Works
Rabanus' works, many of which remain unpublished, comprise Scriptural commentaries (Genesis to Judges, Ruth, Kings, Chronicles, Judith, Esther, Canticles, Proverbs, Wisdom, Sirach, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Maccabees, Matthew, the Epistles of St Paul, including Hebrews); and various treatises relating to doctrinal and practical subjects, including more than one series of Homilies. In De institutione clericorum he brought into prominence the views of Augustine and Gregory the Great as to the training which was requisite for a right discharge of the clerical function. One of his most popular and enduring works is a spectacular collection of poems centered around the cross, called De laudibus sanctae crucis, a set of highly sophisticated poems that present the cross (and, in the last poem, Rabanus himself kneeling before it) in word and image, even in numbers.
Among the others may be mentioned the De universo libri xxii., sive etymologiarum opus, a kind of dictionary or encyclopedia, heavily dependent upon Isidore of Seville's Etymologies, designed as a help towards the typological, historical and mystical interpretation of Scripture, the De sacris ordinibus, the De disciplina ecclesiastica and the Martyrologium. All of them are characterized by erudition (he knew even some Greek and Hebrew) and includes "Veni Creator Spiritus," a hymn to the Holy Spirit, often sung at Pentecost and at ordinations. (Centuries later "Veni Creator Spiritus" would be used by Gustav Mahler as the first choral of his epic eighth symphony.)
In the annals of German philology a special interest attaches to the Glossaria Latino-Theodisca. A commentary, Super Porphyrium, printed by Cousin in 1836 among the Ouvrages inédits d'Abélard, and assigned both by that editor and by Haurau to Hrabantis Maurus, is now generally believed to have been the work of a disciple.
In 2006, the 1150th anniversary of his death was celebrated in Germany, especially in Mainz and Fulda. One of the highlights of the celebrations was the display of Codex Vaticanus Reginensis latinus 124, an extremely rare loan by the Vatican to Mainz of a spectacular manuscript containing De laudibus sanctae crucis. The anniversary also saw the publication of no fewer than three book-length studies of Maurus and his work.
Read more about this topic: Rabanus Maurus
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“The ancients of the ideal description, instead of trying to turn their impracticable chimeras, as does the modern dreamer, into social and political prodigies, deposited them in great works of art, which still live while states and constitutions have perished, bequeathing to posterity not shameful defects but triumphant successes.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.”
—Freya Stark (b. 1893–1993)
“Are you there, Africa with the bulging chest and oblong thigh? Sulking Africa, wrought of iron, in the fire, Africa of the millions of royal slaves, deported Africa, drifting continent, are you there? Slowly you vanish, you withdraw into the past, into the tales of castaways, colonial museums, the works of scholars.”
—Jean Genet (1910–1986)