GOLIARDS. - Name given to those "clerici" who in the 12th-13th centuries, drawn to the university seats by the fame of this or that master, wandered from city to city, often joining in the noisy orgies of the students, despite their ecclesiastical state.
The etymology of the name is uncertain: according to some it is connected to Galia, an appellation symbolically attributed to one or more of these clerics (Abelard himself was so called by his enemies), which later became the prototype of a numerous host; according to others to gula, to signify the tendency to gluttony in these individuals. The second explanation appears on the whole less probable than the first, but it is not excluded that a false etymology contributed to definitively fixing the use of the name. The goliards have often been identified with the clerici vagantes of medieval tradition, late epigones - in a different environment - of the circumcelliones of whom St. Augustine speaks (Enarr. in Ps. 132, 3) and of the wandering monks (semper vagi et numquam stabiles et propriis voluntatibus et gulae inlecebris servientes) to whom the Benedictine Rule alludes (ch. 1) and on whom the Regula Magistri dwells at length; in reality they constitute a particular category of them: restless spirits who have squandered their prebend or have been deprived of it by disciplinary measure, struck for their conduct by numerous conciliar decrees and at times also by direct disposition of the pontiff, the goliards live under the protection of this or that lord who is pleased by their antics, or seeking hospitality among students and professors, as erudite jesters of a world that descends spiritually from the feudal courts and preludes to the environment of Boccaccio's Decameron.
To them is attributed the authorship of a nucleus of poetic compositions in Latin, of a playful and licentious character both in theme and expression, handed down in a numerous series of codices, each of which preserves a more or less extensive anthology (the most ample being that of the so-called *Carmina Burana**, cod. Clm. 4660 of the State Library of Munich). Goliardic poetry has its origin on French soil, spreads to England and Germany, and then reaches Italy as well, where however it does not have so flourishing a life as in the countries beyond the Alps. It is rhythmic poetry, often also rhymed, and treats, not without monotony, certain conventional subjects (unworthiness of the high clergy, greed of the Roman Curia, decadence of society, voluptuousness of wine and love), in a form now satirical now parodic, always pervaded by an intense sensuality, rarely illuminated by a thrill of emotion.
Precedents are not lacking, 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 school 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 scanty popular turns nor the promiscuous use, in essentially Latin compositions, of verses in German or in French d'oil manage to conceal. Above all, then, there is here in addition a tone of rebellion, an attitude of "scapigliatura", a conscious unscrupulousness that lays bare a very interesting side of that society of which mystical literature and courtly poetry reveal other aspects. Modern criticism has succeeded in giving historical contours to some authors of these compositions: Hugh of Orléans, known as "the Primate", flourishing around the middle of the 12th century; the so-called "Archpoet", a native of the Rhineland, who lived between c. 1130 and 1180; Serlo of Wilton, English, abbot in 1173; Walter of Lille, who touches the threshold of the 13th century; Philip "cancellarius" of Notre-Dame, who held that office between 1217 and 1219, and other minor ones, among them the Italian Morando da Padova. But the majority remain broken the veils of anonymity, just as various problems connected with goliardic poetry remain still unresolved: among others whether all the goliards were authors of verses or only minstrels of this poetic genre, and whether the ecclesiastical state was effectively common to all the goliards (clericus was used at times in the Middle Ages as a simple synonym of "learned", "educated").
Romantic criticism nourished for goliardic poetry an explicable but unfounded enthusiasm: in reality it has above all a documentary value; while from the poetic side it gives us only a few flashes of light in a dark tangle of poisonous acrimony and base sensuality.