Frithegod of Canterbury's Maundy Thursday hymn

Extract

In his Catalogus of British writers, John Bale's account of the tenth-century scholar, Frithegod, includes incipits for two hymns, of which the first, on Mary Magdalen (‘Dum pietas multimoda’), was long thought lost. In fact it is not lost, but has simply become uncoupled from its author's name, and is transmitted anonymously in three manuscripts of French origin, and in some Spanish liturgical books, whence it was first printed in 1897. Frithegod's authorship is suggested by Patrick Young's seventeenth-century catalogue of Salisbury Cathedral manuscripts. Young noticed two ‘carmina Frethogodi’ at the end of what is now Dublin, Trinity College 174 (a late eleventh- or early twelfth-century Salisbury legendary), giving the incipit of the first as 'Dum pietas multimoda’. After Young had catalogued TCD 174, the page with the hymns must have become detached, and cannot now be traced. Frithegod may have composed the hymn while still at Canterbury, and then perhaps took a copy back to his native Auvergne, given that it ended up in an English manuscript but also circulated in France. Although the circumstances of composition are beyond recovery, I suggest that the hymn was originally intended not for the cult of Mary Magdalen (it was used thus in France), but rather to accompany the penitential rituals of Maundy Thursday. The article includes a text and translation of the hymn.