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Venantius Fortunatus

Venantius Fortunatus, (c.530–610), bishop of Poitiers. Born near Treviso and educated at Ravenna, he left Italy c.565 to visit the shrine of St. Martin at Tours in thanksgiving for being cured of an illness of the eyes. In return for the hospitality he received he wrote laudatory poems in honour of his hosts. He visited Sigebert's court at Metz, where he stayed for two years earning his living by his varied talent as a writer, who brought something of Roman elegance and literary culture to a rather barbarous Merovingian court.

By this time the Lombards had invaded North Italy and Venantius settled at Poitiers, where he became steward and, after his ordination, chaplain to the nuns among whom were Radegund and the abbess Agnes, to both of whom he wrote letters and poems. He was unusually sensitive to the hardships of women, who indeed played a considerable part in the development of Christian values in the Merovingian world. His letters to Radegund (much older than he) are rhetorically playful and affectionate: ‘Even though the clouds are gone and the sky is serene, the day is sunless when you are absent.’ When he could obtain them, he tells her that he will send her roses and lilies.

The best of his talents were stimulated by the arrival at Poitiers in 569 of relics of the True Cross, sent by the Emperor Justin II, which was the occasion for his fine hymn ‘Vexilla regis prodeunt’ (‘The royal banners forward go’), used in the liturgy of Passiontide and especially Good Friday. At about the same time he composed ‘Pange lingua gloriosi’ (‘Sing, my tongue, the glorious battle’), likewise for Passiontide and ‘Salve festa dies’ for Easter. These are all generally reckoned to be among the finest examples of Christian hymnody, combining as they do classical skill and Christian religious sentiment to a high degree.

Venantius' compositions were highly appreciated by contemporaries, among whom Gregory of Tours encouraged him to collect and publish his poems, some of which were composed for great ecclesiastical occasions. Other bishops who befriended him were Felix of Nantes and Leontius of Bordeaux.

Venantius' other works include prose and verse Lives of Saints; in prose are Lives of Hilary, Radegund, and Severinus of Bordeaux as well as Albinus, Germanus of Paris, and Paternus of Avranches; in verse those of Martin and Médard. His In laudem Mariae depicts the Virgin as queen of heaven, receiving homage, the object of respectful love, forestalling some aspects of courtly love.

About the year 600 Venantius was elected bishop of Poitiers, but not much is known of his short term of office. Feast: 14 December.

Bibliography
Click here for a list of abbreviations used in this bibliography.

  • Works edited by F. Leo and B. Krusch in M.G.H., Auctores Antiquissimi, iv (1881–5) also in P.L., lxxxviii. 59–596; B.T.A., iv. 558–9; J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish Church (1983), pp. 82–8; B. de Gaiffier, ‘S. Venance Fortunat, évêque de Poitiers: les témoignages de son culte’, Anal. Boll., lxx (1952), 262–84; F. J. E. Raby, A History of Christian Latin Poetry from the Beginnings to the Close of the Middle Ages (1953)
 
 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Venantius Fortunatus, Saint
(Venantius Honorius Clementianus Fortunatus) (vēnăn'shəs fôr'tyūnā'təs), d. c.600, Latin poet, b. near Treviso, Italy. A priest in Gaul and later bishop of Poitiers, he wrote a long poem on St. Martin of Tours and also the hymn Vexilla Regis prodeunt, sung on Good Friday in the Roman Catholic Church. Another of his hymns supplied the first line and the meter for the later Pange lingua. He was the last of the Gallic Latin poets.
 
Wikipedia: Venantius Fortunatus
Saint Venantius Fortunatus
Fortunatus_v.JPG

Born c. 530 AD, Veneto, Italy
Died c. 600 or 609 AD, Poitiers, France
Venerated in Roman Catholic Church
Feast December 14
Gloriole.svg Saints Portal

Venantius Honorius Clementianus Fortunatus (c. 530-c. 600/609) was a Latin poet and hymnodist, and a Bishop of the Roman Catholic Church.

Life

Venantius Fortunatus was born in northern Italy somewhere between Valdobbiadene, [1] Ceneda, and Treviso. He grew up during the Byzantine reconquest of Italy and was educated at Ravenna. His later work shows familiarity not only with classical poets such as Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Statius, and Martial, but also with Christian poets, including Arator, Claudian, and Sedulius.

Fortunatus eventually migrated through Germany to Gaul in the mid-560s, probably with the specific intention of becoming a poet in the Merovingian court. After political circumstances impeded his court career, Fortunatus received patronage from various religious figures, including St Gregory of Tours. He became bishop of Poitiers sometime before the year 600.

Works

He is best known for two poems that have become part of the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church, the Pange lingua gloriosi proelium certaminis ("Sing, O tongue, of the glorious struggle"), a hymn that later inspired St Thomas Aquinas's Pange Lingua. He also wrote Vexilla Regis prodeunt ("The banners of the King are lifted"), which is a sequence sung at vespers during Holy Week. This poem was written in honour of a large piece of the "True Cross" that had been sent from the Byzantine Emperor Justin II to Queen Radegunde of the Franks, who after her husband Chlotar I's death had founded a monastery in Aquitaine. The Municipal Library in Poitiers houses an eleventh century manuscript on the life of Radegunde, copied from a sixth century account by Fortunatus.

Venantius Fortunatus Reading His Poems to Radegonda VI.  Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1862).
Enlarge
Venantius Fortunatus Reading His Poems to Radegonda VI. Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1862).

All in all, Venantius Fortunatus wrote eleven surviving books of poetry in Latin in a diverse group of genres including epitaphs, panegyrics, georgics, consolations, and religious poems. His verse is important in the development of later Latin literature, largely because he wrote at a time when Latin prosody was moving away from the quantitative verse of classical Latin towards the accentual meters of medieval Latin. His style sometimes suggests the influence of Hiberno-Latin, in learned Greek coinages that occasionally appear in his poems. He also wrote a verse hagiography of St Martin of Tours which is often considered the last epic of antiquity, and a hagiographic life of his patron Queen Radegunde.

Feast Day

Fortunatus is a saint of the Roman Catholic Church, commemorated on December 14, primarily in the diocese of Poitiers and certain churches of the Veneto.

Further reading

  • Brennan, B. “The career of Venantius Fortunatus” Traditio, Vol 41 (1985), 49-78.
  • George, J. Venantius Fortunatus: Personal and Political Poems. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995.
  • George, J. Venantius Fortunatus: A Latin Poet in Merovingian Gaul. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
  • Reydellet, M. Venance Fortunat, Poèmes, 3 vols., Collection Budé, 1994-2004.


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Copyrights:

Saints. The Oxford Dictionary of Saints. Copyright © David Hugh Farmer 1978, 1987, 1992, 1997, 2003, 2004. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Venantius Fortunatus" Read more

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