Spunti di racconto in alcuni «Carmina Cantabrigiensia»

Abstract

The «Cambridge Songs» («Carmina Cantabrigiensia») are a collection of short Latin poems which we find in the lone manuscript Gg. 35 (Ca), housed in the Cambridge University Library. The manuscript itself was produced at the monastery of St. Augustine in Canterbury, in the middle of the XIth century, just before the Norman invasion of England. 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. We can extricate praise poetry for kings and bishops, erotic verses, nature poems, and other sort of writing less easily classified. 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 – which follows a former essay published on this same revue – deals on the elements of narration and the stories we can find in some «Cambridge Songs», not specifically in narrative poems, but in religious and political poems. This paper offers, then, a strict analysis of five «Cambridge Songs»: 4 (Grates usiae), 5 (Inclito celorum), 77 (Tur-gens in terra Lucifer ille), 82 (David, vates Dei, filius Isaï), 11 (Magnus cesar Otto). In conclusion, we can affirm that the taste and the interest for the narration and the tale are surely two of the most im-portant peculiarities of the «Cambridge Songs».