This volume presents two complementary medieval anthologies containing lyrics by two outstanding Latin poets of the second half of the twelfth century. The poet Peter of Blois was proclaimed by a contemporary of his to be a master composer of rhythmic verse. Peter’s secular love-lyrics gathered in the Arundel manuscript give substance to that claim. Written with a technical virtuosity that rivals the metrical display of Horatian lyric, the poems give eloquent and learned expression to the cult of secular love that emerged in the twelfth ­century.

The collection is further augmented by verse as varied as Christmas poems and satires on the venality of the Roman Curia and immoral bishops, including a famous lament about church corruption by Walther of Châtillon.

The cleric Hugh Primas won recognition and fame for compositions in which he reflects upon his experiences, good and bad, while traveling around the cities of northern France (such as the important sees of Rheims and Sens) in search of patronage. Artistic in conception and execution, the poems are memorable for the witty and often acerbic tone with which Primas engages the holders of ecclesiastical power.

The Cambridge Songs, from the Latin Carmina Cantabrigiensia, is the most important anthology of songs from before the thirteenth-century Carmina Burana. It offers the only major surviving anthology of Latin lyric poems from between Charlemagne and the Battle of Hastings. It contains panegyrics and dirges, political poems, comic tales, religious and didactic poems, and poetry of spring and love. Was it a school book for students, or a songbook for the use of professional entertainers? The greatest certainty is that the poems were composed in the learned language, and that they were associated with song. The collection is like the contents of an eleventh-century jukebox or playlist of top hits from more than three centuries.

This edition and translation comprises a substantial introduction, the Latin texts and English prose in carefully matched presentation, and extensive commentary, along with appendices, list of works cited, and indices.