WINE, WOMEN, AND SONG. - The Language Realm

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[5] 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 self­assertive, 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[6] 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 self­emancipation. 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 motive­force
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