The Wandering Scholars: The Life and Art of the Lyric Poets of the Latin Middle Ages

This study of the "Vagantes" is little more than the scaffolding of its subject. It was begun as an introduction to a book of translations from mediaeval Latin lyric, soon to be published, and outgrew the original intention, without outgrowing its limitations. The historical interest of the "Vagantes" as one of the earliest disintegrating forces in the mediaeval church has been left on one side; with it, their place in literary history, in the development of satire and the secularising of the stage. They have been studied only as the inheritors of the pagan learning, the classic tradition that came to its wild flowering in the rhyming Latin lyric of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. ("Preface")