"The ninth-century monk and poet Notker of St Gall played a seminal role in the history of the sequence, a distinctly medieval poetic genre of liturgical chant, through his Liber Ymnorum. Notker harkens back beyond the classical Latin and Greek tradition, drawing on Hebrew models; his texts combine theological complexity with poetic invention of extraordinary reach. Despite the opposition his innovations provoked in traditionalist circles, Notker's sequences were widely adopted. Promotion by the monastery of St Gall and posthumous idealization of the poet ensured the Liber Ymnorum would become a prototypical model for a wide array of imitations in the genre until the late sixteenth century."--