The Wandering Scholars: The Life and Art of the Lyric Poets of the Latin Middle Ages

This study of the "Vagantes" is little more than the scaffolding of its subject. It was begun as an introduction to a book of translations from mediaeval Latin lyric, soon to be published, and outgrew the original intention, without outgrowing its limitations. The historical interest of the "Vagantes" as one of the earliest disintegrating forces in the mediaeval church has been left on one side; with it, their place in literary history, in the development of satire and the secularising of the stage. They have been studied only as the inheritors of the pagan learning, the classic tradition that came to its wild flowering in the rhyming Latin lyric of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. ("Preface") Note to Sixth Edition v Preface ix Introduction. The Pagan Learning xiii I. THE BREAK WITH THE PAGAN TRADITION 1 II. FORTUNATUS TO SEDULIUS OF LIÈGE 25 III. THE TENTH CENTURY 69 IV. THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING IN FRANCE 89 V. HUMANISM IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY 113 VI. PARIS AND ORLEANS 133 VII. THE ARCHPOET 159 VIII. THE ORDO VAGORUM 175 IX. THE SCHOLARS’ LYRIC 211 APPENDICES A. Latin originals of Lyrics translated in the text 241 B. Extracts from the Travelling Accounts of Bishop Wolfger of Passau, 1203-4 257 C. Indulgence given by Surianus, Arch-Primate of the Wandering Scholars, 1209 261 D. "The Departing of my Books"; He laments his "clergie," lost at dice 265 E. Councils on the "Clericus vagus" or "joculator" 269 Table of Biographical Dates 301 Bibliography 307 Index 339