GOLIARDS — Name given to those “clerics” who, in the 12th–13th centuries, drawn to university seats by the fame of this or that master, wandered from city to city, often joining in the noisy revels of students despite their ecclesiastical status.
The etymology of the name is uncertain: some connect it with Goliath, a symbolic epithet applied to one or more of these clerics (Abelard himself was so called by his enemies), which later became the prototype of a large group; others derive it from gula, to signify the tendency to gluttony in these individuals. The second explanation is in absolute terms less likely than the first, but it is not excluded that a false etymology contributed to fixing the use of the name once and for all. The Goliards have often been identified with the clerici vagantes of medieval tradition, late epigones—in a different milieu—of the Circumcellions spoken of by St Augustine (Enarr. in Ps. 132, 3) and the wandering monks (semper vagi et numquam stabiles et propriis voluntatibus et gulae inlecebris servientes) censured by the Benedictine Rule (ch. 1) and dwelt upon at length in the Regula Magistri; in reality they constitute a particular category: restless spirits who have squandered their prebend or been deprived of it by disciplinary measures, censured for their conduct by numerous conciliar decrees and sometimes even by direct papal disposition. The Goliards live under the protection of this or that lord who is amused by their antics, or seek hospitality from students and professors as learned minstrels of a world that descends spiritually from feudal courts and anticipates the environment of Boccaccio’s Decameron.
To them is attributed the authorship of a nucleus of poetic compositions in Latin, joyous and licentious in both theme and expression, preserved in a large number of manuscripts, each of which contains a more or less extensive collection (the largest being that of the so-called Carmina Burana, cod. Clm. 4660 of the Bavarian State Library in Munich). Goliardic poetry originates in French soil, spreads to England and Germany, and then reaches Italy, where, however, it does not flourish as vigorously as in the countries beyond the Alps. It is rhythmic poetry, often rhymed, and treats, not without monotony, certain conventional subjects (the greed of the high clergy, the avarice of the Roman Curia, the decadence of society, the pleasures of wine and love) in a form that is sometimes satirical, sometimes parodic, always pervaded by a burning sensuality, rarely illuminated by a tremor of emotion.
There are precedents, especially in the Merovingian age (the so-called Joca monachorum, the Cena Cypriani, the Banquet and the love songs of the Cambridge Songbook), but in Goliardic poetry the influence of the schools is more evident, the erudite origin that manifests itself in the elegance of the Latin, in Virgilian and even more Ovidian reminiscences, the doctrinal substratum that neither the scant popular inflections nor the promiscuous use, in essentially Latin compositions, of German or Old French verses can conceal. Above all, there is here an added tone of rebellion, an attitude of “bohemianism,” a conscious boldness that lays bare a most interesting side of that society whose other aspects are revealed by mystical literature and courtly poetry. Modern criticism has succeeded in giving historical contours to some authors of these compositions: Hugh of Orléans, known as “the Primate,” flourishing around the mid-12th century; the so-called “Archpoet,” from the Rhineland, who lived between 1130 and 1180; Serlo of Wilton, English, abbot in 1173; Walter of Lille, who reached the threshold of the 13th century; Philip the Chancellor of Notre-Dame, who held that office between 1217 and 1219, and others of lesser note, including the Italian Morando of Padua. But the majority remain veiled in anonymity, just as various problems connected with Goliardic poetry remain unsolved: among others, whether all Goliards were authors of verse or merely minstrels of this poetic genre, and whether ecclesiastical status was in fact common to all Goliards (clericus was sometimes used in the Middle Ages as a simple synonym for “learned,” “educated”).
Romantic criticism nurtured an understandable but unfounded enthusiasm for Goliardic poetry: in reality it has value chiefly as a document; while from the poetic standpoint it offers us only a few flashes of light amid a dark tangle of venomous acrimony and base sensuality.