Before I get to the poems, I first want to describe their unusual manuscript setting, since it is very important for an understanding of the poems themselves. The manuscript, entitled clm 17142 (clm=codex Latinus Monacensis, “Latin codex of Munich,” currently housed at the Bavarian State Library in Munich), originated in its current form at the monastery in Schäftlarn south of Munich in the 15th century. The second half of that manuscript, however, had an independent origin in the mid-12th century. This text, in turn, seems to be a transcript of a bundle of documents from even earlier. This bundle represented the original materials, likely belonging to the Liège schoolmaster(s), part of which contains the poetic correspondence between him (or them) and the female students in the Bavarian monastery from around 1106 (Paravicini suggests that it may have belonged to the Regensburg women, 1979, p. 11). The manuscript was first presented to the scholarly world by Wilhelm Wattenbach in 1873. You can find that presentation here.
When earlier works are copied by later scribes, some effort is usually made to organize or present the material in a readable way. That is often one of the main goals of the endeavor. Not so with our later 12th century scribe! The bundle of materials he had before him was evidently a disorganized pile of professor’s notes. Apparently, he started at the top and copied—faithfully and mechanically—straight through to the bottom, often leaving no spaces between individual texts. The result is a “magnificant chaos,” as described by Peter Dronke:
The second half of the manuscript, another seventy leaves, is magnificent chaos. In it fragments of classical and patristic authors, fragments of commentary sacred and profane, absurd etymologies, mythographic notes, proverbs, mnemonics, and host of verses—political, satiric and panegyric, elegiac, didactic, misogynistic —follow each other helter-skelter, often mere shreds, scarcely two lines belonging together. In the midst of all this are scattered fifty love letters [it is agreed now that there are 68, A.S.] and lovers’ messages in verse, a great many of them fragmentary or copied out unintelligibly, some composed by men but more of them by women. Amid all the scholastic debris, a few glowing gems. (Dronke 1968, p. 221)
To illustrate, here is the page of the manuscript (folio 92 recto) where the love poems begin (Contempnens uvas, about 1/3 of the way down the page) after a completely unrelated section of the professor’s notes, having to do with politics (see Romam = “Rome” two lines above):
By way of contrast, here is a page from the Carmina Burana (clm 4660, compiled ca. 1230), which like clm 17142 collects materials from heterogenous sources, but with a very clear effort towards organization and readability:
How does the manuscript state of affairs affect our interpretation of the Regensburg love poems? As Anna Paravicini notes in her edition (1979, p. 7), they were written without literary intention, i.e. they were not intended for an audience or public outside of the monastery community (nor even for use within this community, as was probably the case for the Carmina Burana); they represent authentic correspondence between men and a number of women (as opposed to fictitious correspondence, written by male authors); and they survived by pure chance. This last point is especially important. Most of the female-authored Regensburg poems are amateur efforts of a kind that, while written in great number in the nunneries of the middle ages, as a rule did not survive the male-dominated text-curatorial apparatus. Even for a woman as learned and famous as Heloise, no early writings, which she must have produced in abundance under the tutelage of Abelard during the first phase of their relationship, were deemed fit to be recorded. In the case of our Regensburg school, the complete lack of editorial attention on the part of the 12th-century copyist (or his commissioner) allowed a few precious examples of female writing to slip through by chance!
Now, this authenticity does not necessarily mean that the feelings expressed in the Regensburg love poems were truly, biographically experienced by the participants, nor that the sometimes racy scenarios alluded to in the poems necessarily happened, or were intended or even desired to happen. We must keep in mind that the texts were school exercises and almost certainly a kind of pedagogical role-play. Nonetheless, I believe they do bear witness to real lives of real people in a meaningful way. We might think of them as lived fictions, in which the participants used their daily experiences, thoughts, and imaginings as “poetic material” for their school exercises.
Again, this is most important in the case of the female-authored poems. They give us real insight into imagined realities of a number of “normal” women from the southern German nobility around the turn of the 11th century. (Even though the context is a nunnery, many, if not most of its inhabitants would end up returning to secular life in the households or courts of their families or future spouses).
Ok, now on to the poems!
Sagemære 