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Hymns (canons for the great feasts)

Hymni (Ὕμνοι) · Cosmas of Maiuma (Cosmas the Melodist, Cosmas of Jerusalem) · c. 675-751/752 (8th c.) · liturgy

Greek · domain: hymnography · researched 2026-11-13

partial / older only. An English translation exists but is partial or older than the critical edition. The gap is a modern, complete translation from the original. A rendering of a daughter version does not count here: it is recorded on the dossier of the text it actually translates.

Why this is in the register

PG 98's contents list has a distinct section 'COSMAS HIEROSOLYMITANUS. Hymni. 459' (https://archive.org/download/patrologia-graeca_202105/98.pdf), i.e. the hymn corpus is edited there in Greek only, without translation. The only English renderings located are piecemeal: Neale, Hymns of the Eastern Church (1862), pp. 71-86, gives the Christmas canon ode by ode plus a 'Cento on the Transfiguration' (https://archive.org/details/hymnseasternchu01nealgoog); the Festal Menaion (Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware, 1969) supplies English service texts for the feasts it covers, within which the canons attributed to Cosmas are sung. HOLLIS Primo 'Cosmas of Maiuma hymn English' returns 0 records and 'Cosmas the Melodist canon' returns only Neale (checked 2026-11-13).

Cosmas shares with John of Damascus the authorship of the great-feast canons, and liturgical books render those canons for the feasts they serve; but no English translation of his hymn corpus as a body of texts exists, and the Migne text has never been translated as a whole. Neale's versions are hymn-paraphrases in Victorian metre, not a scholarly translation.

Existing translations recorded

Edition / series
Hymns of the Eastern Church · John Mason Neale · 1862

Electronic text

Source and licence
other · PDF scan · public domain (Migne, 1860); Internet Archive scan
patrologia-graeca_202105/98.pdf (PG 98, cols 459ff.)

Scanned witnesses

Scan search: not checked. Not searched in the scan pass: this dossier was outside the 121-work scan target set.

Harvard Hollis

Hollis query: Cosmas of Maiuma — 1 record(s); match basis author_title_unquoted.

RecordCitation
Palaea historica : the second Slavic translation, commentary, and text
Skowronek, Małgorzata · 2016 · eng, chu
Skowronek, Małgorzata. "Palaea historica : the second Slavic translation, commentary, and text." Łódź : Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2016. https://hollis.harvard.edu/permalink/f/1s5nto6/99153810491003941

Sources checked

Cite: Tergwame, “Hymns (canons for the great feasts)” (greek gap dossier), 2026. https://naxiai.com/christian/gaps/greek-kosmas-maiuma-hymni