Singing Cato: Poetic Grammar and Moral Citation in Medieval Latin Song

Abstract

Abstract Widely acknowledged as emerging from clerical, monastic, and pedagogical communities, the poetry of medieval Latin song was informed by the vocabulary, grammar, and rhetoric emanating from these spheres of knowledge and practice. I argue for the specific manifestation of these spheres through grammatical citation, a practice in which noun and verb paradigms poetically shape Latin songs. Specifically, grammatical paradigms structure select songs by declining or conjugating strophic incipits systematically throughout the poem. Grammatical citationality in Latin songs, whose poetry otherwise chiefly explores festive, religious topics, serves as a signal of their implicitly disciplinary and didactic function. With grammar operating as an emblem of correct, moral behaviour, these devotional songs exemplified morally and spiritually upright Christian behaviour for singers and listeners. A capstone to this sung didacticism is the thirteenth-century Cum animadverterem, a conductus uniquely linking grammatical citation with a quotation from Cato’s Distichs, a famed medieval textbook of moral learning.