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Contains 31 hymns, from Keble's translation from the Greek, ‘Hail, gladdening light’, to the Reformation, through the great age of Latin hymnody and into the monastic period, and including two Celtic hymns. It includes some of the great translations by John Mason Neale, such as ‘Jerusalem the golden’, and the great Irish hymn, ‘St Patrick's Breastplate’.

This chapter reconstructs Gottschalk’s priestly career, when he preached a controversial, Augustinian-based theology of predestination in Italy and as a missionary in southeastern Europe in the late 830s and 840s. Deciphering the limited and often obscure evidence (including Gottschalk’s own later writings), the investigation here seeks to uncover his theology of twin predestination at this time and his frequently aggressive and subversive strategies for propagating it among Christians—including bishops—and non-Christians alike. This was an era of political conflict and spiritual uncertainty in the Carolingian Empire, and Gottschalk’s goal was to separate the elect from the reprobate at this critical moment. The chapter also examines Hrabanus Maurus’s writings on predestination and his denunciations of Gottschalk as a heretic. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Gottschalk’s condemnation for heresy at the Synod of Mainz (848), where Hrabanus—then Archbishop of Mainz—oversaw his conviction and punishment.

Gottschalk’s attempts to develop his clerical career in the early 830s were linked to the support of a powerful patron: Archbishop Ebbo of Rheims. Gottschalk, however, was quickly embroiled in the so-called Loyal Rebellion against Emperor Louis the Pious in 831, for which Archbishop Ebbo had Gottschalk forcibly tonsured. These circumstances led Gottschalk to compose his first surviving writings, which cast him as God’s loyal, but suffering servant in need of assistance. The chapter explores how Gottschalk used this self-representation in a verse letter to Archbishop Ebbo to protest his innocence in the rebellion and to recover the archbishop’s favor. Central to the investigation here is an examination of Gottschalk’s biblical and patristic literary allusions, which were meant to provide a hidden message to readers of his letter: an admonishment of unjust judges clearly meant to make Archbishop Ebbo reconsider Gottschalk’s condemnation and incarceration.

In the first years following the Synod of Quierzy, 849, Gottschalk won the support of monks within his prison at Hautvillers, enabling him—through pamphlets smuggled from his cell—to encourage readers to preach and confess his doctrine of twin predestination. In this way, he continued to work to separate the elect from the reprobate in the realm. Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims responded with his own treatise, condemning Gottschalk as a diabolical servant in pious disguise, and the doctrinal debate soon widened as other theologians offered their own interpretations of predestination. In 851, the rulers of the three Frankish kingdoms confirmed Gottschalk’s condemnation, agreeing to prevent troublemakers from disturbing the peace. In response, Gottschalk composed his most famous hymn, Ut quid iubes, casting himself as an exile in a land of error like the Israelites during the Babylonian Captivity.