Regina Caeli

The Regina Caeli is the shortest and most jubilant of the Marian antiphons, four lines that tell the Queen of heaven to rejoice, alleluia, because he whom she merited to bear, alleluia, has risen as he said, alleluia, and that close by asking her to pray for us to God, alleluia. It appears in liturgical manuscripts around the year 1200 without attribution, and its author is unknown. The gap was filled, as medieval gaps usually were, by legend.

The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine tells that during a penitential procession against the plague in Rome, Gregory the Great heard angels singing the antiphon's first three lines above the city, and answered them aloud with the fourth, whereupon he saw an angel sheathing a sword atop Hadrian's mausoleum, the castle thereafter called Sant'Angelo. The story is impossible, Gregory having died six centuries before the antiphon is attested, but it preserves what the medieval church felt about the text, that it sounded like something angels would sing. The antiphon's structure is itself a small Easter catechism, the resurrection announced to the person to whom the incarnation was announced, so that the Easter joy is offered first to Mary, and through her petitions to everyone else.

The Regina Caeli owns the Easter season. From Easter Sunday through Pentecost it serves as the seasonal Marian antiphon at the end of Compline, and by a custom fixed in the eighteenth century it replaces the Angelus itself, so that the thrice daily bell of Catholic settlements calls the faithful, for fifty days, to the antiphon of the resurrection rather than the memorial of the incarnation. It is recited standing, in token of Easter joy, where the Angelus tradition kneels. Popes lead it publicly from the window of the Apostolic Palace on the Sundays of Eastertide, delivering the short address and blessing that accompany the Sunday Angelus the rest of the year, which has made the antiphon's opening line one of the most broadcast pieces of Latin in the modern world.

Musically the Regina Caeli lives a double life. The chant books give it in a simple tone that any parish can manage and an ornate solemn tone for trained choirs, and composers of every polyphonic generation have set it, so the same four lines serve a village congregation after evening prayer and a cathedral choir at full strength. Its liturgical logic repays notice, the church keeping time by changing whom it addresses and how, joy measured not by adding words but by exchanging one Marian greeting for another.