Studies in Medieval Literature

The “Carmina Burana” are the most important collection of Medieval Latin (non-religious) lyrical poetry from the High Middle Ages. The carefully redacted anthology contains moral-satirical poems attacking greed, corruption and hypocrisy; erotic love poems revolving around the fraught issue of sexual desire; and a third group with poems (apparently) written by a rebellious group of poets, the “Vagantes” who adopt the personae of hypocrites, false beggars, and outlaws.

In this course, we will study these poems thoroughly via a combination of perspectives including philology, manuscript studies, close-reading, literary criticism, contextual analysis, and comparisons with Ancient, Medieval and Modern literary traditions. All in all, we will use our studies as an introduction into the literary culture of the Latin High Middle Ages.

Knowledge of Latin (of any level) is a requirement for this course.