Everything about Venantius Fortunatus totally explained
Saint Venantius Fortunatus or
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,
(External Link
) 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.
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 Information
Get more info on 'Venantius Fortunatus'.
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