The Carmina Burana is a famous collection of love
songs, religious songs, drinking songs, political
songs, gambling songs, and also of moral songs
and religious drama, mostly written in Latin, but
to some extent also in a mixture of Latin and Middle High German (called “macaronic poetry”).
This collection was created sometime in the early
13th century and copied down in a manuscript,
today housed in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek
München (Bavarian State Library of Munich; MS.
Clm 4660 and Clm 4660a [single leaves that had
been separated from the original manuscript at
some time]). We do not know for sure where this
collection was originally put together since the
manuscript itself does not provide us with any specific clues, but the Carmina Burana were certainly
copied in a south German or, more likely, Austrian
convent, such as in Seckau (near Graz, Styria),
Murnau (southern Bavaria), or Neustift/Brixen
(south Tyrol). The main section, consisting of 228
songs, was systematically put together by a group
of scribes, and later scribes added a group of another 26 songs. Since a few songs in this collection
can be dated more precisely (NEIDHART’s song CB
168 [ca. 1217–19] and WALTHER VON DER VOGELWEIDE’s “Palästinalied” [ca. 1220–25]), and since
we can draw solid conclusions from paleographical, art-historical evidence—the manuscript is
richly illustrated—and musicological evidence, it
seems most reasonable to date the Carmina Burana at ca. 1230.
Following the sweeping secularization process
in which most convents were dissolved in 1803, the
manuscript was transferred from the Benedictine
Abbey of Benediktbeuern near Bad Tölz (southern
Bavaria) to the State Library in Munich. The collection, however, kept the name Carmina Burana, or
“Songs from Benediktbeuern,” and the manuscript
itself is known today as Codex Buranus. Because
Benediktbeuern had always entertained close cultural and economic contacts with southern Tyrol,
and keeping in mind the fairly open-minded intellectual milieu at the Augustinian convent of
Neustift/Brixen, recent scholarship has increasingly
argued that the Carmina Burana were copied there.
The redactor(s) obviously relied on older song
collections and had them copied either entirely or
in parts. Thematically the Carmina Burana offer a
wide range of topics, both religious and secular:
greed and simony, jealousy, fortune, virtues, religious conversion, sermons for various groups of
clergy, criticism of the Holy See in Rome, pilgrimage to the Holy Land, erotic love, unconventional
and perverse forms of love (including homosexuality, adultery, rape, and prostitution), love
laments, political, ethical, and moral laments, including laments about undesired pregnancy, about
approaching death, the poverty of a student, and
even the parodic lament by an already fried swan
about its own death (CB 130). Moreover, there are
songs about the evils at the court, wine, gambling,
drinking, gluttony, and the other seven deadly sins,
and about the life of goliards (see GOLIARDIC VERSE).
Many times the poets grotesquely parodied religious genres. Some of the best-known poems such
as “Estuans intrinsecus” resort to the traditional
confession of a churchgoer, but in reality the songs
offer nothing but frank acknowledgments of
earthly delight in pleasure and sensuality. Not surprisingly, a number of songs prove to be openly
obscene, but most of them display an outstanding
poetic skill in the employment of rhetorically sophisticated language and music (43 of the poems
are accompanied by lineless neumes, that is, notation systems for the general melody, but not for the
intervals and the rhythm). The poets were obviously members of a university-trained group of
people, both students and teachers, such as Gautier
de Châtillon, Giraldus of Bari, Hugo Primas of Orleans, Gottfried of Saint Victor, the ARCHPOET,
Peter of Blois, Philipp the Chancellor, and Marner,
but the majority of songs have come down to us
anonymously. The poets not only display a remarkable disrespect of the church and its sacred
texts, they also proudly demonstrate their thorough familiarity with classical Roman literature.
Although there are many allusions to the life of
minstrels and poor students, most songs seem to
have been composed by well-established poets,
probably in leading positions at universities and
cathedral schools, not afraid of satirizing many of
the holiest institutions and ideals of the Catholic
Church, freely playing with the cruder human instincts and desires—which would explain the general anonymity of the poets. These highly liberal
songs, however, are framed by very serious moralethical songs and by Christian dramas. One of the
earliest songs, “Postquam nobilitas seruilia cepit
amare” (CB 7), deserves closer examination here.
The poet criticizes the decline of the aristocracy
that has assumed crude and boorish behavior. Nobility without inner virtues is worth nothing, and
man’s true nobility rests in his mind and in his
being an image of God: “Nobilitas hominis mens et
deitatis imago” (3, 1). The poet defines this nobility
even further, mentioning the ability to control
one’s temper, the willingness to help those in need,
the understanding and acceptance of the limits for
man set up by nature, and the absence of fear of
anything in this world, except for fear of one’s own
moral decrepitude. True nobility is characterized
by virtues, whereas the person who is lacking in
virtues is a degenerate being: “Nobilis est ille, quem
uirtus nobilitauit, / Degener est ille, quem uirtus
nulla beauit” (4, 1–2).
Many of the songs are contrafactures, that is,
they are using the melody of other songs for their
own purposes. The individual songs have often
come down to us in scores of other manuscripts (a
total of 502 at the latest count), and only a few of the
songs are unique to the Codex Buranus. The
Carmina Burana have always enjoyed great respect
among medievalists, but they gained true popularity among the wider audience only when the German composer Carl Orff (1895–1982), in 1937, set
to his own music 25 songs selected from this collection in the form of a scenic oratorio or cantata, originally accompanied with ballet and divided into the
three themes of Spring, Tavern Life, and Love.
Bibliography
Carmina Burana. Edited by Alfons Hilka and Otto
Schumann. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1930–1970.
Lehtonen, Tuomas M. S. Fortuna, Money, and the
Sublunar World: Twelfth-Century Ethical Poetics
and the Satirical Poetry of the Carmina Burana.
Helsinki: Finnish Historical Society, 1995.
Peterson, Jeffrey. “Writing Flowers: Figuration and
the Feminine in Carmina Burana 177,” Exemplaria
6 (1994): 1–34.
Sayce, Olive. Plurilingualism in the Carmina Burana:
A Study of the Linguistic and Literary Influences on
the Codex. Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1992.
Walsh, P. G., ed. and trans. Love Lyrics from the
Carmina Burana. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1993.
Albrecht Classen