Friday, August 30, 2013

Digital edition of the week: a fifteenth-century German-Latin macaronic drinking song (with transcription)

The BSB released a digital facsimile this week of the manuscript clm 29775/12, a fragment of a twelfth-century gradual on which someone in the fifteenth century recorded a drinking song, including a melody. Because the corpus of fifteenth-century German-Latin macaronic drinking songs is surely not large enough, I've attempted a quick transcription (which is undoubtedly full of errors - I tried to resolve as much as I could in the time I had, but I didn't mark every dubious reading with a question mark. Corrections are welcome.) I've expanded abbreviations silently and split the text into lines and stanzas in order to reflect what I think is the poem's structure. Punctuation is barely modernized.

Carmen vite eandorum in religionem relinquam

Gaudete nostram concionem     uns dy zeit verlegen ist
Viventes nunc in iubilo     so singe wir und springe wir
tripudio     nach frewden wel wir singen.

Restat nunc bibitio    und wer in unsn orden will /
sit ei nunc devotio /    So hebet her auff unnd folge nach
potagio     daz im die augen swiczen.

O milites religiosi    ir solt nicht nuchtern bleiben
cum tota non cum laicis    solt ir die zeit vertreiben
in gaudiis /    und mit den paurn weibern.

Et qui non bonum biberit     der sey auch in dem banne
vix salvus esse poterit     trat umb raicht uns die kanne
cum gaudio     da mit ge wir vonn dannen.

Si dolor est in cerebro     so sterck es mit weinne /
placebit tunc dormitio /    biß zu dem sonnenn scheyne
Religio     ist uns worden klaine.

Preceptum est in aprilis    nun tringc unnd est das beste
cras ibimus in bethleem    Das wesen stet nicht veste:
sit gloria     dem wirt und allem geste. amen.
The most recent secondary literature on late medieval German drinking songs I can find, by the way, is:

Haas, Norbert. Trinklieder des deutschen Spätmittelalters: philologische Studien an Hand ausgewählter Beispiele. Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1991.

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