Education of Nuns, Feast of Fools, Letters of Love: Medieval Religious Life in Twelfth-Century Lyric Anthologies from Regensburg, Ripoll, and Chartres

These three anthologies are all relatively unknown, particularly in the

English-speaking world, outside of professional medieval Latinist

circles. Though excerpts from the Regensburg and Ripoll poems have been

published in English translation, only the Ripoll poems have been

translated completely, and only into Spanish and French. Making these

anthologies available in a bilingual edition with commentary will make

the insight they provide into several aspects of medieval life

accessible to medieval historians as well as the more general public.

The Regensburg poems take the form of epistolary exchanges in Leonine

hexameters, mainly between a male teacher and his female students, who

appear to have been nuns. Some of the sixty-eight short poems imply an

erotic relationship between teacher and student. The poems afford us

rare glimpses into the education of women at this time. The Ripoll poems

are a collection of twenty love poems, probably written in Lorraine

around 1150 and copied in Ripoll. All twenty poems were written by a

single unknown poet, except for one, a misogynistic poem also found in

other manuscripts. The Chartres poems comprise seven performed at the

post-Christmas festivities in Chartres around 1180, when the world was

turned upside down in a carnivalesque suspension of the normal social

order. This collection offers unique insight into the kind of poems

performed during these feasts of fools. The last four poems are by two

of the most famous medieval Latin poets, Walter of Chatillon and Peter

of Blois, the canonist.