The Goliards (Wandering Scholars)

The goliards were the wandering clerks and students of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe, men trained in the schools and cathedral chapters who lived by their wits, drifting between universities and patrons. They wrote in Medieval Latin, in rhymed and accentual stanzas, on spring, love, wine, dice, poverty and the hypocrisy of the Church. Their verse is almost entirely anonymous, and is preserved chiefly in manuscripts of the period.

The largest surviving collection is the Carmina Burana, copied in the early thirteenth century at a Bavarian monastery and now in Munich. Among the best known goliardic poems is the 'Confession of Golias', long attributed to the Archpoet. The translations here are by John Addington Symonds, from his Wine, Women, and Song (1884), where they are set within his essay on the student songs.