times extraordinarily candid, producing a sincere presence that appears to have repelled
the few critics who have approached these intriguing and well-crafted poems.
A fourth and final generation of secular poets followed, some of the most famous
exercising their talents outside France. Many fine poets, such as the Rheinlander known
only as “the Archpoet,” were born and employed abroad but received their education and
poetic models in France. Yet even the two dominant French lyric poets, Peter of Blois
and Walter of Châtillon, spent a considerable amount of their career in courts outside
modern France. By the end of the 12th century, the Latin clerical culture had become so
homogeneous and “universal” that class or regional identities mattered much less than
they had at the beginning.
The rhythmic poems by Peter of Blois, which Walter of Châtillon himself praised, had
been presumed lost until recently. Circumstantial but persuasive evidence now suggests
that a group of sixteen formally and topically coherent metrical love songs at the
beginning of the famous Arundel anthology belong to him; the dozen Christmas songs
and satires that follow may be his as well. Born ca. 1135 and educated in France, Peter
spent his career as a letter writer and diplomat in the service of Anglo-Norman magnates
in Sicily and England before retiring to the monastery and dying ca. 1200. His Arundel
poems stand out for their formal virtuosity; the presence of stanzas, refrains, and complex
rhyme structure signals a strong influence by vernacular court lyric; yet vocabulary, style,
and concepts belong to the school culture. Peter’s sophisticated poet-lover treats art and
love as natural, serious, and significant activities, a view common in vernacular lyric but
rare in Latin poetry.
Walter of Châtillon was the most productive, important, and influential secular Latin
lyric poet of the 12th century, composing more than fifty satires, love songs, and hymns.
Born ca. 1135 at Lille, he studied and taught in France during the early part of his career,
then became associated with the brilliant humanist court of Henry II of England; when
Thomas Becket was murdered (1169), he left for posts at Châtillon and then Reims, dying
of leprosy ca. 1200. His dozen or so love poems include pastourelles, nature poems, and
a paean to Love. But despite his constant borrowing from Ovid, Walter was not a love
poet, and both tone and form signal his distance from that material. In most of his poetry,
in fact, he attacked as satirist and moralist all forms and agents of cupidity. In his earlier
poems, he built lively stanzas from the short rhythmic verses (predominantly seven or
eight syllables) of the vernacular tradition, often adding a refrain. For his later pieces, he
turned to the “Goliardic measure” that the Archpoet had used with such success in the
1060s and that featured long rhythmic verses, simple four-line stanzas, a “Goliardic”
speaker similar to that of Hugh Primas, satire, and frequent parody. Walter invented a
successful variant by substituting an auctoritas for the final line: a hexameter or
pentameter taken from a classical or “modern” author—including himself. Widely
imitated and anthologized during the 13th century, Walter’s poems mark the end of great
high-medieval secular personal poetry by signaling the institutional pressures to
harmonize the products of the human imagination with a new orthodoxy.
This minor genre does not carry minor significance for an understanding of 12th-
century Latin culture, for it affords a privileged view of human and humanistic aspects
otherwise difficult to see. By content, the genre portrays, examines, and publicizes the
psychological, economic, and social costs imposed upon its own members by the
institutional demands. By form, it reveals the centrality, commodification, and ambiguity
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