Library › Latin: Early Christian Writings › Acclamationes
This short liturgical text is a set of acclamations, sung antiphonally by the boys of the choir and the canons, in the form known as the laudes regiae. It begins with the refrain Christ conquers, Christ reigns, Christ commands, and then acclaims in turn the pope, the most Christian king of the Franks, crowned by God, great and peace-giving, and the archbishop, each name left as N. to be filled in. After each acclamation the canons invoke Christ and the saints, the Saviour of the world, Peter and Paul, Mary, Michael and Gabriel, John, and the boys answer, Help him. The saints named for the archbishop include Nicasius, Remigius and Rigobert, the patrons of Reims.
Acclamations of this kind were sung in the Frankish and later French churches on great feasts and at royal and episcopal occasions, combining praise of Christ with prayers for the rulers of Church and kingdom. This Reims form shows how the liturgy expressed the bond between the archbishop of Reims, the pope and the king of the Franks. Its date is not certain, but it belongs to the long tradition of the laudes from the Carolingian period onward.
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. 138, Parisiis 1853), 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.