Stella celi extirpavit

Description

The Marian hymn ‘Stella celi extirpavit’ is one of the few musical sources that is unequivocally phrased as a plea for deliverance from the plague. The text is widely recorded in late medieval sources, including in polyphonic settings in the Old Hall Manuscript and the Eton Choirbook. The best medical thinking at the time attributed the plague to the configuration of the heavens, particularly to the conjunction of Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars a few years prior to the Black Death. This hymn, accordingly, calls upon Mary in her guise as the stella maris, star of the sea, to restrain these constellations whose strife ‘brings the people the ulcers of a terrible death’. Though scientific understanding has advanced in the intervening centuries, it is with the same urgency and anguish that we call for deliverance from the new pestilence of COVID-19.