Cambridge Songs

The Cambridge Songs (Carmina Cantabrigiensia) are a collection of Goliardic medieval Latin poems found on ten leaves (ff.

They may have been collected by an English scholar while travelling on the continent sometime after the last datable song (1039), and brought back with him to the church of Saint Augustine at Canterbury, where they were copied and where the Codex was long kept.

The Cambridge Songs were long thought to be forty-nine in number, but a missing folio that contained twenty-seven more was discovered in Frankfurt and returned to the University Library in 1982.

It was probably either a book of instruction on Latin verse, a songbook for wandering minstrels (the clerici vagabundi: vagabond clerics), or an anthology for private enjoyment.

Those songs from Nenia de mortuo Heinrico II imperatore to Gratulatio regine a morbo recreate directly praise the rulers of the Salian dynasty.