English

Alternative forms

• Goliardic

Adjective

goliardic ‎(not comparable)

1. Of or pertaining to Goliards, wandering medieval students who earned money by singing and reciting poetry.
   • 1982, Piero Boitani, Joan Krakover Hall (translator), English Medieval Narrative in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, [1980, La narrativa del Medioevo inglese], 1986, page 28,

     Minstrels and goliardic clerics - priests, monks and university students who dropped out, travelled all over Europe and composed loose or satirical works - had been and continued to be the creators of fabliaux and interludes.

   • 1999, Norman F. Cantor, The Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, page 198,

     Many poems in the collection known as Carmina Burana, are believed to be of goliardic origin.

   • 2004, Anne L. Klinck, Anthology of Ancient and Medieval Woman's Song, page 89,

     For the Carmina Burana, see the introductory essay on goliardic poetry (i.e., the recreational poetry of medieval clerics) in Edward Blodgett and Arthur Swanson's translation, The Love Songs of the Carmina Burana (1987).

2. Of or pertaining to a form of medieval lyric poetry that typically celebrated licentiousness and drinking.
   • 1961, Phillip Damon, Modes of Analogy in Ancient and Medieval Verse, page 304,

     This basic structure was used as long as the medieval Latin lyric flourished; the goliardic poems of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries still retain it.

   • 1999, Miriam Cabré, Footnote, Cerverí de Girona and His Poetic Traditions, page 53,

     The concept of goliardic poetry rests on a series of stylistic traits and the identification of the corpus with the figure of the wandering goliard.

   • 2011, Albrecht Classen, Sexual Violence and Rape in the Middle Ages: A Critical Discourse in Premodern German and European Literature, page 83,

     References to rape occur in a variety of literary genres, whether we think of the Indian princess in the goliardic epic Herzog Ernst […] .

Related terms

• goliardery