Ancient genres in the poem of a medieval humanist: Intertextual aspects of the `De sufficientia...

In the second half of the 11th century, a humanist circle of clerical poets, living around the central valley of the Loire, was writing poetry in classical language and metre. Baudri of Bourgueil, who wrote an impressive corpus of Latin poems, was an expert in the language, style, verse, motifs and genres of the classical and later antique pagan and Christian poetry, and treated theological as well as profane and explicitly ancient topics. About 1107, when he was urged to become bishop and to abandon his personal independence and quiet monastic life, he gave voice to his disgust of the new ecclesiastical burden by a long poem in elegiac distichs. This paper tries to show the ancient genres Baudri has used and transformed and even inverted in order to describe his special situation. Therefore, in imitating the ancient genres, far from showing only his literary culture, he was rather using them in a very specific and personal way. This use of literary traditions can best be analyzed in terms of intertextuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]