Revisiting the Codex Buranus: Contents, Contexts, Compositions ed. by Tristan E. Franklinos and Henry Hope

Abstract

Reviewed by: Revisiting the Codex Buranus: Contents, Contexts, Compositions ed. by Tristan E. Franklinos and Henry Hope Joseph W. Mason Tristan E. Franklinos and Henry Hope, eds. Revisiting the Codex Buranus: Contents, Contexts, Compositions. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music 21. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2020. xv, 462 pp., 32 color ills. £60. ISBN: 9781783273799. One of the most famous manuscripts and songbooks from the Middle Ages, the Codex Buranus (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 4660) has fascinated and divided scholars for over a century. Considered in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to be the creations of wandering poets and defrocked clerics, the codex’s contents are today understood to be the product of an intellectual clerical milieu somewhere in southern Austria. The texts span an extraordinary range, covering numerous topics: love, church politics, morality and religious devotion, sexual violence, drinking and gambling. These texts are in Latin but in several cases have German texts appended, and in a handful of cases have interpolations in Romance languages [End Page 402] or Greek. Most of the items are songs, for which music notation (not on a stave and unheightened) is sometimes provided; other items include plays and miniatures. Together, these varied contents point to the creation and performance of poetry in an intellectual community whose rich and kaleidoscopic knowledge of medieval lyric poetry, classical verse, liturgy, and patristics is demonstrated in the intertextual richness on display throughout the codex. Revisiting the Codex Buranus examines the manuscript from numerous perspectives and gathers contributions by scholars from a range of disciplines. As the editors of this collection of essays, Tristan E. Franklinos and Henry Hope, point out, such interdisciplinary expertise is essential when dealing with a manuscript whose contents are so varied, and which does not fit neatly into the purview of any single modern discipline (5). The collection’s aims, as stated by the editors, are threefold: first, to document and summarize scholarly study of the Codex Buranus; second, to engage afresh with debates about the manuscript from the perspectives of different disciplines; and third, “to encourage fresh modes of engagement with its contents, its contexts, and its composition” (6). These aims are achieved in different ways, with some essays focused more on assessing old debates, whereas others offer new readings. While readers of this journal might be disappointed not to find any significant new contributions from codicologists or philologists, the volume nevertheless brings many fresh perspectives to the literary and musical contents of the codex. Approximately half of the volume is dedicated to the Latin poetry of the codex, appropriately so, since most of the contents are Latin. Carmen Cardelle de Hartmann explores the Latin items that parody the Bible and liturgy, often with a critical moral intent, such as the famous Gamblers’ Mass; other items, such as parodies of love songs, have a less clear purpose, and inter-textual readings of them are consequently more difficult. Cardelle de Hart-mann also theorizes “parodic neighbourhoods” (61), small groups of songs that, when read against each other, parody one another. Satire in the Codex Buranus is discussed by David A. Traill, who notes three principal subjects of satirical treatment: the poets themselves, clerics and monks, and confession. Albrecht Classen examines the combination and intersections of learned and erotic discourses in the Latin poetry, asking what (sometimes graphic) [End Page 403] sexual poetry meant to clerical readers and listeners: he concludes that these were songs by male poets intended for a male audience. The thematization of peasants and peasant life in the Latin poetry is taken up by the late Peter Godman, whose chapter shows that the songs’ attitudes toward the lower classes, and especially lower-class women, is inflected by the clerical worldview of the songs’ authors. Two chapters draw on these themes, and more, by looking at individual cases. Jonathan Seelye Martin presents a sensitive reading of Ich was ein kint so wol getân (CB 185), a song which some scholars have viewed as a celebration of rape. Instead, the chapter argues that we might view the song as a didactic piece that teaches medieval women about the dangers that extramarital sex posed to a woman’s reputation. Franklinos presents...