Jubilemus omnes una – Dictionary of Hymnology

The Latin hymn "Jubilemus omnes una" is a medieval liturgical sequence composed for the Fourth Sunday in Advent. The text serves as a celebratory choral introduction to the Eucharistic liturgy, preparing the congregation for the Nativity through themes of corporate joy and prophetic fulfillment.

Manuscript and Missal History

The sequence is widely distributed across several key English and French liturgical manuscripts dating from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries:

English Sources: The earliest noted text appears in a twelfth-century English Gradual preserved in the British Museum (Reg. 2, B. iv. f. 65), as well as an English Sequentiary compiled around 1199 (Calig. A. xiv. f. 44). It is also preserved in a fourteenth-century manuscript copy of the standard Sarum Missal (Lansdown, 432, f. 11 b).
French Sources: The hymn is found in two prominent fourteenth-century French Missals housed in the British Museum, representing the regional uses of Paris (Add. 16,905, f. 18 b) and Sens (Add. 30,058, f. 16 b).

In print, the Latin text was maintained within the historic regional Missals of Sarum, York, Hereford, and Arbuthnott. In modern hymnological scholarship, the text was edited and printed by Dr. John Mason Neale in his Sequentiae ex Missalibus (1852, page 8), which was subsequently duplicated by Hermann Adalbert Daniel in his Thesaurus Hymnologicus (Volume V, page 174) and included in Anselm Schubiger's Kethrein (Number 5).

English Translations

The sequence was rendered into English during the mid-nineteenth century through three distinct translations:

"Honour and glory, thanksgiving and praise" was translated by Edward Arthur Dayman for The Hymnary and published there in 1872. This version achieved broader circulation when it was adopted across the Atlantic in the New York collection Laudes Domini (1884).

"Let us all rejoice together" is an independent translation executed by John David Chambers and published in his Lauda Syon (1866).

"Before the all-creating Lord" was translated by Charles Buchanan Pearson and included within his complete prose and verse rendering of the Sarum Missal in English (1868).