Venantius Fortunatus

Venantius Honorius Clementianus Fortunatus was a Latin poet born in northern Italy around 530. He travelled to Merovingian Gaul, where he became court poet and friend to Queen Radegund at Poitiers, and later served as bishop of Poitiers. He died there in the early seventh century.

His processional hymns for the Cross, written when relics of the True Cross reached Radegund's convent at Poitiers, passed into the Latin liturgy and are still sung. Both are given here in the English verse of John Mason Neale (1867), from Mediaeval Hymns and Sequences.