The third motet of Compère’s cycle is transmitted in Librone 1, ff. 173v–174r and was copied there by Scribe A, like all other motets of the cycle. The scribe was careful and copied the text without mistakes.
The topic of the motet is again the Nativity. The idea that an event of sacred history from the past, in this case the birth of Christ, is re-enacted and made present through liturgy today^[1] is very strong in this particular motet, in which every strophe opens with the word hodie. The rubric ‘loco Patrem’ indicates that this motet was sung to or instead of the Credo, but the textual interferences between its text and that of the motet are barely noticeable. Only the expression ‘de caelo pax vera descendit’ found in the first section of the motet text recalls the sentence ‘et propter nostram salutem descendit de caelis’ found in the Credo.
Compère used a vast selection of sources and his compositional technique is eclectic, as has been stated before.^[2] In this motet antiphons and responsories from the Christmas liturgy are used and freely adapted, creating a multilayered textual patchwork. Some small changes to the source show how elaborated this compositional technique was (see the Table below): for instance, while the text of a responsory for Christmas reads ‘ad regna caelestia’, the motet text has ‘ad caelestia dona’; furthermore, the text of a responsory at Matins for Christmas, already used in the motet Beata dei genitrix of this same cycle, is modified here and the textual bit ‘Maria cuius viscera intacta permanent’ is left out. Also, the text of the Magnificat antiphon at Second Vespers for Christmas is dismembered into smaller units and used in different places of the motet: the sentence ‘hodie in terra canunt angeli’, for instance, becomes independent and the words ‘hodie salvator’ are fused with the text of another responsory.

^[1] See Felix Heinzer, ‘Figura zwischen Präsenz und Diskurs: Das Verhältnis des “gregorianischen” Messgesangs zu seiner dichterischen Erweiterung’, in Figura: Dynamiken der Zeiten und Zeichen im Mittelalter, ed. Christian Kiening and Katharina Mertens Fleury (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2013), 71–90: 75.

^[2] See Eva Ferro, ‘“Old Texts for New Music”? Textual and Philological Observations on the Cycles “Salve Mater Salvatoris” and “Ave Domine Iesu Christe” from Librone 1’, in Motet Cycles between Devotion and Liturgy, ed. Daniele V. Filippi and Agnese Pavanello, Schola Cantorum Basiliensis Scripta, 7 (Basel: Schwabe, 2019), 203–8.