Temi narrativi ed elementi novellistici, agiografici ed esemplari nei «Carmina Cantabrigiensia»

The «Cambridge Songs» (Carmina Cantabrigiensia) are a collection of short Latin poems which we find in the lone manuscript Gg. 35 (Ca), housed in the Cambridge University Library. The manuscript itself was produced at the monastery of St. Augustine in Canterbury, in the middle of the XIth century, just before the Norman invasion of England. The best part of the poems of the «Cambridge Songs» probably derives from Germany and belongs to a period between IXth and XIth centuries. The 84 poems of the collection display a diversity of form, content and function. We can extricate praise poetry for kings and bishops, erotic verses (some of which have been erased or inked out), nature poems, and other sort of writing less easily classified. The most recent classification divides the content of the «Cambridge Songs» in eight typologies: religious, narrative, political, "amatoria", didactic, memorial, "vernalia", moral poems, to which we may add the "excerpta" of Boethius, Vergil, Horace, Statius and Venantius Fortunatus. An important place, in this collection, have the eight narrative poems (CC 6, 14-15, 20, 24, 30A, 35, 42), which display a big and interesting variety of typologies of tales, from the comic tale ("ridiculum") to the "exemplum", from the hagiographical legend to the "fabliau". This paper offers, at first, a short presentation of the whole collection, and then, a strict analysis of each of these eight narrative poems.