Wine, Women, and Song; Medieval Latin Students Songs now First Translated into English Verse
Portland, Maine: Thomas B. Mosher, 1899. Limited edition. Small quarto (7 1/2 inches tall), decorated white wrappers folded over card, spine and front wrapper titled in red-and-black, ribbon marker, uncut. About-Fine. Item #1549
"THE FIRST LITERARY EFFORT TO RESTORE THE MORAL ATTITUDE OF ANTIQUITY WHICH HAD BEEN DISPLACED BY MEDIEVAL CHRISTIANITY"
Handsome Mosher edition of Wine, Women, and Song—the Verse of the Wandering Students of the Middle Ages, translated from the original Latin by John Addington Symonds. One of 725 copies printed on Van Gelder hand-made paper and published by Thomas B. Mosher. Laid-in is a printed publisher's slip crediting Charles Ricketts for the wood-engraved border of violets (first used in Fifty Songs by Thomas Campion, 1896) on the spine and front wrapper. A bright, fresh copy.
Mostly students and seminarians, the medieval Goliards were often the younger sons of wealthy families driven, by the laws of primogeniture, into the service of the Church. Symonds, in a lengthy introduction (in XIII parts), seeks to dispel our preconceptions about the vigor of the medieval spirit. Working primarily from the Carmina Burana (the medieval manuscript of Latin verses), Symonds divides the songs of the Goliardi into two broad classes: satires of the ecclesiastical world and the Roman Court, and more interestingly, "poems on the themes of vagabond existence, the truant life of these capricious students; on springtime and its rural pleasure; on love in many phases and for divers kinds of women; lastly on wine and on the dice-box."
The Wandering Students of the twelfth century, Symonds concludes, "seem to me noteworthy as the first unmistakable sign of a change in modern Europe which was inevitable and predestined, as the first literary effort to restore the moral attitude of antiquity which had been displaced by medieval Christianity." First published in 1884—while Symonds was completing his multi-volume work, Renaissance in Italy (1875–86)—this edition of Wine, Women, and Song was printed several years after Symonds died in Rome (at age 52). Includes the author's original Dedication, to Robert Louis Stevenson: "To you, in memory of past symposia, when wit (your wit) flowed freer than our old Forzato, I dedicate this little book, my pasttime through three anxious months. Yours, John Addington Symonds / Villa Emily, San Remo, May 1884." The text is supplemented with 1. an Appendix: Note on the "Ordo Vagorum" and the "Archipoeta," 2. a short Bibliography: Books on Goliardic Literature, and 3. a Table of Songs with titles in English & Latin.
Price: $75.00