Walsh's book should be a vade mecum for anyone who would teach the Carmina Burana on any level and be of considerable value in general to medievalists, comparatists, and those in related disciplines.--New England Classical Newsletter and Journal "Teachers, students, and any reader interested in medieval lyric will find this volume a clear and useful approach to intrinsically interesting texts.--Renaissance Quarterly "The most scholarly and most helpful presentation of a group of these captivating lyrics that has yet appeared in English.--Peter Dronke, University of Cambridge "A superb volume, fully worthy of these famous but often misunderstood poems. P. G. Walsh's unmatched erudition in Latin literature furnishes lucid grammatical explanations, incisive analysis of goliardic literary values and technique, and illuminating references to ancient and medieval parallels. His prose translations make the poems accessible also to those with little or no Latin.--Janet M. Martin, Princeton University

Originally published in 1987, this book contains the Love Sgons of the Carmina Burana, alongisde a select bibliography and textual notes. The collection of poems now known as the Carmina was given its name by Schmeller in 1847, and the Carmina Burana comprises the best and most representative products of goliardism and remains the definitive manifestation of the goliardic movement.

The famous - and bawdy - lyrics that inspired Carl Orf's stirring and moving music. and the dying swan ....

The secular clergy - priests and other clerics outside of monastic orders - were among the most influential and powerful groups in European society during the central Middle Ages. The secular clergy got their title from the Latin word for world, saeculum, and secular clerics kept the Church running in the world beyond the cloister wall, with responsibility for the bulk of pastoral care and ecclesiastical administration. This gave them enormous religious influence, although they were considered too worldly by many contemporary moralists - trying, for instance, to oppose the elimination of clerical marriage and concubinage. Although their worldliness created many tensions, it also gave the secular clergy much worldly influence. Contemporaries treated elite secular clerics as equivalent to knights, and some were as wealthy as minor barons. Secular clerics had a huge role in the rise of royal bureaucracy, one of the key historical developments of the period. They were instrumental to the intellectual and cultural flowering of the twelfth century, the rise of the schools, the creation of the book trade, and the invention of universities. They performed music, produced literature in a variety of genres and languages, and patronized art and architecture. Indeed, this volume argues that they contributed more than any other group to the Twelfth-Century Renaissance. Yet the secular clergy as a group have received almost no attention from scholars, unlike monks, nuns, or secular nobles. In The Secular Clergy in England, 1066-1216, Hugh Thomas aims to correct this deficiency through a major study of the secular clergy below the level of bishop in England from 1066 to 1216.

Walter Cohen argues that the history of European literature and each of its standard periods can be illuminated by comparative consideration of the different literary languages within Europe and by the ties of European literature to world literature. World literature is marked by recurrent, systematic features, outcomes of the way that language and literature are at once the products of major change and its agents. Cohen tracks these features from ancient times to the present, distinguishing five main overlapping stages. Within that framework, he shows that European literature's ongoing internal and external relationships are most visible at the level of form rather than of thematic statement or mimetic representation. European literature emerges from world literature before the birth of Europe-during antiquity, whose Classical languages are the heirs to the complex heritage of Afro-Eurasia. This legacy is later transmitted by Latin to the various vernaculars. The uniqueness of the process lies in the gradual displacement of the learned language by the vernacular, long dominated by Romance literatures. That development subsequently informs the second crucial differentiating dimension of European literature: the multicontinental expansion of its languages and characteristic genres, especially the novel, beginning in the Renaissance. This expansion ultimately results in the reintegration of European literature into world literature and thus in the creation of today's global literary system. The distinctiveness of European literature is to be found in these interrelated trajectories.

Enables the less well-known aspects of the Codex Buranus to receive greater scrutiny, and bring new perspectives to bear on the more thoroughly explored parts of the manuscript. Making accessible existing discourse and encouraging fresh debates on the codex, the essays advocate fresh modes of engagement with its contents, contexts, and composition.

Focusing on team translation and the production of multilingual editions, and on the difficulties these techniques created for Renaissance translation theory, this book offers a study of textual practices that were widespread in medieval and Renaissance Europe but have been excluded from translation and literary history. The author shows how collaborative and multilingual translation practices challenge the theoretical reflections of translators, who persistently call for a translation text that offers a single, univocal version and maintains unity of style. In order to explore this tension, Bistué discusses multi-version texts, in both manuscript and print, from a diverse variety of genres: the Scriptures, astrological and astronomical treatises, herbals, goliardic poems, pamphlets, the Greek and Roman classics, humanist grammars, geography treatises, pedagogical dialogs, proverb collections, and romances. Her analyses pay careful attention to both European vernaculars and classical languages, including Arabic, which played a central role in the intense translation activity carried out in medieval Spain. Comparing actual translation texts and strategies with the forceful theoretical demands for unity that characterize the reflections of early modern translators, the author challenges some of the assumptions frequently made in translation and literary analysis. The book contributes to the understanding of early modern discourses and writing practices, including the emerging theoretical discourse on translation and the writing of narrative fiction--both of which, as Bistué shows, define themselves against the models of collaborative translation and multi-version texts.