Due «Carmina Cantabrigiensia» politico-encomiastici

Abstract

The Cambridge Songs (Carmina Cantabrigiensia) are a collection of short Latin poems which we find in the lone manuscript Gg. 35 (Ca), produced at the monastery of St. Augustine in Canterbury in the middle of the XIth century and currently housed in the Cambridge University Library. The best part of the poems of the Cambridge Songs probably derives from Germany and belongs to a period between IXth and XIth centuries. The 84 poems of the collection display a diversity of form, content and function. The most recent classification divides the content of the Cambridge Songs in eight typologies: religious, narrative, political, amatoria, didactic, memorial, vernalia, moral poems, to which we may add the excerpta of Boethius, Vergil, Horace, Statius and Venantius Fortunatus. This paper deals on two political poems of the Cambridge Songs: n. 3 (Voces laudis humanae) was composed for the coronation of king Conradus II (Rome, 26 march 1027); n. 16 (O rex regum, qui solus in evum) was written in the occasion of the coronation of his son, Henry III king of Bourgogne (Aachen, 14 april 1028). Both poems are presented and analyzed with particular attention to the elements of form, language and style; they display also strict similarities in the structure and the conception of kingship.