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This small group of four anonymous poems comes from Visigothic Spain. The first praises a bishop of Narbonne, radiant with merit, of illustrious lineage, who ruled Narbonne by divine favour, as Peter had once refined the city of Béziers. The second celebrates King Sisenand, who ruled his peoples rightly and cherished them all, and turns to the noble family of the addressee, including Lupus and Britius. The third is addressed to a deacon, whose cheerful face, angelic look and teaching by example as much as by word it praises, and the fourth is untitled. The verse is irregular and the text partly damaged, as the opening gaps show.
Sisenand was king of the Visigoths from 631 to 636, which places at least the second poem in the first half of the seventh century. Few Latin poems survive from Visigothic Spain outside the works of such writers as Eugenius of Toledo, and these occasional pieces in praise of churchmen and a king show the culture of compliment and patronage among the Visigothic elite. Their rough metre and Latin also make them evidence for the language of the period.
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. 87, Parisiis 1851), 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.