O Maria, Deu maire is an Old Occitan song, a hymn to the Virgin Mary, unique in being both the only song from the Saint Martial school (the chantry

Chantry

Chantry is the English term for a fund established to pay for a priest to celebrate sung Masses for a specified purpose, generally for the soul of the deceased donor. Chantries were endowed with lands given by donors, the income from which maintained the chantry priest...

 of the Abbey of Saint Martial at Limoges

Limoges

Limoges |Limousin]] dialect of Occitan) is a city and commune, the capital of the Haute-Vienne department and the administrative capital of the Limousin région in west-central France....

) that is entirely in the vernacular (having no Latin

Medieval Latin

Medieval Latin was the form of Latin used in the Middle Ages, primarily as a medium of scholarly exchange and as the liturgical language of the medieval Roman Catholic Church, but also as a language of science, literature, law, and administration. Despite the clerical origin of many of its authors,...

 stanza or refrain) and the only medieval Occitan song with extant musical notation

Musical notation

Music notation or musical notation is any system that represents aurally perceived music, through the use of written symbols.-History:...

 for all its (twelve) stanzas. It dates to the 1090s and is preserved in MS

Manuscript

A manuscript or handwrite is written information that has been manually created by someone or some people, such as a hand-written letter, as opposed to being printed or reproduced some other way...

 f. lat. 1139 of the Bibliothèque nationale de France

Bibliothèque nationale de France

The is the National Library of France, located in Paris. It is intended to be the repository of all that is published in France. The current president of the library is Bruno Racine.-History:...

. It has been translated into English.

A liturgical song, O Maria was designed to communicate sacred truth to the people in a language they could understand, although usually this was done through a mixture of Latin and vernacular verses. The melody of the piece basically repeats for each stanza with only minor variations. The later songs of the troubadour

Troubadour

A troubadour was a composer and performer of Old Occitan lyric poetry during the High Middle Ages . Since the word "troubadour" is etymologically masculine, a female troubadour is usually called a trobairitz....

s, composed in the same style, were never transcribed with more than one stanza of music. It has been suggested that, like O Maria, subsequent stanzas were melodically similar with only minor variations. Similarities have been drawn between the music of O Maria and that of a ninth-century hymn to the Virgin, Ave maris stella ("Hail, star of the sea"), and also between O Maria and Reis glorios, verais lums e clardatz ("Glorious King, true light and brilliance"), an alba

Alba (poetry)

The alba is a subgenre of Occitan lyric poetry. It describes the longing of lovers who, having passed a night together, must separate for fear of being discovered by their respective spouses....

by the troubadour Guiraut de Bornelh (fl.c.1200). The latter may be a contrafactum

Contrafactum

In vocal music, contrafactum refers to "the substitution of one text for another without substantial change to the music"....

or just a metrical imitation, although its words cannot be presumed to have any similar religious significance.