The news has long been out: behind the serene facades of medieval churches in the streets and taverns of high- medieval European towns, cities and villages consecrated to Christian prayers and ideals, there daily erupted among scholars and poets— in the thirteenth century the two were often the same— such a spate of drinking, wenching, fucking, dicing, pummeling, singing, battering, shrieking, moaning and celebrating as has seldom been seen anywhere on earth. Scholarship incited clarity rather than murk. It in turn provoked lyrics as brash as clerical hypocrisy, as refreshing as cheer in winter. Golias, the “Archpoet,” himself of the twelfth century, may have proclaimed his “fierce indignation” over his poverty, but he also rejoiced in his “levity,” his love of Venus, or “a young girl's beauty” and his determination, now that “the soul in me is dead,” to “save [my] skin.”

Among medieval poet- scholars, saving one's skin was the grand theme. A churchly post would do. It guaranteed fine food and a dry bed. Often, though, the singer had already achieved his plummy appointment. His selfpromotion was a pose to elicit sympathy for his persona. Impoverishment was a medal. What is more, not all of the “Goliard” carousers in Latin— for most of their poetry was composed to be sung on the exquisite instrument of succinct and rhyming medieval Latin— were wandering rogues, despite their interesting notoriety which over a century of modern scholarship has failed to disturb.

Their drinking and wenching were real enough. Bacchus and promiscuity, satire and mild bawdiness, coupled with an effusive praise of springtime flowers, might camouflage the universal damp. They might brighten the candle- dim long tables on which the steins of mead and ale clashed in merriment against official primness. They might even open one's mind to liberal ideas of sin. “To drink and wench and play at dice/ Seem to me no such mighty sins,” writes one poet (they were nearly all anonymous), tossing his insolence into his Credo, or death- bed confession, to shock his attending priest.

Rooting in the pagan past was no vice. Horace had coaxed the fragrance of peonies and the white Euganean hills clad in robes of roses into his odes. Ovid's Art of Love was known to all educated people. Its sexual candor was overlooked on the grounds of its superior style.