Religious Figure, Poet, Composer. The greatest creator of Victorine sequences, a genre of hymns that flourished in 12th Century France. His religious poetry was greatly admired and the music he set it to influenced the Notre Dame School. The name Adam of St. Victor is a posthumous appellation. He was probably born in Paris and spent most of his life as an Augustinian monk at the Notre Dame Cathedral. In 1107 he became its Cantor and from then on signed himself "Adam Precentor". But his theological allegiance was elsewhere. Adam supported the reformist teachings of the Parisian Abbey of St. Victor from its founding in 1108, and met with resistance trying to spread its influence into Notre Dame. Many of the sequences he composed were likely performed at the Church of St. Victor rather than the cathedral. By the late 1120s Adam's Victorine group had tacit approval from the Pope and the Bishop of Paris, creating internal strife that culminated in bloodshed. In 1133, Prior Thomas of St. Victor was murdered by secular agents of the Notre Dame faction, sending shockwaves throughout the Catholic Church. Adam donated his prebend to the Abbey in protest and was eventually allowed to retire there. For centuries the day of his death (January 14) was commemorated at that institution. The Abbey of St. Victor was burned during the French Revolution and finally demolished in 1820. Over 100 sequences attributed to Adam are extant. While his texts survive some of the music is lost, and what remains was redacted by later hands - a sadly common practice in the French Medieval liturgy. Thirty-seven of the sequences were printed in the "Elucidatorium Ecclesiasticum" (1516) of Jodocus Clichtovaeus; the rest were retrieved from the Abbey library before its destruction and later deposited at the Bibliothèque Nationale. The first complete edition of Adam of St. Victor was published in 1858.