Carmina Burana & Prudentius

Section VI
March 24—
24—April 5

This week’s questions were expertly written and artfully

presented to make your reading of Carmina Burana and
Pyschomachia a fulfilling pedagogical experience!! Be sure to
come to section prepared and ready for a lively discussion!
While there is no written assignment for this section, there is
a listening assignment! Yay! Look for the Listening Assignment
on the Assignments page.

Please print this assignment and bring it to section.

CARMINA BURANA

1. FORTUNA: What imagery is used to depict Fortune in the Carmina Burana? How does it respond to
Boethius' discussion? How do the protagonists of the Carmina Burana songs seem to deal, or come to terms,
with Lady Fortune? Is there anything instructional or elevating about the Carmina Burana songs, or do you
see them as being meant purely for entertainment?

2. PERSONAE: Who were these singers of drinking, gambling, and love? Are the poetic personae in the
various carmina highly imagined and conventional,
conventional, or personal and autobiographical? Which poems seem to
draw from literary convention and which, if any, seem to derive from a poet's individual experience? Why?

3. LOVE: What sort of picture is painted of love in the Carmina Burana? How similar
similar is this to the love in
the medieval responses to the Song of Songs? Are there any differences in the way love is expressed in the
Latin and the vernacular poems?

4. LISTENING ASSIGNMENT: Carl Orff's oratorio is a famous twentiethtwentieth--century response to medieval

medieval
lyric poetry. How successfully does his music convey the themes of the poems in the Carmina Burana? What
conception of the European Middle Ages does it create/reflect? Compare Orff's versions with the recreations
of the poems' medieval settings, as derived
derived by musicologists from musical notations in medieval manuscripts.
How do the re-re-creations influence your reading of the poems?

PRUDENTIUS

1. ALLEGORY When does it become clear that the Psychomachia is an allegory? Do the personifications
in Prudentius
Prudentius have any individuality? How do the Scriptures influence the allegory? Which scriptural
personages appear in the poem? How are virtues matched with vices? How do punishments fit vices?

2. CHRISTIAN EPIC AND VIOLENCE Is the term "Christian epic" an oxymoron?oxymoron? What are the problems
inherent in a Christian epic? How can the violence be reconciled with Christianity?