deletions. Both early versions were replaced, beginning in the 9th century, by a still more
elaborate hymnal, probably originating in France, whose earliest form contained thirty-
eight hymns (the New Hymnal).
In the centuries that followed, hundreds more hymns, often reflecting strictly local
interests, were added to the core collection to provide for all the feast days and special
commemorations of the church calendar. Gneuss lists 133 hymns found in English
Benedictine hymnals by the 10th and 11th centuries. Chrysogonus Waddell’s study of the
development of the 12th-century Cistercian hymnal in France reveals how a conservative
hymn repertory might fluctuate in response to changes in monastic thinking. Waddell
observes the “pioneer” monks of Molesme, who left that monastery to found the abbey of
Cîteaux, arriving at their new site in 1098 with their traditional hymnal of over eighty
hymns in hand. This collection was soon abandoned in favor of a much-reduced
collection of only thirtyfour hymns, which the monks felt was more purely Ambrosian
and thus closer to St. Benedict’s ideal. When these hymns, amid some liturgical
controversy between Bernard of Clairvaux and Peter Abélard, proved inadequate for even
the simple services of the Cistercians, a third collection was introduced after 1147 that
incorporated all the original thirty-four hymns and twenty-five additional works; none of
these was newly composed, but many were anonymously divided, revised, and assigned
new melodies and new places in the liturgy.
In the same period, Peter Abélard himself composed over ninety completely new
hymns for various occasions that were added to the large hymnal used by the nuns at
Héloïse’s convent of the Paraclete. In the 13th century, members of the recently founded
preaching orders, the Franciscans (including St. Bonaventure) and the Dominicans
(including St. Thomas Aquinas), produced new hymns for their own evolving spiritual
purposes. As a result of all this activity, a huge body of hymns on many subjects came to
exist by the close of the Middle Ages. Joseph Szövérffy, to cite but one example, has
compiled 152 hymns written about St. Peter between the 4th and the 16th centuries.
Various poetic meters were used in the composition of medieval Latin hymns, but
after the earliest period meters consisted largely of accentual patterns that had developed
out of older quantitative classical meters; patterns of stressed and unstressed Latin
syllables came regularly to replace the older meters that had been defined by sequences
of long and short syllables. Bruno Stäblein lists the eleven most important medieval Latin
hymn meters, the commonest being the iambic dimeter line in use as early as Ambrose’s
compositions. Each hymn strophe contained a series of metrically, or at least syllabically,
identical lines. (Hymns written in distichs were the only common exception to this rule.)
The number of lines per strophe was not fixed, but within an individual hymn each
strophe was constructed like all the others.
The earliest hymnals with music begin to appear in the 11th and 12th centuries. Hymn
texts and tunes circulated widely; few hymn tunes are found uniquely linked with
particular texts; all hymn texts composed in one meter could in theory be sung to the
same melody. Waddell’s reconstructed early Cistercian hymnal, for example, contains
only nineteen hymn melodies for its thirty-four hymn texts (all but two in iambic
dimeter).
Polyphonic hymns proper emerge in France, as in the rest of Europe, only toward the
close of the Middle Ages, though certain hymn texts or fragments of texts were earlier
used in the composition of motets. Besides a collection of ten hymns for three voices
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