Salve Mundi Salutare
SALVE MUNDI SALUTARE
A hymn of seven cantos, each dedicated to one of the suffering members of Christ's crucified body. Each canto has five stanzas of ten lines, all in trochaic dimeter except the fifth and tenth lines, which are iambic dimeter. The rhyme scheme is aaaabccddb. The authorship, still uncertain, is attributed to bernard of clairvaux (d.1153). Daniel ascribes to Bernard the first two cantos, Ad pedes and Ad genua, but holds that the others were written by different authors at later times when devotion to the Passion was becoming stronger. Since the manuscripts present such a varied arrangement of titles and stanzas, Julian considers it difficult to determine which parts, if any, were actually written by Bernard. The last and most beautiful canto, Salve caput cruentatum, has frequently been attributed to Arnulf of Louvain, Abbot of Villers (d. 1250).
Bibliography: h. a. daniel, Thesaurus hymnologicus, 5 v. (Halle-Leipzig 1841–56) v.1, 2, 4. r. c. trench, Sacred Latin Poetry (3d ed. London 1886) 138–143. f. a. march, ed., Latin Hymns (New York 1874; repr. 1898) 114–119, 277. j. julian, ed., A Dictionary of Hymnology (New York 1957) 989–991. a. schwerd, Hymnen und Sequenzen (Munich 1954) 67–69, 111–112. u. chevalier, Repertorium hymnologicum (Louvain-Brussels 1892–1921) 2:515.
[g. e. conway]