FOOTNOTES TO INTRODUCTION

  • To go directly to the Latin text of the poem, click here.
  • The most thorough study of the names of these women is in Lee (see Bibliography below), pp. 69 ff. The Cardinalis Domina is the only individual not given a name in the manuscripts of the poem; her dress and behavior support the view that she is intended as a symbolic figure. At one point, in fact, she refers to herself as an outsider (l. 53).
  • The Altercatio Phyllidis et Florae is one of the Carmina Burana (Number 92). Excerpts of it are included in F. J. E. Raby's Secular Latin Poetry (2:191 ff.), and in the same author's Oxford Book of Medieval Latin Verse, pp. 312 ff.
  • The only real exceptions are at lines 7-8 and 109-10, both times involving the carryover of the word Amoris. The word then is intended to come as something of a surprise, after a brief pause.
  • Rhyming in Latin, largely because of the inflectional endings, is such an easy effect that it takes special effort to avoid it. Good classical stylists regarded such patterns as multorum virorum bonorum with disdain. Not so in the case of many medieval Latin poets, even where the most commonplace endings were concerned. It is instructive to observe how many of the lines of the Concilium Romarici Montis have such banal rhymes as -ibus, -imus, or -ia. (Between lines 109 and 115, for example, this last rhyme occurs four times.) The poet does avoid repeating the same rhyme in two consecutive lines within the same stanza. This circumstance adds some support to the placement of line 44 in its new position there; see below. About the best that can be said for the rhymes in the Concilium Romarici Montis is that most of them are at least accurate. Lines 33, 218, and 241 are mildly aberrant; only line 148 is so much so as to be actually somewhat suspect. See Commentary on line 148.
  • The subheads before lines 61 and 67 are present only in T, the ones before lines 94, 100, 103, 106, 109, 115, 121, 172, 178, 184, 199, 202, and 205 only in R.
  • For details of these works, see Bibliography. Lee provides an excellent bibliography (pp. vii-xvii), complete to 1981. Substantial accounts of the Concilium Romarici Montis can be found in C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford, 1938, reprinted 1967); F. J. E. Raby, A History of Secular Latin Poetry in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1957); and Peter Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric (Oxford, 1968).