A Cosmos of Desire: The Medieval Latin Erotic Lyric in English Manuscripts (Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Civilization)

Rigg is in a position sixty six Erotic Lyrics in Early English Manuscripts sixty seven to record, in addition to Reginald, part a dozen Anglo-Latin poets who have been approximately contemporaneous with Marbod and Baudri. lots of the poetry that survives from the interval is spiritual or political-saints' lives, epitaphs, epigrams, his- torical verse-most of this in hexameter or elegiac couplets, usually rhymed. 2 still, a really few explicitly Ovidian erotic poems do exist which may be of insular foundation and appear to belong to this early stratum of erotic verse. They look in one manuscript given over mostly to the poetry of Marbod and Hildebert, British Library extra 24199 (fig. 2). three even though by no means rubri- cated, it's a substantial, good-looking, readable folio textual content, most probably a manufactured from the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds and probably written within the abbey scriptorium overdue within the reign of Abbot Anselm ( 1121-48), a guy of broad schooling and large continental connections. Anselm used to be mostly answerable for the swift devel- opment of the abbey's library within the years sooner than 1150 and will theoretically were the writer of a few of the poems distinctive to the gathering. four Addi- tional 24199 is likely one of the oldest surviving insular collections of the poetry of Marbod and Hildebert, written, that's, inside twenty years of the latter's demise. five The nameless Latin poetry the manuscript comprises is all incredibly "old-style" in comparison to later twelfth-century verse, just like the poetry of Marbod and Hildebert this kind of classicizing (often leonine) verse that went out of model good sooner than the center of the 12th century. 6 aside from the poetry of the eleventh-century Canterbury songbook, which we'll talk about on the finish of this bankruptcy for its handful of rhythmic erotic lyrics, the poems within the Bury manuscript are the oldest surviving examples of insular Latin erotica. What we discover right here displays the extra formal line of improvement that existed alongside- aspect the fewer classical kind of erotic poetry represented within the Canterbury col- lection. As with the Canterbury manuscript, a lot of the contents of Addi- tional 24199 is continental, and it really is challenging to understand if unattributed works are insular or now not. The constitution of the manuscript itself offers us transparent feel of simply how indebted such classicizing verse was once to the paintings of the poets of northern France. because it is sure this day, the manuscript has in its first thirty-eight folios a tenth-century replica of Prudentius's Psychomachia; this can be (fols. 39-89) by means of the massive, twelfth-century choice of poetry of curiosity to us. Folios 39-89 fall into 4 usual divisions that most likely replicate the resource fabric from which the scribe constructed the manuscript: (i) from folios 39 to fifty six an unin- terrupted sequence of thirty-three poems attributed to Hildebert;7 (2) from folios fifty six to sixty eight an uninterrupted sequence of seventeen poems attributed to Marbod;8 (3) from folios sixty eight to eight ia number of fifty-four poems, 5 caused by Marbod, to Hildebert (though A.