ABSTRACT
Date and publication. First printed in 1693 in EP (the volume probably appeared towards the end of July); not reprinted in D.’s lifetime.
Context. The poem is a free translation of the celebrated Latin hymn, the precise date and authorship of which are unknown. The earliest known sources are in MSS of the tenth century. By the twelfth century the hymn was widely current, and its text established in a stable, six-stanza form with only minimal local variations between the various MS versions. Some MSS contain a concluding doxology, which takes different forms (see ll. 34-9n). (On the text, authorship and date of Veni Creator Spiritus, see A Dictionary of Hymnology, edited by John Julian (revised edition 1908) 1206-8; for a plain prose translation, see The Penguin Book of Latin Verse, edited by Frederick Brittain (1962) 146-7.) From the tenth century, the hymn was regularly used in the Hour Services at Pentecost, and from the eleventh century it formed a regular part of ordination services (A Dictionary of Hymnology 1208-9). The hymn was regularly included (in Latin) in editions of the post-Tridentine Officium Beatae Mariae Virginis (from 1571), and (in English) in the various editions of the Primer, versions of the Officium BVM produced (from 1599) as works of private devotion for the English Roman Catholic community. Four separate translations were included in versions of the Primer first published in 1599, 1615, 1651 and 1687 (the first three of these each went through several editions: for details, see J. M. Blom, The Post-Tridentine English Primer (1982) 230 and passim). English versions of Veni Creator Spiritus are also to be found in the service for the ‘Ordering of Priests’ in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (1549, 1552, 1662), in Archbishop Parker’s Psalter (written 1553-8), in John Cosin’s Collection of Private Devotions (1627), and in Edward Maihew’s A Paradise of Praiers (1613) (A Dictionary of Hymnology 1209-10; Blom 247). Of the previous English versions, D. seems to echo only those in the 1651 and 1687 Primers (abbreviated below as 1651 and 1687).
