Wine, Women, and Song: Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse
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Wine, Women, and Song: Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse
Goliards -- Songs and music -- Texts; Songs, Latin (Medieval and modern) -- Translations into English; Students' songs -- Europe -- Texts
We can hardly avoid the conclusion that by Golias Episcopus, Primas,
and Archipoeta one and the same person, occupying a prominent post in
the Order, was denoted. He was the head of the Goliardic family, the
Primate of the Wandering Students' Order, the Archpoet of these
lettered minstrels. The rare excellence of the compositions ascribed
to him caused them to be spread abroad, multiplied, and imitated in
such fashion that it is now impossible to feel any certainty about the
personality which underlay these titles.
Though we seem frequently upon the point of touching the real man, he
constantly eludes our grasp. Who he was, whether he was one or many,
remains a mystery. Whether the poems which bear one or other of his
changing titles were really the work of a single writer, is also a
matter for fruitless conjecture. We may take it for granted that he
was not Walter Map; for Map was not a Canon of Cologne, not a follower
of Reinald von Dassel, not a mark for the severe scorn of Giraldus.
Similar reasoning renders it more than improbable that the Golias of
Giraldus, the Primas of Salimbene, and the petitioner to Reinald
should have been Walter of Lille.[48]
At the same time it is singular that the name of Walter should twice
occur in Goliardic poems of a good period. One of these is the famous
and beautiful lament:--
"Versa est in luctum--eithara Waltheri."
This exists in the MS. of the _Carmina Burana_, but not in the Paris
MS. of Walter's poems edited by Müldner.
It contains allusions to the poet's ejection from his place in the
Church--a misfortune which actually befell Walter of Lille. Grimm has
printed another poem, _Saepe de miseria,_ in which the name of Walter
occurs.[49] It is introduced thus:
"Hoc Gualtherus sub-prior
Jubet in decretis."
Are we to infer from the designation _Sub-prior_ that the Walter of
this poem held a post in the Order inferior to that of the Primas?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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