Bibliotheca Augustana - Carmina Burana ca. 1230

The Archpoet and Medieval Culture

Archpoet is the name given to an anonymous 12th century author of ten medieval Latin poems. This monograph explores their historical and cultural context

The Archpoet and Medieval Culture
by Peter Godman
Oxford University Press 2014
ISBN-10: 0198719221
ISBN-13: 978-0198719229

ABSTRACT:

The arch poet by Godman coverThe Archpoet (c. 1130 – c. 1165) or Archipoeta (in Latin and German) is the name given to an anonymous 12th century author of ten medieval Latin poems, the most famous being his “Confession” found in the Carmina Burana manuscript.

This is the first monograph to be published about one of the most famous and least understood authors of the Latin Middle Ages. We know him by the pseudonym of Archpoet. Setting the Archpoet’s world and works in their historical contexts, Peter Godman argues that they provide insight into a brilliant counter-culture of medieval Germany. Its subtlest exponent did not indulge in literary play but refashioned the political, social, and religious roles available to a twelfth-century thinker in order to create, for himself and his patron, an identity alternative to the norms of clerical conformity prevalent elsewhere in Europe.

At a time when Germans were being decried as backward barbarians, he produced a manifesto of intellectual heterodoxy which wittily challenged the truth-claims made by humourless moralists. The Archpoet and Medieval Culture reconsiders the categories in which the literature of the Middle Ages is interpreted and suggests a less literal mode of reading the sources to historians.

CONTENT:

I: Prelude in the Pub
II: The Ruin of the World
III: Culture and Conflict in the Chancery
IV: Transmontane Identity
V: ‘A Depraved Man Sowing Tares’
VI: The Anti-Actor
VII: The Reluctant Encomiast
VIII: The Penitent at Pavia
IX: The Preacher of Sin
X: The Roving Prophet
XI: The Culture of the Barbarians
XIII:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Peter Godman, professor at the University of La Sapienza in Rome, is a cultural historian of the Middle Ages and Renaissance with interests in the Latin tradition.

FEATURED PHOTO:

The illustration of the Wheel of Fortune stems from the manuscripts of Carmina Burana in the collection of Bibliotheca Augustana in Bayern

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