Education of Nuns, Feast of Fools, Letters of Love

Medieval Religious Life in Twelfth-Century Lyric Anthologies from Regensburg, Ripoll, and Chartres

These three anthologies are all relatively unknown, particularly in the English-speaking world, outside of professional medieval Latinist circles. Though excerpts from the Regensburg and Ripoll poems have been published in English translation, only the Ripoll poems have been translated completely, and only into Spanish and French. Making these anthologies available in a bilingual edition with commentary will make the insight they provide into several aspects of medieval life accessible to medieval historians as well as the more general public.

The Regensburg poems take the form of epistolary exchanges in Leonine hexameters, mainly between a male teacher and his female students, who appear to have been nuns. Some of the sixty-eight short poems imply an erotic relationship between teacher and student. The poems afford us rare glimpses into the education of women at this time. The Ripoll poems are a collection of twenty love poems, probably written in Lorraine around 1150 and copied in Ripoll. All twenty poems were written by a single unknown poet, except for one, a misogynistic poem also found in other manuscripts. The Chartres poems comprise seven performed at the post-Christmas festivities in Chartres around 1180, when the world was turned upside down in a carnivalesque suspension of the normal social order. This collection offers unique insight into the kind of poems performed during these “feasts of fools.” The last four poems are by two of the most famous medieval Latin poets, Walter of Châtillon and Peter of Blois, the canonist.

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