For a thousand years, the plainchant Victimae paschali laudes has intertwined itself in the history of Christian liturgy. With its emergence in the eleventh century, Victimae paschali laudes appears within a rich moment of liturgical expansion. The Catholic Church of the High Middle Ages did not rest once the annual cycle of Gregorian plainchants was codified, but expanded the treasury of its liturgy by inserting new texts and even by adding new genres. The famous account of the monk Notker "the stutterer" tells of his addition of poetic texts to the lengthy melismas found at the end of sung "Alleluias," as a memory aid to the singers. This created a completely new genre of chant, known as the sequence (since it sequentially followed the Alleluia). Between Notker's work and a later flowering of sequence composition at the time of Adam of St. Victor, sequences for greater feasts often display a transitional character. Eleventh century sequences, including the Victimae paschali laudes of Wipo of Burgundy (d.c. 1048), show greater tendencies toward regular phrase structure, and even hints of poetic rhymes. Only the first line of Victimae paschali laudes fails to be echoed in a second line to the same music.

The complete text of this sequence celebrates aspects of the Easter mystery: the resurrection, the angelic witnesses to Mary over the empty tomb, and the complete victory of Christ over death. As such, it not only served the annual high feast of Easter itself, but Victimae paschali laudes also provided a seed for the early flowering of liturgical drama. The third verse of the sequence offers a dialogue between bystanders questioning the Virgin Mary about the empty tomb. Its clearly dramatic dialogue, and possibly its assignment of different voices to different vocal ranges, allowed its early adoption into fuller dramatic renditions of the Easter story, the "Quem queritis" plays that began in the twelfth century.

Yet Victimae paschali laudes' distinguished liturgical history does not end there. As one of his favorite chants, Martin Luther transplanted the Catholic sequence into early Protestant circles in his hymn Christ lag in Todesbanden. At the same time, the counterreformation preserved the same sequence for later centuries of Catholic worship; Victimae paschali laudes was one of only five sequence chants to survive the Council of Trent's liturgical reforms. (It is not quite intact, however: the reformers omitted one anti-Semitic line of poetry.)

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