368 BuoniCattolici
The charm of this prayer is somewhat lost in translation, which does not
reproduce its rhymes, but the theological paradoxes remain. The Deity is
hidden in Christ. Thus, the Devil, who tricked Adam, is himself deceived.
God’s great act of the Incarnation is possible only because he created human
flesh in the first place. The creation of man in God’s image receives honor
through the miracle by which bread becomes Christ’s human body on the
altar at Mass. A Eucharistic doctrine so balanced in its theology and so
expressive of the paradoxes of the Christian understanding of salvation
would be hard to find in the schools of Paris or Bologna. The author wrote
this prayer not in Latin, or even in formal Tuscanizing Italian, but in a
regional dialect. Few Latin Eucharistic devotions rise to this level. One four-
teenth-century owner copied a more conventional Eucharistic devotion on
the verso of a blank folio at the beginning of his sumptuous thirteenth-cen-
tury codex of works by the lay theologian Albertano of Brescia. The poem
is one of many adaptions of the ‘‘Ave Corpus’’ model for Eucharistic prayers.
The best known of these is the hymn ‘‘Ave Verum Corpus’’ itself, which is
by far the most common Eucharistic devotion in the manuscripts examined.
The short prayer is hardly more than a jingle, theologically unharmed by an
attempt at verse translation:
Hail, O Word, now incarnated,
on the altar consecrated.
You, of angels, living bread,
Savior, hope for Christians fed.
Praise, O body of Christ Jesus,
who descended and who frees us.
Savior of the world and healing,
free us by your power annealing. Amen.^122Easy to memorize, the verses probably served as an elevation prayer.
Rhymed Latin hymns in devotional collections sometimes rise to certain
dignity and have considerable theological sophistication. Take, for example,
the opening lines of a hymn from a miscellany of the early 1300 s. In spite
of the quadruple rhyme (not attempted in the translation), the verses are
theologically suggestive:
Hail living victim, truth, and life,
in whose sacrifice all others are ended.ho pilglasti, deforusse a morte sua malignitate.Laudare devemo tua gran boneneza, ke per mi fece si
gran longinnitu; vedemo nostra carne assunta in Deu.Fecestiti homo in vostra semelglanza; no lador-
amo quellu operimentu, nel ostia mutata in corpu teu.’’
122. Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale,msII.iv. 111 (xiiicent.), fol. 1 v: ‘‘Ave Verbum incarna-
tum, in altare consecratum.Panis vivus angelorum, salus, spes Christianorum.Salve Corpus Iesu
Christi, qui pro nobis descendisti.Salus mundi pro salute, libera nos cum virtute. Amen.’’