Wine, Women, and Song | Page 2

evils and
to utilise the goods of life, seem everywhere deficient. Men are
obstinate in misconception of their proper aims, wasting their energies
upon shadows instead of holding fast by realities, waiting for a future
whereof they know nothing, in lieu of mastering and economising the
present. The largest and most serious undertakings of united Europe in
this period--the Crusades--are based upon a radical mistake. "Why seek
ye the living among the dead? Behold, He is not here, but risen!" With
these words ringing in their ears, the nations flock to Palestine and pour
their blood forth for an empty sepulchre. The one Emperor who attains
the object of Christendom by rational means is excommunicated for his
success. Frederick II. returns from the Holy Land a ruined man because
he made a compact useful to his Christian subjects with the Chief of
Islam.
II.
Such are some of the stereotyped ideas which crowd our mind when we
reflect upon the Middle Ages. They are certainly one-sided. Drawn for
the most part from the study of monastic literature, exaggerated by that
reaction against medievalism which the Renaissance initiated, they
must be regarded as inadequate to represent the whole truth. At no one
period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the close of the
thirteenth century was the mental atmosphere of Europe so unnaturally
clouded. Yet there is sufficient substance in them to justify their
formulation. The earlier Middle Ages did, in fact, extinguish antique
civility. The later Middle Ages did create, to use a phrase of Michelet,

an army of dunces for the maintenance of orthodoxy. The intellect and
the conscience became used to moving paralytically among visions,
dreams, and mystic terrors, weighed down with torpor, abusing virile
faculties for the suppression of truth and the perpetuation of revered
error.
It is, therefore, with a sense of surprise, with something like a shock to
preconceived opinions, that we first become acquainted with the
medieval literature which it is my object in the present treatise to make
better known to English readers. That so bold, so fresh, so natural, so
pagan a view of human life as the Latin songs of the Wandering
Students exhibit, should have found clear and artistic utterance in the
epoch of the Crusades, is indeed enough to bid us pause and reconsider
the justice of our stereotyped ideas about that period. This literature
makes it manifest that the ineradicable appetites and natural instincts of
men and women were no less vigorous in fact, though less articulate
and self-assertive, than they had been in the age of Greece and Rome,
and than they afterwards displayed themselves in what is known as the
Renaissance.
With something of the same kind we have long been familiar in the
Troubadour poetry of Provence. But Provençal literature has a strong
chivalrous tincture, and every one is aware with what relentless fury the
civilisation which produced it was stamped out by the Church. The
literature of the Wandering Students, on the other hand, owes nothing
to chivalry, and emanates from a class which formed a subordinate part
of the ecclesiastical militia. It is almost vulgar in its presentment of
common human impulses; it bears the mark of the proletariate, though
adorned with flourishes betokening the neighbourhood of Church and
University.
III.
Much has recently been written upon the subject of an abortive
Renaissance within the Middle Ages. The centre of it was France, and
its period of brilliancy may be roughly defined as the middle and end of
the twelfth century. Much, again, has been said about the religious
movement in England, which spread to Eastern Europe, and anticipated

the Reformation by two centuries before the date of Luther. The songs
of the Wandering Students, composed for the most part in the twelfth
century, illustrate both of these early efforts after self-emancipation.
Uttering the unrestrained emotions of men attached by a slender tie to
the dominant clerical class and diffused over all countries, they bring us
face to face with a body of opinion which finds in studied chronicle or
laboured dissertation of the period no echo. On the one side, they
express that delight in life and physical enjoyment which was a main
characteristic of the Renaissance; on the other, they proclaim that revolt
against the corruption of Papal Rome which was the motive-force of
the Reformation.
Our knowledge of this poetry is derived from two chief sources. One is
a MS. of the thirteenth century, which was long preserved in the
monastery of Benedictbeuern in Upper Bavaria, and is now at Munich.
Richly illuminated with rare and curious illustrations of contemporary
manners, it seems to have been compiled for the use of some
ecclesiastical prince. This fine codex was edited in 1847 at Stuttgart.
The title of the publication is Carmina