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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")
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T H E
W A N D E R I N G
S C H O L A R S
J A N E W A D D E L L Was bom in 1889 in Tokyo, where her North Irish parents were mis sionaries. She received her education in Ireland at Victoria College and Queens University in Belfast. She held honorary doctorates from Belfast, Durham, St. Andrews, and Columbia, and was elected a member of the Irish Academy of Letters in 1932. Among her works are: a translation of Lyrics from the Chinese ( 19 13 ) ; a translation of M edieval Latin Lyrics (19 29 ); Peter Abelard, a novel (19 3 3 ); T h e A bbé Prévost (19 3 3 ) ; and Poetry in the Dark Ages (1947)* T h e W andering Scholars was first published in 1927. HELEN
THE W ANDERING SCHOLARS H E L E N
W A D D E L L
Anchor Books
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Reprinted by permission of Constable and Company, Ltd., London Cover by Antonio Frasconi Typography by Joseph P. Ascherl
Note to the Sixth Edition this edition is less imperfect than its predecessors is a good deal due to the kindness of several readers, espe cially of Professor C. H. Haskins, Professor E. F. Jacob, Miss E. M . Jamison, Mr. Henry Broadbent, and Mr. A. L. Poole. The text has been revised, a table of biographical dates added, and since much has been written on the mediaeval Latin lyric since 1926, when this book went to press, a new list of authorities has been compiled. The five years which have passed since its first publica tion have only deepened the note of apology of the orig inal preface. For in spite of its title, this is far from being an adequate history of the Vagantes, tamquam folium a vento rapitur, et quasi scintilla in arundinete, leaves caught by the wind, sparks in the brushwood, of me diaeval literature and history. It is the record, as they ap peared to one reader, of the visitations of lyric beauty as fugitive and swift as they, in mediaeval verse: not among the vernaculars, which have all mens praise, but in the Low Latin which seemed for long enough no better than the discoloured stubble of harvests long since gathered. This deprecation of the title raises another question. The trend of modem scholarship is to abandon the old romantic name of Vagantenlieder, goliard poetry, and to call the whole corpus of this kind of verse, “secular clerical lyric.”1 Wilhelm Meyer came even to speak of the Vagantenmythus, and (though one remembers that An drew Lang once disposed of Mr. Gladstone as a solar T
hat
1 I have myself preferred to call it, as in Chapter IX, ‘'The Scholars’ Lyric,” for this covers both religious ana profane, and the Archpoet, like Sedulius Scotus before him, Villon and Dun bar after him, was capable of both.
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Note to the Sixth Edition
myth) there was reason for his exasperation. Golias, richly gifted and ubiquitous though he was, did not write all the lyrics of the great age; and before crediting him, as even the cautious Schumann does, with the Bacchanalian verse, it is sobering to reflect that the greatest drinking song in English, “Bac