Wine, Women and Song: Students' Songs of the Middle Ages - Couverture souple

Symonds, John Addington

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0486419134 ISBN 13 : 9780486419138

Editeur : Dover Publications Inc., 2002

Synopsis

Book by Symonds John Addington

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur :

When we try to picture to ourselves the intellectual and moral state of Europe in the Middle Ages, some fixed and almost stereotyped ideas immediately suggest themselves. We think of the nations immersed in a gross mental lethargy; passively witnessing the gradual extinction of arts and sciences which Greece and Rome had splendidly inaugurated; allowing libraries and monuments of antique civilisation to crumble into dust; while they trembled under a dull and brooding terror of coming judgment, shrank from natural enjoyment as from deadly sin, or yielded themselves with brutal eagerness to the satisfaction of vulgar appetites. Preoccupation with the other world in this long period weakens man's hold upon the things that make his life desirable. Philosophy is sunk in the slough of ignorant, perversely subtle disputation upon subjects destitute of actuality. Theological fanaticism has extinguished liberal studies and the gropings of the reason after truth in positive experience. Society lies prostrate under the heel of tyrannous orthodoxy. We discern men in masses, aggregations, classes, guilds—everywhere the genus and the species of humanity, rarely and by luminous exception individuals and persons. Universal ideals of Church and Empire clog and confuse the nascent nationalities. Prolonged habits, of extra-mundane contemplation, combined with the decay of real knowledge, volatilise the thoughts and aspirations of the best and wisest into dreamy unrealities, giving a false air of mysticism to love, shrouding art in allegory, reducing the interpretation of texts to an exercise of idle ingenuity, and the study of Nature (in Bestiaries, Lapidaries, and the like) to an insane system of grotesque and pious quibbling. The conception of man's fall and of the incurable badness of this world bears poisonous fruit of cynicism and asceticism, that twofold bitter almond, hidden in the harsh monastic shell. The devil has become God upon this earth, and God's eternal jailer in the next world.

Présentation de l'éditeur :

Wine, Women, and Song, the brief title of mediaeval Latin students' songs translated into English verse with an Essay by J. A. Symonds, is a very welcome addition.

Symonds's versions and comments thereon, first published in 1884, introduce the reader to some of the most genuine manifestations of the Middle Ages. It was a period, as he remarks, when the unnatural prevailed, and an orthodoxy lost in futilities had become tyrannous. But in these songs, preserved in a Munich MS. of the thirteenth century, 'Carmina Burana,' and a Harleian MS., written before 1264, and published in 1841 as 'Latin Poems commonly attributed to Walter Mapes,' we find a spirit of youth and gaiety which exists at all times, and breaks through all conventions and philosophies. The wandering students were called "Goliardi," and their exact history, like that of this term, is obscure. Their Latin differs notoriously from that of previous models, though we rather wonder that Symonds did not refer to the 'Pervigilium Veneris' as a predecessor in the melodic cadences which distinguish their poems.

The modern student's "Gaudeamus igitur" is derived from this mediaeval source. The poems offer considerable difficulties to a translator, which were excellently met by Symonds, a scholar admirably equipped for such a work. His introductory essay—a little too elaborate in style to be pleasing—is yet full of interest, and we have no hesitation in commending the book as one of the most attractive in an excellent series.

— Notes and Queries

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Dover Publications Inc.
• Date d'édition: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0486419134
• ISBN 13: 9780486419138
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 192