Education of Nuns, Feast of Fools, Letters of Love

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 Châtillon and Peter
of Blois, the canonist.