The Cambridge Songs (Carmina Cantabrigiensia), ed. and translated by Jan M. Ziolkowski. Cambridge, MA: Department of the Classics, Harvard University, 1994, 1998; The President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2020, 472 pp., 10 ill.

Abstract

Abstract: This important eleventh-century collection of Latin poetry antecedes a more famous anthology, the thirteenth-century Carmina Burana (“Songs from Benediktbeuern”). This Cambridge group includes a wide variety of contents – panegyrics, dirges, political, religious, and didactic lyrics, comic tales, as well as poems of spring and of love. Like a medieval “top hits,” this varied assemblage could easily have been a student’s or poet’s class book or a professional entertainer’s songbook.