The Cambridge Songs (Latin: Carmina Cantabrigiensia) are a collection of medieval Latin poems found on ten leaves (folios 432–441) of the Codex Cantabrigiensis (MS Gg. 5.35), a manuscript held in Cambridge University Library. They are widely regarded as one of the most important surviving anthologies of Latin lyric poetry from the period between the Carolingian era and the thirteenth-century Carmina Burana.
History and Content
The songs as they survive are copies made shortly before or after the Norman Conquest of 1066. They may have been collected by an English scholar while traveling on the continent sometime after the last datable song (1039) and brought back to the church of Saint Augustine at Canterbury, where they were copied and where the codex was long kept. The original manuscript may have been lost in a fire that struck Saint Augustine's in 1168.
The few vernacular portions found in some of the songs are in the North Rheno-Franconian dialect of Old High German, suggesting that the composers came from the north or middle Rhineland, probably the area between Trier, Cologne, and Xanten. Some songs may have originated in France or Italy. While most of the Cambridge Songs survive only in the Cambridge manuscript, a few are duplicated in a manuscript (designated W) from Wolfenbüttel.
Number and Structure
The Cambridge Songs were long thought to number forty-nine, but a missing folio containing twenty-seven more was discovered in Frankfurt and returned to the University Library in 1982. Seven additional songs in a different hand, occurring in the same codex after the first forty-nine, have since been identified as probably part of the collection. The total number of Cambridge Songs is now considered to be eighty-three.
Some of the verses are neumed (notated with early musical signs), and it is assumed that the entire collection was intended to be sung. Four of the original forty-nine are called modi (melodies, namely sequences). The purpose of the collection has not been definitively established; scholars have proposed that it served as a book of instruction in Latin verse, a songbook for wandering minstrels (the clerici vagabundi), or an anthology for private enjoyment. Classicist Keith Sidwell has suggested that their purpose may have been "the repertoire of an entertainer who catered for the imperial court."
Contents
The collection includes a wide variety of genres: panegyrics and dirges, political poems, comic tales, religious and didactic poems, and poetry of spring and love. Several songs directly praise the rulers of the Salian dynasty of the German emperors in the first half of the eleventh century. Individual pieces include De Heinrico, Modus Ottinc, Modus Liebinc, De luscinio (on the nightingale), and Alfrâd, among others.
Scholarly Significance
The Cambridge Songs are considered a key part of the canon of medieval secular songwriting and represent one of the earliest examples of such literature. They are the only major surviving anthology of Latin lyric poems from between the time of Charlemagne and the Battle of Hastings. The collection has been edited and translated in modern scholarship, notably by Karl Strecker (1926), Karl Breul (1915), and Jan Ziolkowski (1994).
