Hildebert of Lavardin: Inscriptiones Christianae

This series of short verse inscriptions, printed among the works of Hildebert of Lavardin (c. 1055–1133), bishop of Le Mans and archbishop of Tours, consists of fifty-nine numbered pieces of one or a few lines each. They follow the order of sacred history: the eternity of God, the sin of Adam, the patriarchs, Job, Moses striking the rock, the rod of Jesse, the Virgin Mother of God, the angels announcing the birth of Christ to the shepherds, and the infant Christ in the manger, continuing through the life of Christ. Many are rhymed and give a typological reading in a single couplet.

Such verses are tituli, captions of the kind written to accompany paintings, sculptures or windows, or to serve as aids to memory. Each reduces a biblical scene or doctrine to a pointed formula, as in the lines on the twofold striking of the rock as the two beams of the cross, or on the virgin birth, whose manner the poet says he cannot know but whose possibility he ascribes to God. The collection illustrates the close link between Latin verse and religious art in the twelfth century.