Songs of the Wandering Scholars

This volume reprints Waddell's 1927 study The Wandering Scholars, intercut with her English versions of medieval Latin lyrics and two extracts from her novel about Peter Abelard. The prose chapters follow the clerks and goliards from late antiquity through the twelfth century: monastic schools, the revival of learning, Paris and Orleans, the Archpoet, and the Ordo Vagorum. The facing Latin songs treat spring, drink, love, satire of churchmen, and the scholar's road. There is no single plot. The book is a history of a literary culture joined to a selection of its poems, not a biography of one medieval author.

Bound in brown-green cloth with a cover frieze of Monotype ornaments in purple and gold. Pale brown endleaves. Lilac slipcase.