ADAM OF SAINT VICTOR. - Regular canon, one of the most renowned authors of liturgical sequences. Biographical information is scarce. According to the Victorine abbot William of Saint-Lô (d. 1349), A. "nazione Brito" (a Breton) would have lived in the time of Hugh of St. Victor and would have composed "valde multas prosas," perfect in content and form, on the Most Holy Trinity, on the Holy Spirit, on Our Lady, on the apostles and many other saints (E. Martène, Ampl. Coll., VI, 220-221). He died during the second half of the 12th century.
While the attribution of the Prosae, such as Summa de vocabulis Bibliae, De discretione animae et spiritus and Super cantica expositio, to A. remains uncertain — the Victorine sources on the matter are late and often inaccurate — his fame is rightly linked to the Sequentiae. It is interesting that this genre of poetry, which began in the Benedictine Order in a still rather awkward and irregular form, developed splendidly in the Order of Regular Canons, especially of St. Victor, where A., as it seems, had more than one competitor and imitator, and at St. Florian (Upper Austria), from where already in the 11th century sequences emerged that were not inferior to those attributed to our author.
Commonly 45 of the 72 sequences contained in one of the oldest graduals of St. Victor (cod. B. N. 14452, 13th century) are attributed to A. But this attribution rests almost exclusively on internal criteria, which are not entirely reliable and at times even deceptive (cf. C. Blume, Anal. Hymn., 54 [1915], p. VIII ff.). However, some direct and unpublished testimony, as well as the milieu and the time in which the use of these sequences is documented, authorize us to hold that of the 45 sequences, at least a good number must be owed to the Victorine inspiration.
At the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), Innocent III gave special approval to the compositions of A. together with the works of Hugh, Richard and others. A.'s poetry is based on accent, rhyme and the counting of syllables, according to which the verses may be of 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12 syllables. The meter is iambic or trochaic. The most common stanza — which would remain typical until the 16th century — is the trochaic one, composed of two octosyllables and a septenary with the caesura after the second foot: Ave virgo singularis, | Porta vitae, stella maris, | Ave decus virginum.
Usually the sequence begins with an invocation, which is followed by the development of the thought with a surprising variety of nuances, and it closes with a new invocation. Elegance of form and depth of concepts explain the great fortune that many of these sequences enjoyed in the Latin Church of the Middle Ages.
Bibliography5 works
Carlo Egger