LUMEN HILARE

This chant from the fourth century is attributed to St. Ambrose.

The Catholic church was born, and lived through its infancy, in a highly patriarchal age. Women in the Roman world (and in most of the tribal and pagan societies around the Romans) might have been literally no more than chattel in a man's household, completely subject to him. This provides a context for understanding why the early Christians tended to revere men who died for their faith as martyrs, but women who did the same in the different category of "virgins." If a woman had of her own will (or in her family) become a member of the Christian faith but was asked in marriage by a non-Christian, her marriage would legally and practically end her faith. Thus, stories emerge of early Christian women who chose a martyr's death before being joined to a non-Christian man. As the medieval Church gradually developed its reverence for the many saints of the faith, it even developed a special category for such women who remained virgins for the sake of Christianity. Their stories and feasts continued to multiply for centuries: St. Ursula was said to have had the company of 11,000 Christian virgins in her death at the hands of a German king. To this day, the Catholic Church retains a special service to celebrate the feast days of virgin martyrs; Jesu corona Virginum is sung as the Vesper hymn on every such feast.

Jesu corona Virginum is available both for feasts celebrated throughout the Catholic church and for any local devotion to an unmarried female saint. The evening service of Vespers on such days will conclude the festivities with a series of Psalms, the singing of the Magnificat (the here-poingnant song of Mary the Virgin of virgins), and the final hymn, Jesu corona Virginum. As with most Vesper hymns in the Gregorian chant tradition, Jesu corona Virginum follows the textual style of St. Ambrose: quatrains of rhyming Latin verse in iambic tetrameter. In this case, the text praises the virgin in question, claiming that Jesus Himself will crown her as her true Husband, especially since He came from the Virgin Mother Mary; it goes on to revel in her spiritual marriage and to pray for her guidance for us below. The music is sparse and mostly syllabic, but rises to several jubilant high notes in each verse of its festive mode 8 melody. A doxology and an "amen" conventionally close the singing of the hymn.