The pium dictamen (plural pia dictamina), known in German as a Reimgebet or Leselied, is a Christian hymn for private devotion, generally rhyming and often using acrostics. The genre is highly variable. It includes "psalters" (psalteria) with 150 strophes and "rosaries" (rosaria) with 50. Another type was the "gloss song" (Glossenlied, prière glosée), in which a popular prayer was divided up by word, with each word be "glossed" by a stanza of commentary. They were popular in both Latin and the vernacular and were sometimes multilingual.
The hymn Stabat Mater was originally a pium dictamen.
References
- ^ Joseph Szövérffy, "L'hymnologie médiévale: recherches et méthode", Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 4.16 (1961): 389–422, at 390–391 (plurals Reimgebete and Leselieder).
- Christina E. A. Marshall, Late Medieval Liturgical Offices in Acrostic Form: A Catalogue and Study, PhD diss. (University of Toronto, 2006), p. 23 ("a paraliturgical genre of poetry for private devotion").
- "Pia dictamina", in The Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology (Canterbury Press, 2013), accessed 26 November 2022.
- Patrizia Noel Aziz Hanna and Levente Seláf, "Textsetting of Multilingual Poems: The Example of Bruder Hans' Ave Maria", in Teresa Proto, Paolo Canettieri and Gianluca Valenti (eds.), Text and Tune: On the Association of Music and Lyrics in Sung Verse (Peter Lang, 2015), pp. 111–127, at 114–115.
Further reading
- Christina Lechtermann, "Commentary as Literature: The Medieval Glossenlied", in Christina Lechtermann and Markus Stock (eds.), Theories and Practices of Commentary (Vittorio Klostermann, 2020), pp. 160–180.