religious lyric practices offered the secular Latin poet both popular and learned forms
(such as the Ambrosian stanza and the sequence, respectively) as well as a cultural
rationale for formal experimentation. In one sense, there is thus a continuous tradition in
France of secular Latin poets’ renewing a genre of playful and personal school poetry that
can be traced back to the 4th-century poet Ausonius writing in Bordeaux—though those
acts of renewal themselves are significant. In the hands of the new poets, however, such
trifling texts became highly successful vehicles for serious treatments of formal,
psychological, literary, moral, or political topics.
For the sake of convenience, one can divide the high-medieval secular lyric poets into
four “generations.” The discussion that follows will give special attention to leading
figures of “satire” and “love,” the two lyric modes that brought the most prestige and
reward. A first generation appeared in France during the last decades of the 11th century
led by Marbode of Rennes, praised as the “King of Eloquence,” who wrote an extensive
body of secular poems while schoolmaster and chancellor at Angers from ca. 1067 to
- His collection includes love poems, satires, epigrams, stylistic exercises, personal
laments, and poetic letters. Some of his most daring ventures into secular topics and
techniques were suppressed in the early 18th century and have become known only
recently. The speakers of his love poems return repeatedly to the power and anguish of
their desire for young women and men—the latter topic widely treated during this first
generation—and it is clear that Marbode’s great achievement lies in the depiction and
exploration of human nature. Hildebert of Le Mans (or Lavardin) wrote only a small
amount of secular poetry, but both his command of Latin poetry and rhetoric and his
Christian humanism were widely admired and imitated throughout the 12th century.
Others, such as Godefroi of Reims, Raoul of La Tourte, and Baudri of Bourgueil, also
made important experiments in Romanesque poetics. Although these poets remain
relatively unknown today, their efforts led to a cultural reevaluation of a “modern”
secular personal poetry written in Latin.
The texts of the second generation of poets writing during the early decades of the
century, when Reformist pressure was greatest in France, have been less well preserved
than those of the first. How interesting it would be to see the love songs that Abélard
wrote ca. 1120 and that were still being sung decades later; the fervor, eloquence, and
learning of his extant religious lyric suggest that they must have been of high quality. Yet
even such infamous love lyric was ignored by anthologists. Of the extant love poetry
from this second group, that of Abélard’s student Hilary of Orléans claims perhaps the
most serious attention.
Born and educated in Orléans, Hilary became ca. 1105 a cleric attached to a convent in
Angers; his complaint (with an Old French refrain) to Abélard about refusing to teach
disobedient students establishes Hilary’s presence at the abbey of the Paraclete ca. 1125,
and he apparently taught in various schools, including Orléans, for the remainder of his
life. In about a dozen love poems, found in a unique manuscript, he uses plain style and
simple form, building his songs with rhymed quatrains. Lavishly praising the beauty of
beloved nuns and young men, Hilary adopts the position of a humble servant, even
describing himself as a feudal vassal on his knees with hands joined. He speaks from the
same position in some of his letters, offering servitium to those above him, a fact that
implies that his originality lay in the ambiguous overlap between sexual and material
desires.
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