Virgilio Masciadri

Pange lingua:Überlegungen zu Text und Kontext

“Pange Lingua”, the hymn to the True Cross, written by Venantius Fortunatus, is one of the few Latin poems that have been widely read from the Middle Ages up to modern times without interruption. Up to now, researchers focussed especially on the reception history or on the circumstances that gave birth to this text, included in the liturgy as a hymn sung on Good Friday. Actually it is possible, with the help of other poems by Fortunatus as well as accounts by Gregory of Tours and Baudonivia, to trace back this hymn to the time when the then queen of the Franks, Radegundis, received the True Cross relics of Poitiers, shortly after AD 565. However, the usual assumption that Fortunatus wrote the hymn for the liturgy celebrated on the occasion of the enshrinement of the relics can be questioned and differentiated in many aspects. By analysing the correlation of the text to other poems using the same metre, it appears that it implies a wide poetic tradition, going well beyond the examples, often cited alone, of Hilary of Poitiers and Prudentius, and including non-religious literary texts as well. Moreover, “Pange Lingua”, in the manuscripts of the collected poems of Fortunatus, is only one out of six poems on the True Cross placed at the beginning of book two. An analysis of this context discloses a complex web of cross-references. By referring to comparative texts from the classical tradition, one can deduce that some of these poems might have been conceived as a cohesive corpus of poems praising the True Cross in different poetic forms. Consequently, besides its liturgical purpose, a specific written and literary function must be ascribed to this hymn. Pange lingua: Überlegungen zu Text und Kontext 223