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This is a collection of hymns printed under the name of Hrabanus Maurus, abbot of Fulda and archbishop of Mainz. It opens with a hymn on charity in Sapphic stanzas, praising love as the great and saving gift from above, the ardour and communion of the Trinity, by which the heavens, sea and earth were made, Adam formed in God’s image, the prophets filled with the Spirit, and the Son sent down to heal mankind and to suffer the cross, scourges, spitting and thorns before rising victorious. Other hymns follow for Christmas, the Holy Innocents, Epiphany, Easter, the Ascension and Pentecost.
Further hymns honour saints and angels; in the sample a hymn calls on companions to sing of the feast of the chief apostles, Peter and Paul, and another prays to an angel to intercede for the singers. The collection uses a variety of metres and forms, from classical lyric stanzas to more liturgical patterns. Not every piece printed here is certainly Hrabanus’s, but the collection is a useful witness to Carolingian hymnody.
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. 112, Parisiis 1852), 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.