Assisi,
edited inPoeti minori del trecento,ed. Nataino Sapegno (Milan: Riccardi, 1952 ), 1033 – 50.