ADAM of ST. VICTOR ~ SEQUENCES and HYMNS
The LITURGICAL POETRY of ADAM of ST. VICTOR
From the TEXT of M. GAUTIER
With TRANSLATIONS into ENGLISH in the ORIGINAL METRES by DIGBY S. WRANGHAM
PUBLISHED by KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH & COMPANY of LONDON ~ MDCCCLXXXI
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Please note any typographical errors and e-mail them to danmitsui [at] hotmail [dot] com, with the subject line ADAM of ST. VICTOR - ERRORS.
Adam of St. Victor was, according to Dom Prosper Gueranger, the greatest poet of the Middle Ages. According to John Mason Neale, he was the greatest poet to write in Latin in any age, Middle or otherwise. Adam was prolific, profound, and, in his time, immensely popular. Working at the renowned Augustinian Abbey of St. Victor in France during the 12th century, he composed liturgical sequences and hymns, over 100 of which have survived. Although many were undoubtedly lost in the revolutionary depredations that destroyed countless monastic libraries, the surviving sequences and hymns reveal a broad, varied and consistently excellent body of work.
Sadly, it is little remembered today. This is largely due to a decision made by the liturgical reformers at the Council of Trent (a decision that retrospection can only regard as deleterious) to remove the sequences from the Roman Catholic liturgy. Only four - the Victimae Paschali Laudes, the Veni Creator Spiritus, the Dies Irae and the Lauda Sion Salvatorum - remain in the Gradual; the Stabat Mater survived as a hymn; a few were retained in the liturgies of the religious orders. But thousands - perhaps tens of thousands - of sequences, comprising a large portion of the Roman Catholic musical tradition, were simply discarded and forgotten.
There is an oft-repeated (but seldom demonstrated) claim that the Tridentine reformers were justified in proscribing the sequences, as they were rife with heretical content. I am no scholar, but I have read many more mediaeval sequences than most Catholics, and I have never found a hint of heresy in one. Adam's work is assuredly orthodox. More likely, the Tridentine reformers were trying to avoid scandalizing Protestants; the sequences, which were not taken directly from Holy Scripture but rather composed by contemporary theologians, poets and musicians, were hardly acceptable to the proponents of Sola Scriptura. And the sequences did reflect the mediaeval religion in which they were created - with its magnificent hagiographies and symbolic exegesis - that was attacked with ever-increasing vehemence during the Reformation.
The sequences suffered the same fate as the mystery plays, and the iconographic traditions that the Catholic Church inherited from the Fathers and brought to the fullest expression of their genius in the High Middle Ages: proscribed by short-sighted churchmen who never really understood their value, churchmen whose only concern was to deprive Protestants of cause to attack the Church. Thus so much treasure was turned to garbage, so quickly and so needlessly. How much richer the Catholic religion would be, had the wise decision been made to study and codify the sequences, rather than to proscribe them!
My purpose in creating this website dedicated to Adam of St. Victor is threefold. First, to share the riches of his poetry with a wider audience, for the edification of souls and the Glory of God. Second, to correct (in a very small way) the injustice done to Adam, that his work may be recognized for the literary, musical and spiritual treasure that it is. And third, to advance (in a very remote way) the restoration of the sequences to liturgical use. I do not yet possess the music for these sequences, but hopefully the words themselves will generate interest and inspire further scholarship.
The content of the following web pages was first published in 1881. It includes the Latin text of all of Adam's surviving sequences as compiled by the French scholar Léon Gautier, as well as charming English translation (retaining their rhyme and meter - no easy task!) by Digby S. Wrangham. I purchased the three-volume set of Adam's complete works used from a seminary library in Melbourne, and found it sadly appropriate that its pages were uncut. In 126 years, I was the first person to read it. When I began transcribing it, no other online edition was available; the books later appeared in the Internet Archive, and I began to work (much more quickly) from the text files downloaded there, correcting the many errors of the transcription software by referencing the actual books. Still, typographical errors undoubtedly abound. Please e-mail me if you spot any.
Kind Regards,
Daniel Mitsui
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