page_title: Archpoet
section_title: Modern critical reassessment
hierarchical_section_title: Archpoet / Biography / Modern critical reassessment
caption_attribution_description: Čeština: Fridrich Barbarossa
context_page_description: The Archpoet, or Archipoeta, is the name given to an anonymous 12th-century author of ten medieval Latin poems, the most famous being his "Confession" found in the Carmina Burana manuscript. Along with Hugh Primas of Orléans, he is cited as the best exemplar of Goliardic poetry and one of the stellar poets of the Latin Middle Ages.
  Knowledge about him comes essentially from his poems found in manuscripts: his noble birth in an unspecified region of Western Europe, his respectable and classical education, his association with Archchancellor Rainald of Dassel's court, and his poetic activity linked to it in both content and purpose. As such, it has been speculated that the bibulous, extravagant personality emanating from his work could be only serving as a façade despite its apparent autobiographical trend.
context_section_description: While it is still commonly assumed that the Archpoet was a follower of the Goliard tradition—writing student drinking songs, parodies critical of the Church and satires on the life of itinerant clergy in the Middle Ages—, the noted scholar Peter Dronke proposed a very different portrait in his 1968 book The Medieval Lyric:
  [H]e was in fact a court poet, perhaps also a civil servant or minor diplomat, in the service of the Imperial Chancellor, and so almost certainly a member of the circle around Frederick Barbarossa himself. I am convinced that his leitmotif of the wayward, wretched vagabond-poet who is compelled to beg from his patron and his audience contains far less autobiography than literary craft... The Archpoet's picture of the vagabond-poet (whatever element of literal truth it may have contained) has been drawn for the sophisticated entertainment of that international set of diplomats and legislators, high-born scholars and prelates who surrounded the Emperor, whose lingua franca was Latin, and among whom the Archpoet probably, by his birth and position, moved as an equal.
  This view of the Archpoet and his milieu, severely contrasting with that of the previous generations of researchers and writers such as J. A. Symonds and Helen Waddell, created a break in modern High Middle Ages scholarship about the Goliards and, in spite of not creating consensus within the academic community, has since been embraced by many scholars. Summarizing Dronke's view by using English writer Geoffrey Chaucer as an example of differentiation between actual (historical) self and poetic (fictional) persona, Jan Ziolkowski wrote that the Archpoet's shenanigans "may be little more than a stance struck by the poet to entertain his audience; the persona could be as far from the reality as that of Chaucer the character was from Chaucer the poet or man." Dronke further argued that the Archpoet could well have been Hugh Primas's student in Orléans, getting acquainted through him with various rare Classical poets and also with his personal style (themes and techniques).
caption: Frederick Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor from 1155 to 1190. (14th century)
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