three herbs and flowers. Other poems include hagiography and praises of important
people (including Louis the Pious and the empress Judith, mother of Charles the Bald). In
the Middle Ages, he was also famous for his exegesis, much of it based on the longer
works of Rabanus Maurus, including commentaries on the Pentateuch, the Psalms, and
the canonical epistles. This exegesis remains in need of further critical study. The Glossa
ordinaria, published as a work of Walafrid in Migne’s Patrologia Latina, Vols. 113–14,
is now known to have been written in the 12th century and erroneously ascribed to
Walafrid in the 15th.
E.Ann Matter
[See also: BIBLE, CHRISTIAN INTERPRETATION OF; CHARLES II THE BALD;
GLOSSA ORDINARIA; LATIN POETRY, CAROLINGIAN; LOUIS I THE PIOUS;
PURGATORY; RABANUS MAURUS]
Walafrid Strabo. Poems. MGH Poetae 2 259–473.
Traill, David A., ed. and trans. Walahfrid Strabo’s Visio Wettini: Text, Translation and
Commentary. Bern: Lang, 1974.
Duckett, Eleanor Shipley. Carolingian Portraits: A Study in the Ninth Century. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1962, pp. 121–60.
Godman, Peter. Poets and Emperors: Frankish Politics and Carolingian Poetry. Oxford:
Clarendon, 1987.
Onnerfors, Alf, Johannes Rathofer, and Fritz Wagner, eds. “Über Walahfrid Strabos Psalter-
Kommentar.” In Literatur und Sprache im europaischen Mittelalter: Festschrift für Karl
Langosch zum 70. Geburtstag. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1973, pp. 75–
121.
WALDO/WALDENSES
. The Waldenses, or “Poor of Lyon,” were members of a lay spiritual movement founded
on three principal points: the adoption of voluntary poverty, access to the Scriptures
through a vernacular translation, and public preaching. In many ways, the form that this
movement took is a product of the developing “profit economy” of the 12th century. The
founder was a certain Waldo, a rich merchant of Lyon, who, upon hearing a jongleur sing
the Vie de saint Alexis, had a conversion experience ca. 1173. He then had two priests
translate the Bible into French and decided upon the apostolic life: giving away his
wealth and placing his wife and daughters in convents, he memorized his translated Bible
and began to preach. He quickly gained a following of laymen who called themselves
“the poor” and traveled in pairs, begging and preaching repentance.
Doctrinally orthodox, Waldo and his followers preached against Cathar heretics, but
their ostentatious poverty and public preaching soon roused clerical opposition. Waldo
sought the pope’s approval of his mission and his vernacular Bible (1179), but the clergy
proved both contemptuous of these unlettered laymen and unalterably opposed to their
preaching, despite their usefulness in combating the church’s primary concern—
Catharism. Waldo disobeyed rather than forsake the Lord’s command to preach the
gospel, and by 1184 the group was condemned as heretical. In response, some Walden-
sians (especially the Lombards) claimed that the church had become the “Whore of
The Encyclopedia 1835