Salve Regina

The Salve Regina emerges in manuscripts of the eleventh century, and by the twelfth it was already famous. Medieval writers ascribed it most often to Hermann of Reichenau, called Hermannus Contractus, the paralyzed monk of the abbey of Reichenau who was one of the most learned men of his age, and sometimes to Adhemar, the crusading bishop of Le Puy, or even to earlier saints, but none of the ascriptions can be established, and modern scholarship leaves the author unknown.

The text itself is a masterpiece of medieval Marian devotion. It addresses Mary as Queen and mother of mercy, life, sweetness and hope, and speaks in the voice of the banished children of Eve, sighing, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears, before asking their advocate to turn her merciful eyes toward them and, after their exile, to show them Jesus, the blessed fruit of her womb.

Tradition holds that the closing triple invocation, O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary, was a later addition, and a well loved legend credits it to Bernard of Clairvaux, said to have added the words in the cathedral of Speyer, another story that measures the prayer's prestige rather than documents its history. The Latin has been translated into every language of Catholic devotion, in English most familiarly as Hail, Holy Queen.

Few prayers have been planted in as many corners of Catholic life as the Salve Regina. In the Divine Office it is one of the four seasonal antiphons of the Virgin sung at the end of Compline, assigned to the long stretch of the year from Trinity Sunday to the beginning of Advent, so that for half the year the church's last sung words of the day are addressed to the Queen of mercy. The monastic orders gave it particular devotion.

The Cistercians and Dominicans established the daily singing of the Salve after Compline in the thirteenth century, and the Dominican Salve procession became one of the order's signatures, while later custom added the prayer to the conclusion of the rosary, where most Catholics now meet it. The antiphon also went to sea. Medieval and early modern sailors sang the Salve Regina at evening as a service of its own, and the journal of Columbus's first voyage records the crew singing it in the evenings, one witness among many to a custom that made the antiphon the sailors' hymn of the Atlantic world. Its chant settings, the ornate solemn tone and the simple tone every congregation knows, carried it into polyphony, and composers from the Renaissance onward have set it continuously, making the Salve Regina one of the most composed texts in the history of Western music.