Carmina Carolingiana
Carmina Carolingiana
The IXth century deserves to be reexamined in its own
light, not in that of our fantasies. The « Carolingian renaissance » is
not one of these empty tag phrases in which too many self-appointed
experts revel. It eases the constraints of ancient inheritance and
helps us think up a new legacy. As early as the 780s, teams of
transcribers set up by Charlemagne and his successors undertook to
correct, copy and circulate, better than ever, the sacred writings and
secular works from Latin antiquity, without paying particular heed to
their pagan or Christian origins. The scholars of the time would read
and copy not only Virgil, an easy prey, as he had long been
accommodated into Christianity, but also Ovid, Horace, Terence and
others, more immune to Christian phagocytosis. They also perused saint
Jerome and the stern warning he had received in a dream and bequeathed
to all admirers of classical literature: « you are a Ciceronian, not a
Christian » (Jerome, letter 22, §30). Such is the power of second
usage: provided that the authors, highly respected authorities, teach
the paragons of good speech and the value of beauty, anything is better
than nothing, everything can be laundered in the hands of the innocent.
The IXth century stands out in the history of creative arts. It shines
out. How come? Possibly because the masters of the Empire restored by
Charlemagne managed to create the impulse, to breed emulation, to
trigger the freedom of creation, more probably because they attempted,
out of political instinct, to further the development of a Western
culture. They had to break free from Byzantine Orientalism, guilty of
standing in the way between the old and the new Latinity. Charlemagne
(† 814), his heir Louis the Pious († 840) and the latter's sons,
Lothair († 855), Louis the Germanic († 875) and Charles the Bald (†
877), thus shoulder the responsibility for the awe-inspiring gap that
kept widening for half a century between the West and Constantinople,
eventually providing the Franks with the ability to create without
constraints. They charged their servants with the task of developing
the tools of which we still remain the beneficiaries, over a thousand
years on. They started with the overhaul of writing characters,
fashioning the Carolingian minuscule that we still use to this day.
They built a great number of schools around cathedrals and major
monasteries, which contributed to the rapid and compulsory extension of
Christianity, and, in return, did their utmost to meet the expectations
of political powers eager for competent administrators. They
reorganized and relaxed the strict usages of written expression, still
paralyzed under the weight of the traditions of the ancients. Favouring
the clarity and rhythm of articulation over the ancient strictures of
scansion, they allowed for an easier blending of oral and written
language. Recommending that sermons should be preached in the common
people's languages, they first opened the gates to the earliest
appearance of vernacular forms of literature. They introduced a system
of musical notation with signs that mimicked the rising and falling
inflections of the singing voice in the space above the lines: the
neumes, which mark less the notation of a melody than the articulation
of a correct, easily understandable delivery of the text.
From then on, the masters managed to give unprecedented scope
to the rites of a public and official liturgy whose function was
sacramental as well as secular, as corroborated by all IXth century
chronicles. Into their great prose writings they insert exuberant
pieces of poetry, prosimetra that were probably meant to be read aloud
and sung. They are used as material for all the rites of public life
and death, in the churches and palaces where services are held. These
public ceremonies must first and foremost be beautiful, luxurious,
magnificent. Thus they have to be enriched with musical creations,
sequences, tropes and other pieces more plainly supported by monodic
chant or polyphonic singing. From then on, music ceased to be a mere
embellishment: it turned into language, communication. Contemporaries
expected it to be awe-inspiring and to help memorization.
Singing was not the exclusive preserve of monks and clerics.
Writings were kept and have been handed down to us, admittedly, through
the long-standing institutions that cathedrals and major monasteries
were then, which means they were in ecclesiastical hands. But the
libraries of the great IXth century aristocrats testify that they
readily accommodated secular works next to the hymn-books they needed
for the chapel in their palaces. They were particularly interested in
three genres: love songs, elegies and funereal lamentations (planctus).
The great majority of love songs did not survive their dedicatees. They
only resurface in the early XIIth century, when a keen connoisseur of
the matter reinstated the genre: Pierre Abélard. Elegies, whether
political, hagiographic or dedicated to friends, have made a name for
Ermold le Noir, who composes around 820-830, Florus of Lyons († around
860), Paschase Radbert (ca. 786-865), or Gottschalk of Orbais (ca.
807-867/869). Lastly, the lamentation, mourning the disappearance of a
beloved, revered or most powerful character, a genre for which, in the
IXth century, were particularly renowned the monks of Bobbio, and
Corvey (Agius of Corvey in Germania, in the second third of the
century), as well as professional warriors, like the author of the poem
on the death of his companions at the battle of Fontenoy en Puisaye,
which led to the treaty of Verdun (843). It is a literary exercise, but
it fulfils a duty of consolation and recollection, vital to the
community in traditional societies that cannot allow any discontinuity
between the world of the living and that of the dead. Other genres,
poems about visions and « revelations », such as the Visio Wettini and
the Revelationes, by Audrade of Sens (ca. 840), were less readily
subservient to the interests of the powerful than to those of the
Churches. The three genres above-mentioned exerted a greater
fascination. They fuelled the vigour of another genre, the classical carmen heroicum, which was to rise to unprecedented fame, thanks to its shift from Latin to the vernacular languages. Long before the Chanson de Roland,
epic songs had actually won the favour of the secular elite in
Anglo-Saxon England, in the lands of the Ottonian and Salian Empires,
in the France of the time, and they became all the rage, thanks to the
Reconquista of Spain, with the Cantar del mio Cid (last quarter
of XIth century). The legend of the Carolingians lived on because it
had been concocted by their servants in the IXth century and had been
kept alive in all the families of trusty servants of the emperor and
peddled on all battlefields.
From 840 or thereabouts and the middle of the Xth century, in
the Frankish Empire and what was left of it after 888, clerics, not
only monks but also laymen, put down in writing a great number of major
works in several important collections of poetry. Three of these
collections stand out, by reason of their material and formal quality,
those of Paris (Bnf Latin 1154, copied around year 900 for a
Saint-Martin monastery and adapted in the XIth century for the abbey of
Saint-Martial of Limoges), Brussels (BR 8860-8867, from early Xth
century, most probably originating in Saint-Gall where it must have
been copied), and Verona (Biblioteca Capitolare XC (85), written there
in the middle of the Xth century for the cathedral or the abbey of San
Zeno). These collections of poems or « songs » in Latin language are
the forerunners of the great song-books of the trouvères and
troubadours in Romance languages in the XIIth and XIIIth centuries.
Between the three of them, virtually all of poetic creation in the IXth
century is handed down to us. As always, literature, the arts of the
spoken word and the arts of music and singing sail in convoy:
precentors thus took down musical notations on the first stanzas of a
great number of poems, as soon as they were copied or in the following
years. We have no idea what these books were meant for. Were they
monuments intended for commemorations, half-dead conservatories of
sorts, were they used as collections of textbook examples for schools
or were they entrusted to the care of official singers whose function
was to keep a repertory alive and make sure that they were performed in
public ? These books, nevertheless, deserve better than the mere
consideration of a few scholars. The same applies to another first-rate
piece: the short poem about the destruction of the Mont-Glonne
monastery, the original site of the future abbey of
Saint-Florent-le-Vieil (Maine-et-Loire), ruled, in the Xth century, by
the abbot of Saint-Florent of Saumur. This too little known poem has
often escaped the attention of musicologists because it failed to
follow the triumphal pathway of the great Carolingian song-books: it
appears in a chartulary compiled in the second half of the XIIth
century and confirms the ceremonial function of such writings, too
often considered as archival compendia. It had, however, been listed by
philologists as a testimony to the art of poetry in the IXth century.
Historians generally agree to shift the date of composition to the late
Xth century and attribute the poem to Létald, a monk from Micy in the
Orléans area who wrote several poems between 984 and 1010 or
thereabouts. This is the only exception to the unity of time that has
governed the composition of this musical collection.
Katia Caré deserves all the credit for allowing us to
rediscover these poems from a remote IXth century abounding in
masterpieces. The time has come to restore the intimacy that brought
together, in the Early Middle Ages, oral and written speech, history
and literature, great epic songs and music.
Versus de bella quae fuit acta Fontaneto
On June 25th 841, shortly after the death of emperor Louis the
Pious, successor to Charlemagne, a devastating war set the heir to the
imperial title, Lothair, against both of his brothers: Louis the
Germanic and Charles the Bald. The crucial battle took place in the
Puisaye, at Fontenoy: it resulted in the treaty of Verdun, which left a
deep-seated mark on the history of the European West, as it led to the
partition of « Francia » into an Eastern kingdom, which was to become
Germany, and a Western part, which has become France. One of the
survivors of this fratricidal war, Angilbert, wrote a lamentation in
Latin, a poem in the form of an alphabet primer where the initials of
each line, assembled in succession, make up the alphabet from A to P.
Each of the fifteen stanzas of the poem is composed of « three
fifteen-syllable lines with an ascending clausula (a « trochaic »
cadence), one of the most highly valued rhythmic patterns »
(Brunhölzl): « given that the trochee is a prosodic foot, made up of a
long-lasting syllable followed by a short syllable, the trochaic
septenarius should number fourteen syllables; but with an extra
syllable at the end, it numbers fifteen » (Bastiaensen). Angelbert
belongs to Lothair's party, although he bemoans «blood against blood
cowardly conspiring»; in this respect, his poem could be listed as
political literature. Two allusions to the Song of Solomon (Ct 3, 7-8
in stanzas 7 and 13) and to the anthem Mons Gelboe
from the liturgical service of the third or fifth Sunday after
Pentecost (2 sm 1, 21-25) provide it with a steady spiritual undertone,
but it takes the form of the most tragic planctus, without relief or hope, bereft of any eschatological certainties.
Angilbert's Versus has been preserved in three
manuscripts, but only the Paris version has been supplied with an
Aquitanian-style musical notation. This is the great Paris collection,
BnF Lat. 1154, f. 136r, of which a facsimile can be found in
Coussemaker, Histoire de l'harmonie au moyen âge, pp. i-iv. The
second copy appears in the Saint-Gall manuscript, Stiftsarchiv, Cod.
Fab. X (acquired in the XVth century by the abbey of Pfäfers;
south-western writing from Germania, mid-IXth century), f. 10rv
(incomplete; added folio). To these manuscripts must be added the copy
of Kórnik (Poland: Biblioteka Kórnicka – Polska Akademia Nauk, BK
00124, DZ (former Dzialinski 124; IXth century, France?), f. 1r): the
poem was copied on the front side of the first folio of the Commentaire de la Règle de saint Benoît by Smaragde de Saint-Mihiel.
Versus Paulini de Herico duce
Yet another first-rate piece, this poem on the death of duke Eric of
Friuli is also the earliest composition in the selection featured in
this recording. Carolingian annals have kept the memory of the battle
of Tersatto (present-day Croatia) where Heric died in 799, during a war
expedition against the Slavs of Liburnia, on the Dalmatian coast; he
was a close friend of Charlemagne and a margrave, i.e. the duke of the
March of Friuli. The author of the poem is none other than the great
scholar Paulinus II of Aquileia (ca. 730/750-802), a Lombard who had
rallied to Charlemagne and become the patriarch of Aquileia in 787,
thanks to his protector. Paulinus mourned the margrave at whose court
he was staying and to whom he had offered, shortly before 799, his
first « mirror of the prince », which he had titled « Book of
exhortation » (Liber exhortationis).
The lamentation on the death of Heric is composed of 14 stanzas, each
made up of five rhythmic lines, senarii. Paulinus is transported, as in
a dream, into Liburnia, to the place of the tragedy; he depicts the
tears of the young prince's next of kin and of his « family » in the
broader sense; he grieves, then regains his composure, praying God the
all-powerful to grant his servant Heric the joys of Paradise. One of
the stanzas alludes to the anthem Mons Gelboe of the third and fifth
sundays after Pentecost (2 sm 1, 21).
The poem of Paulinus II of Aquileia is preserved in the Paris
manuscript, BnF lat. 1154 (f. 116r-118r) and two Bern manuscripts (Bern
BB 455 (Xth c.) and Bern BB 394 (Xth c.), f. 1r in which only two
stanzas are copied).
Versiculi de eversione monasterii Sancti Florentii
Paris, BnF nouv. acq. lat. 1930 (former Phillipps 70; XI-XII, prior to 1159)
The poem traditionally referred to as « On the destruction of the
Saint-Florent monastery » has survived thanks to its insertion in the
Chartulary of this abbey, which used to go under the name of Black book,
compiled after 1055, folios 6r-8r. It actually chronicles the sacking
of the Mont-Glonne, perpetrated by Nominoë, « king » of the Bretons, in
845. Until about 840, the Mont-Glonne monastery had benefited from the
liberalities of Charlemagne and his son, Louis the Pious. This is now
all over. Hardly have the fratricidal wars between Louis's sons died
out when unrest starts shaking the kingdom of Western Francia under
Charles the Bald. The monks, driven away by Nominoë, are said to have
been rehoused in Saint-Gondon before returning to Mont-Glonne under the
protection of saint Florent and the king. The trouble with this
narrative is that the monastery can't possibly have been destroyed by
Nominoë, and the site was devastated in 849, perhaps by Bretons, but
more certainly, later on, by Normans. Supported by Charles the Bald,
the monks were able to resettle in Saint-Gondon, on the border of the
dioceses of Bourges and Orléans, whence they later came back to
Mont-Glonne now called Saint-Florent-le-Vieil (Maine-et-Loire). Only
between 940 and 975/977 did the earl of Blois, Thibaud the Cheat,
summon the monks from Saint-Florent-le-Vieil to
Saint-Florent-lès-Saumur (nowadays Saint-Hilaire-Saint-Florent). The
composition of the 39 stanzas of this poem in regular iambic dimeters
must be dated from the years 940-960 at the earliest, or otherwise from
the late Xth century and then nothing would stand against its
attribution to a monk from Micy near Orléans (Létald).
From the first two lines the tone is that of legend. The
reminiscences of Ovid and the sound of the lyre die away, the bugles of
war start blaring. The Bretons, a race of uncultured brutes – so said
the abbot of Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys around 1125 – are let loose on the
country. Here starts the narrative. The remembrance of the generous
gifts of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious is only matched by the cruelty
of Nominoë the Breton; this despicable leader (a tiller of the land who
owes everything to chance, nothing to inheritance) demands from the
monks of Mont-Glonne that they erect a statue in his image, facing the
east, as a challenge to the authority of Charles the Bald. But Charles
has the monks make the statue in his own image, and the impious Nominoë
returns to ransack the abbey. The abbot refers to King Charles, saint
Florent avenges them by paralysing the Breton and the king grants the
monks a new and safer land of their own.
Planctus Hugonis abbatis
Hugo, a natural son of Charlemagne, was slain in battle in 844
while he held the office of secular abbot of the abbeys of
Saint-Quentin and Charroux in the Poitou. The lamentation upon the body
of the deceased was written by a monk, most probably from Charroux,
where Hugo was buried. It consists of 8 stanzas composed of seven lines
with a different structure each, the last one being « adonic » (a
dactyl and a spondee). The piece testifies to the high cultural
standards of the Poitou abbey, which is known to have been in relation
with Florus of Lyons and with the great monastery of the Reichenau. The
author juggles with learned reminiscences, of the heathen Virgil (70-19
B.C.: Aeneid, XI, 908) and of the Christian Lactantius († ca. 320), a most singular writer (On the wrath of God, c. 5). The Planctus Hugonis was handed down in the great Paris collection, BnF lat. 1154 (IXth c., Limoges, Saint-Martial) at f. 133r.
Planctus Karoli
Paris, BnF lat. 1154 (IXth c., Limoges, Saint-Martial), au f. 132r-
133v
This is the most famous IXth century planctus, one of the
most ancient that the Frankish world has bequeathed to us. Soon after
the death of Charlemagne, on January 28th
814, a monk from the abbey of Saint-Columbanus in Bobbio, Northern
Italy, wrote a lamentation on the demise of the master who had
transformed the kingdom of the Franks into a powerful Empire. He
recalls the vibrant eulogy delivered by Alcuin of York about the one
that was then merely the king of Franks: « another king David... is now
our leader and our guide, a leader in whose shade the Christian people
can now rest in peace, who strikes terror everywhere into the hearts of
the heathen nations, a guide whose evangelical firmness and devotion
have ceaselessly strengthened the Catholic faith against preachers of
heresy... and striving to keep the Catholic faith radiant everywhere in
the light of heavenly grace. » (Alcuin, Letter 41 (MGH, Epistolae II, n° 41, p. 84).
According to a XVIIth century manuscript, the monk of Bobbio had
dedicated his poem to a bishop by the name of André (a byname commonly
used among Charlemagne's retinue), who can hypothetically be identified
with an Irishman by the name of Cadac. Bobbio, founded by saint
Columbanus in the early VIIth century and showered with benefits by
Charlemagne, was then often visited by islanders. Through the lines of
the anonymous poet, all the peoples and the faithful of the Empire
mourn the loss of a peerless being, master rather than conqueror, and
voice their sorrow. The poet himself joins the procession of mourners,
proclaiming his distress in the refrain «Alas, wretched me! I grieve
and mourn » (Heu me dolens, heu mihi misero).
This piece is composed of twenty rhythmic stanzas made of distichs of
two dodecasyllables with a metrical word at the end, and each stanza
ends with the heptasyllabic refrain. It was copied and notated in
neumes in the Xth century.
The first words sound very much like a hymn composed by
Coelius Sedulius (Vth century), sung every year for the celebration of
Christ's resurrection. But the Planctus Karoli
is not a hymn, it affects the IXth century listener as the complete
opposite of the Easter hymn; it is rather close to the ritual of the
service for the dead. Can't we thus imagine, as Peter Stotz suggests,
that it was performed by a double choir as the alternated chant of the
funeral procession?
Versus Godischalchi
Gottschalk d'Orbais to his Reichenau friend
The monk Gottschalk of Orbais (ca. 807-867/869) is famous for
triggering a theological disputation about predestination in the years
840-850. He raised, and finally answered in a most pessimistic way, the
insoluble question of the dilemma between God's salvific will and the
human propensity to sin. Around 850, he addresses the poem O quid jubes pusiole to his boyhood friend Walafried Strabon (808/809-849). The pusiolus,
or young boy, is now nearing forty and has gained, in the monastery of
the Reichenau, the intellectual stature that turns him into one of the
great learned abbots of the IXth century. As for Gottschalk, he had
been brought up in the other great monastery of Germania, in Fulda,
which was the seat of a brilliant school, most particularly under the
abbacy of Raban Maur (780-856, abbot of Fulda from 822 onwards) and
relationships between the monk and the abbot had soured, long before
the predestination dispute. The argument precisely breaks out in 848
and 849. Gottschalk is severely condemned, in Mainz, in Reims, when
suddenly his friend Walafried begs Gottschalk to write a poem to him.
But « why should you ask me to sing? », Gottschalk answers. The
complaint stirs up no overtones of presumed homosexuality, it only
deals with the friendship that brings together two men that have
drifted apart in their very conceptions of theology.
Two copies of the poem are known, in a book from Autun (BM 33)
and in the Paris collection, BnF lat. 1154, f. 131v-132r. In this
manuscript, the transcriber marks, as is customary, the beginning of
each stanza with a crimson initial, and the refrain is in red ink; the
musical notation only appears on the first stanza.
Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, Consolatio Philosophiae
(Book I, ix)
Ms.: Paris, BnF lat. 1154, f. 118r-119v
Boethius, the schoolteacher of the Middle Ages, « the saintly soul that unfolded the deceits of our world » (Dante), wrote his Consolation of Philosophy
brought to him by Dame philosophy in the prison where he had been
thrown by the Ostrogoth king Theodoric, while awaiting his execution in
524. His prose writing, interspersed with poems, bequeathed to the
Middle Ages not only the form of the prosimetrum, but also the
philosophical theme of consolation. The first poem in the Consolation
(Book I, ix) expounds the way in which God the Creator subjected Nature
to his sovereign authority. Nature has no power to organize and
harmonize chaos, but God does. God created a Nature that mimics the
creative movement in its rational and numerical perfection. What about
humans? God has abandoned them to the whims of Fortune and also to
their own crimes. No opposition between providence (God) and destiny
(Nature): the former is the source of the latter. This famous hymn of
the Consolation of Philosophy, widely circulated all through
the IXth century, rings with Boethius' neo-platonism. This never
bothered Christian thinkers, who recycled it in their liturgy and
steadily commented on it, particularly, in the IXth century, Alcuin of
York († 802), Moduin of Autun († 840/843), Jonas of Orleans (bef.
780-843), Loup of Ferrières (805-862) – who wrote a specific
explanation for all the poems in the Consolation, or Rémi of Auxerre († 908). With or without the Consolation, the hymn O stelliferi conditor orbis has migrated over the centuries towards vernacular-language literature: Jean of Meun writes an adaptation of the Consolation between 1269 and 1278 and a literal translation in 1305, but Chaucer also uses the material, in The Knight's Tale, around 1380.
Guy Lobrichon
(Translation: Pierre Bourhis)
About Latin in the Carolingian era
Our present-day knowledge of Latin as a whole remains
first and foremost literary; it was nevertheless a language of daily
oral communication, from Antiquity to the Renaissance... Within the
scope of this recording, we have thus attempted a plausible restitution
of the variant of Latin in usage at the court of Charlemagne, in the
VIIIth century and the early IXth century, but, as we only had written
sources at our disposal, we must needs restrict ourselves to
conjectures that will never be corroborated, given that, apart from a
few certainties attested by some treatises or substantiated by
alternative written forms of some terms, comparative and diachronic
phonetics is not altogether an exact science as far as dead languages
are concerned, for want of audio-oral data.
As they drifted ever further away from Vulgar Latin (lingua romana vulgaris)
during the VIIIth and IXth centuries A.D. (1), Carolingian grammarians
and clerics became more and more aware of the dichotomy between the
vernacular languages derived from Latin, and Latin proper. Hence their
desire to restate the role of Latin... The reform initiated by Pepin
the Short in order to improve the teaching of Latin grammar and writing
was then carried on by his son Charlemagne as soon as he came to the
throne (768), the most remarkable feature in this respect being the
adoption of the Caroline minuscule, inspired by the Roman uncial of the
IIIrd century, itself inherited from the cursive script of Roman
Antiquity.
Although Charlemagne and his peers were mostly speakers of Low
Frankish, one of the Germanic dialects in use near the Rhine, to which
group also belong the Ripuarian Frankish of Cologne or the present-day
language of Luxembourg, it was with a view to restoring to its
prominent position the language so dear to the heart of Varro that
Charlemagne appointed Alcuin – born in York ca. 730 or 740, who could
speak Old English as well as Latin – to the head of the Palatine
Academy, in 782, as the study of Latin was no longer the exclusive
preserve of clerics but was now open to the laity.
As Low Frankish had influenced the phonology of Romance
languages of the Rhenish era and that of Latin as well to a significant
extent, it seemed quite natural to take it into consideration so as to
manage consistent standards of pronunciation, of which we will now
detail the most salient features.
Unlike the Latin-speaking islanders from across the Channel,
who had kept up the guttural character of the /c/ in all positions,
particularly in front of /e/ or /i/ (both of them closed syllables),
the confusion between /ci / and /ti/ (see the alternative forms etiam/eciam, clementia/clemencia and fatio/facio)
tends to testify to the Germanic usage of reading the /c/ as a /ts/
when it comes before either of these vowels, which is further evidenced
by certain mistakes that can be ascribed to copyists, a frequent
giveaway of the phonetic reality of the time. A term such as cella
(cellar) which was pronounced [kella] in Cicero's time eventually
turned into Zelle – pronounced [tselle] – beyond the Rhine, to mention this famous example only (2) & (3).
The group /di/ was probably pronounced [dz] before a vowel, whereas
/ti/ was articulated as [ts] before /e/ and /i/, like /c/ (2), a trend
corroborated by Erasmus which will survive until the dawn of the French
Renaissance and even later than the XVIIIth century, in Italy.
Besides, we have decided to keep the diphthong /ae/ rather
than assimilating it to the phoneme [e], a tendency that only became
standard usage much later (let us mention, in this respect, quae and ecclesiae which will be spelt que and ecclesie as a rule in all writings after the XIth century (4).
Lastly, to the difference of the so-called « church Latin », we have
retained the occlusive sound of the unpalatalized /g/ in all positions,
considering that the phoneme [dz] (similar to the English « j » in
jungle) was unknown to Frankish speakers of Germanic dialects, who were
in the habit of pronouncing all the letters (5), even if the groups
/ce/-/ci/ and /ge/-/gi/ were already widely palatalized in the greater
part of the Romance-language area, in the middle of the Vth century
A.D.
Christopher Tellart
(Translation: Pierre Bourhis)
(1) Antoine Meillet, Esquisse d'une histoire de
la
langue latine
(Cambridge University Press, 2009)
(2) Dag Norberg, Manuel pratique de latin médiéval (Picard,
1980)
(3) Pascale Bourgain & Marie-Clotilde Hubert, Le latin médiéval
(Brepols, 2005)
(4) Keith Sidwell, Reading medieval Latin (Cambridge University
Press, 1995)
(5) Roger Wright, La période de transition du latin, de la lingua
romana et du français (Médiévales, 2003)