The Love Songs Of The Carmina Burana

Originally published in 1987, this book contains the Love Sgons of the Carmina Burana, alongisde a select bibliography and textual notes. The collection of poems now known as the Carmina was given its name by Schmeller in 1847, and the Carmina Burana comprises the best and most representative products of goliardism and remains the definitive manifestation of the goliardic movement.

This is a selection from the 13the century collection of secular latin poems. Some are serious (eg Crusade poems) but the majority are light, including many love poems. A number of items from the Carmina are well known as text for Carl Orff's 'Scenic Cantata'.

The love song is timeless. From its beginnings, it has been shaped by bohemians and renegades, slaves and oppressed minorities, prostitutes, immigrants and other excluded groups. But what do we really know about the origins of these intimate expressions of the heart? And how have our changing perceptions about topics such as sexuality and gender roles changed our attitudes towards these songs? In Love Songs: The Hidden History, Ted Gioia uncovers the unexplored story of the love song for the first time. Drawing on two decades of research, Gioia presents the full range of love songs, from the fertility rites of ancient cultures to the sexualized YouTube videos of the present day. The book traces the battles over each new insurgency in the music of love--whether spurred by wandering scholars of medieval days or by four lads from Liverpool in more recent times. In these pages, Gioia reveals that the tenderest music has, in different eras, driven many of the most heated cultural conflicts, and how the humble love song has played a key role in expanding the sphere of individualism and personal autonomy in societies around the world. Gioia forefronts the conflicts, controversies, and the battles over censorship and suppression spurred by such music, revealing the outsiders and marginalized groups that have played a decisive role in shaping our songs of romance and courtship, and the ways their innovations have led to reprisals and strife. And he describes the surprising paths by which the love song has triumphed over these obstacles, and emerged as the dominant form of musical expression in modern society.

Carl Orff's 24 selections from 200 poems of the Carmina Burana celebrate the universal range of human emotion and experience: passion, longing, exuberance, humor, rebellion, ennui, resignation. Now tender, now tragic; secular yet reverent; the poems of the carmina touch the chords of our purest and darkest spirituality. An excellent resource for the student, the performer, the audience and the general reader, this dual language edition provides two moving translations from the original Latin, informative essays, and facing vocabulary. This text will enrich understanding and heighten appreciation of these beloved medieval poems.

To help place the selections within their wider historical, social, and political contexts, Pucci has written extensive introductory essays for each of the new edition's five parts. Headnotes to individual selections have been recast as interpretive essays, and the original bibliographic paragraphs have been expanded. Reprinted from the best modern editions, the selections have been extensively glossed with grammatical notes geared toward students of classical Latin who may be reading medieval Latin for the first time.

Contributors: Anne J. Duggan, Peter Dronke, Cyril Edwards, Julia Walworth

Despite popular opinions of the ‘dark Middle Ages’ and a ‘gloomy early modern age,’ many people laughed, smiled, giggled, chuckled, entertained and ridiculed each other. This volume demonstrates how important laughter had been at times and how diverse the situations proved to be in which people laughed, and this from late antiquity to the eighteenth century. The contributions examine a wide gamut of significant cases of laughter in literary texts, historical documents, and art works where laughter determined the relationship among people. In fact, laughter emerges as a kaleidoscopic phenomenon reflecting divine joy, bitter hatred and contempt, satirical perspectives and parodic intentions. In some examples protagonists laughed out of sheer happiness and delight, in others because they felt anxiety and insecurity. It is much more difficult to detect premodern sculptures of laughing figures, but they also existed. Laughter reflected a variety of concerns, interests, and intentions, and the collective approach in this volume to laughter in the past opens many new windows to the history of mentality, social and religious conditions, gender relationships, and power structures.