This selection traces the development of the medieval Latin lyric from its source in the first century A.D. to its full flowering in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The wandering scholars, or vagantes, who flourished in the later Middle Ages, left behind them a splendid harvest of poetry, including the most famous anthology of medieval lyric, the "Carmina Burana". These poems of love and wine, of life and death, were written not to be read, but to be sung; in her translation, which is set alongside the Latin, Helen Waddell succeeds in capturing the rhythmic vitality and youthful flavour of the original.