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83):95–107.
LATIN LYRIC POETRY
. High-medieval Latin poets studying, working, and writing primarily in France produced
a distinctive group of secular personal poems whose sophisticated treatment of style,
ideas, forms, and voice won admirers and imitators in the courts as well as in the schools,
in the vernacular as well as in Latin. The topic, however, presents many problems of
definition, since within medieval Latin culture it is often difficult to separate secular from
ecclesiastic, personal from professional, lyric from letter, or France from England.
Despite its popular, personal, and secular traits, this lyric always belonged to the
written culture of the schools and always existed in written form. The practice of light
poetry accompanied the mastery of Latin, and many high-medieval authors regret the
“trifles” (nugae) they wrote in their younger years. In the later 11th century, poets already
speak of sending and receiving poems both as single texts and in small groups; they also
speak of public recitations of poetry. In fact, variants indicate that secular lyric could
circulate both as performance and as text. Written copies, often made at first on wax
tablets because they were cheap and easily corrected, attained permanent form in
authorized copies (such as that of Baudri of Bourgueil), regional collections (such as that
of Saint-Omer), and general anthologies (such as those at Oxford). These poetic practices
brought criticism, approval, and betterment for the text; amusement, friendship, and favor
for the poet; renown, identity, and authority for patron or institution.
Multiple sources for this lyric can be found. Horace and the satirists on the one hand
and Ovid on the other had been adapted to the new requirements of the Christian
educational system, and they were being widely read in high-medieval France—
especially at Orléans, the school most known for its humanist study of the artes. A
second source lay in Carolingian culture, where secular lyric was written by and for
members of the courts of Charlemagne and his successors and where literacy in general
and lyric in particular functioned as symbolic markers of power. In a different arena,
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