Domina?

Around 700ish someone wrote a hymn about our Lady, Quem terra, pontus, aethera. It was subsequently divided into two and and thus provided a couple of Office Hymns for the Common of the BVM. The second half began "O gloriosa Femina". This was subsequently altered to "O gloriosa Domina", ["woman" changed to "Lady"] for reasons which are fairly obvious. Urban VIII's revisers changed it to "virginum" ["of virgins"]. They will have disliked "Domina" because the first syllable of that word is short, while this is a metrical hymn in which the first syllable of the word at that place in the line has to be long - as the first syllable of "femina" is (pronounced more like Fame than as in the English Feminine.)

Don't forget that the first hints of corruption of the Roman Rite began, not with Paul VI, not with Pius XII, not even with Pius X, but when, in the 1620s, Papa Barberini aka Urban VIII mucked up the ancient Office Hymns because he wanted them to sound more like Horace. This was the first, deplorable, example of the Roman Catholic Church adopting the deplorable "we've-now-got-printing-so-we-can-now-impose-our-latest-revolutionary-fad-almost-overnight-on-the-Universal-Church" syndrome which ultimately led to Bugnini and is the deplorable godfather of PF's deplorable conclusion to Traditionis custodes: the (impractical) demand that the deplorable little document should come into force immediately. Jawohl, mein Fuehrer!

Protestants like Cranmer, of course, had seen the possibilities of this technology for imposing liturgical devastation even earlier, in 1548 ... although the order in 1549 "that this realm shall have but one Use" did but echo the order of a Henrician Convocation in 1542 that the entire Province of Canterbury should use the Sarum Breviary. (The printers, naturally, loved this vastly, and embellished a new edition of the Sarum Breviary with heavy hints that you would need to buy it in order to comply with the Royal Supremacy.)

"Back to Pius V" should be our Traditionalist instinct. That is why, if you want to use English translations of the original texts of the Office Hymns as given in Sarum and Pius V (and the Liturgy of the Hours), you need to use Anglican translations - done from Sarum by people like J M Neale and to be found, in large part, in the admirable English Hymnal - rather than RC translations by scholars like E Caswall.

Vatican II very rightly ordered that the text of the Hymns should generally revert to the original texts still for the most part found in S Pius V's original Breviary (not to mention in Sarum and the other medieval local dialects of the Roman Rite). Dom Anselmo Lentini's Coetus proposed, when dealing with the hymn we are considering today, restoring the original reading Femina [woman] on the grounds that " it seems to us very beautiful, since thus the glory of the humble creature raised to so great a dignity shines more brightly; moreover, Domina [Lady] spoils the metre ...". I think Dom Anselmo is hinting that Gloriosa Femina  is an oxymoron! But at some point somebody decided that Domina ... even if unmetrical ... even if unoriginal ... had better go back into the text. I wonder who ... and do you agree with them?

Incidentally, in the first part of the original hymn - what we know as Quem terra, pontus, aethera - Urban VIII changed aethera to sidera because he didn't share the Carolingian fashion that found a delicious exoticism in words borrowed from Greek.

And that hymn originally had a third stanza long since omitted, which Lentini wanted to reintroduce, but ... apparently ... here again he was vetoed by somebody. It went (I translate unmetrically):
"Therefore the ages wonder,/That an Angel brings the Seed [Lentini wanted to emend this line to "That the Spirit overshadows her"]/ That the Virgin conceives by ear/ And, believing in her heart, gives birth." This, of course, gives a picture which relates to much medieval iconography of the Annunciation, where a piercing ray goes from the Father or the Spirit to our Lady's ear.

There is material for speculation in that stanza!