Wine, Women, and Song. Mediaeval Latin Students' Songs
- London: Chatto and Windus, 1884
London: Chatto and Windus, 1884. First edition. Fine. One of 50 large-paper copies. Bound ca. 1900 by Zaehnsdorf in an "Exhibition" binding of full red crushed levant morocco. Covers decoratively tooled in gilt with multi-line borders and floral decorations. Spine with five raised bands, decoratively tooled and lettered in gilt, gilt board edges and turn-ins, red silk liners and endpapers. With the small circular "'Exhibition" stamp in blind on rear turn-in. Slight darkening to spine, otherwise very Fine.
Wine, Women, and Song compiles John Addington Symonds’ translations from the Carmina Burana, a Medieval Latin manuscript of 254 poems, songs and dramatic texts from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. The Carmina Burana, which is now held at the Bavarian State Library in Munich, was the work of the goliards, a group of young, itinerant clergy. The goliards protested the growing contradictions within the Church and satirized it through song, poetry and dramatic performances, which they performed on their travels throughout western Europe. Symonds’ selection is dedicated to Robert Louis Stevenson and is prefaced by an essay on goliardic literature.
John Addington Symonds (1840 - 1893) was an English poet, literary critic, and cultural historian specializing in the Renaissance. Symonds was one of the earliest English writers to address gay love and desire in his writing, breaking ground (and sometimes the law) with his A Problem in Greek Ethics (1873) and, later in life, his contributions to Sexual Inversion (1897), the first volume in Havelock Ellis' Psychology of Sex (Edsall, Toward Stonewall, pp. 106-109). He also translated the poems of Sappho, Poliziano's Orfeo, and Benevenuto Cellini's sonnets, in which he was the first translator to restore the original masculine pronouns in the poems addressed to Tommaso dei Cavalieri. Fine.
Wine, Women, and Song compiles John Addington Symonds’ translations from the Carmina Burana, a Medieval Latin manuscript of 254 poems, songs and dramatic texts from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. The Carmina Burana, which is now held at the Bavarian State Library in Munich, was the work of the goliards, a group of young, itinerant clergy. The goliards protested the growing contradictions within the Church and satirized it through song, poetry and dramatic performances, which they performed on their travels throughout western Europe. Symonds’ selection is dedicated to Robert Louis Stevenson and is prefaced by an essay on goliardic literature.
John Addington Symonds (1840 - 1893) was an English poet, literary critic, and cultural historian specializing in the Renaissance. Symonds was one of the earliest English writers to address gay love and desire in his writing, breaking ground (and sometimes the law) with his A Problem in Greek Ethics (1873) and, later in life, his contributions to Sexual Inversion (1897), the first volume in Havelock Ellis' Psychology of Sex (Edsall, Toward Stonewall, pp. 106-109). He also translated the poems of Sappho, Poliziano's Orfeo, and Benevenuto Cellini's sonnets, in which he was the first translator to restore the original masculine pronouns in the poems addressed to Tommaso dei Cavalieri. Fine.