Fourth stanza, explaining how Jesus was born of Mary to save sinners: :Since he was of woman born, :God saved women; :And he was born a man :To save men.

''O Maria, Deu maire'' ("O Mary, mother of God") is an

Old Occitan Old Occitan ( oc, occitan ancian, label=Occitan language, Modern Occitan, ca, occità antic), also called Old Provençal, was the earliest form of the Occitano-Romance languages, as attested in writings dating from the eighth through the fourteen ...

song, a hymn to the Virgin Mary, unique in being both the only song from the

Saint Martial school The Saint Martial School was a medieval school of music composition centered in the Abbey of Saint Martial, Limoges, France. Most active from the 9th to 12th centuries, some scholars describe its practices, music, and manuscripts as 'Aquitanian'. ...

(the

chantry A chantry is an ecclesiastical term that may have either of two related meanings: # a chantry service, a Christian liturgy of prayers for the dead, which historically was an obiit, or # a chantry chapel, a building on private land, or an area in ...

of the

Abbey of Saint Martial The Abbey of Saint Martial (french: Abbaye Saint-Martial, Limoges; Limousin: ''Abadiá de Sent Marçau de Limòtges'') was a monastery in Limoges, France, founded in 848 and dissolved in 1791. The buildings were razed at the beginning of the 19t ...

Limoges Limoges (, , ; oc, Lemòtges, locally ) is a city and Communes of France, commune, and the prefecture of the Haute-Vienne Departments of France, department in west-central France. It was the administrative capital of the former Limousin region ...

) that is entirely in the vernacular (having no

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

stanza or refrain) and the only medieval Occitan song with extant

musical notation Music notation or musical notation is any system used to visually represent aurally perceived music played with instruments or sung by the human voice through the use of written, printed, or otherwise-produced symbols, including notation fo ...

for all its (twelve) stanzas. It dates to the 1090s and is preserved in MS f. lat. 1139 of the

Bibliothèque nationale de France The Bibliothèque nationale de France (, 'National Library of France'; BnF) is the national library of France, located in Paris on two main sites known respectively as ''Richelieu'' and ''François-Mitterrand''. It is the national repository ...

. It has been translated into English. A

liturgical Liturgy is the customary public ritual of worship performed by a religious group. ''Liturgy'' can also be used to refer specifically to public worship by Christians. As a religious phenomenon, liturgy represents a communal response to and partic ...

song, ''O Maria'' was designed to communicate sacred truth to the people in a language they could understand, although usually this was done through a mixture of Latin and vernacular verses. The melody of the piece basically repeats for each stanza with only minor variations. The later songs of the

troubadour A troubadour (, ; oc, trobador ) was a composer and performer of Old Occitan lyric poetry during the High Middle Ages (1100–1350). Since the word ''troubadour'' is etymologically masculine, a female troubadour is usually called a ''trobairit ...

s, composed in the same style, were never transcribed with more than one stanza of music. It has been suggested that, like ''O Maria'', subsequent stanzas were melodically similar with only minor variations. Similarities have been drawn between the music of ''O Maria'' and that of a ninth-century hymn to the Virgin, ''Ave maris stella'' ("Hail, star of the sea"), and also between ''O Maria'' and ''Reis glorios, verais lums e clardatz'' ("Glorious King, true light and brilliance"), an ''

alba ''Alba'' ( , ) is the Scottish Gaelic name for Scotland. It is also, in English language historiography, used to refer to the polity of Picts and Scottish people, Scots united in the ninth century as the Kingdom of Alba, until it developed i ...

'' by the troubadour

Guiraut de Bornelh Giraut de Bornelh (; c. 1138 – 1215), whose first name is also spelled Guiraut and whose toponym is de Borneil or de Borneyll, was a troubadour connected to the castle of the viscount of Limoges. He is credited with the formalisation, if not the ...

(''fl.c.''1200). The latter may be a ''

contrafactum In vocal music, contrafactum (or contrafact, pl. contrafacta) is "the substitution of one text for another without substantial change to the music". The earliest known examples of this procedure (sometimes referred to as ''adaptation''), date back ...

'' or just a metrical imitation, although its words cannot be presumed to have any similar religious significance.For Guiraut's poem in translation, with an introduction, see Paden and Paden, 92–93.

Notes

{{Authority control Marian hymns Old Occitan literature Medieval compositions