Library › Latin: Myth, Hymn & Religion › Prosa de Sancto Martino
This short liturgical prose, or sequence, celebrates Martin of Tours. It calls on the whole Catholic Church throughout the world to sing of Martin, priest of Christ, and on every heretic to flee in fear of his name. Pannonia is to rejoice as mother of such a son, Italy as nurse of such a youth, and the three parts of Gaul are to contend in holy rivalry over whose bishop he should be, while all rejoice to have him as father and Tours keeps his body. The Franks and Germany applaud him who saw the Lord in his own garment; he is honoured in Egypt and Greece. The prose lists his miracles, curing fevers, driving out demons, restoring three dead to life and destroying idols.
Martin was the most widely venerated saint of Gaul, and the episodes recalled here, including the cloak shared with a beggar and seen afterwards on Christ, come from Sulpicius Severus’ Life of Martin and the tradition built on it. Sequences of this kind were sung at Mass before the Gospel on feast days. The text is printed by Migne with the works of Gregory of Tours, but its author and date are not known.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from Corpus Corporum, the Latin text repository of the University of Zurich (edition: Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 71, Parisiis 1849), reused with attribution for non-commercial purposes (CC BY-NC-SA). Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.