<div>not fwd--->((Xue: Thank you for your interesting opinion as well.))</div> <div> </div> <div> </div> <div> </div> <div> </div> <div>Message: 1<BR>Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2008 00:15:23 -0500<BR><BR>Vast ist dies "Goliard"??<BR>/Q<BR><BR>They were basically medieval hippies.<BR><BR>They were part of medieval European student culture from about the 11th-12th<BR>century onward: they appeared at the rise of the great Universities of the<BR>Continent, especially in Paris, and continued...to this day, really.<BR><BR>They were the bad company you fell into when you moved away from home for<BR>the first time and lived in a university town on money that wasn't your own.<BR>They were the dropouts, flunk-outs and kick-outs who still managed to hang<BR>around somehow, getting drunk, getting laid and getting into trouble. Think<BR>of National Lampoon's Animal House in the 12th century, and you've pretty<BR>much got it.<BR><BR>They took their name from
"Golias" a sort of deity or patron saint that they<BR>invented or half-invented, and who was associated, sort of like Bacchus,<BR>with drink and revelry, and sort of like Apollo with music.<BR><BR>So why are they so interesting? Well, because they wrote a lot of poetry,<BR>all of it very, very unconventional by the standards of the time, and some<BR>of it quite good. It could be bawdy or chaste, reverent or blasphemous,<BR>philosophical, lyrical, bibulous, humorous or philosophical. Good or bad, it<BR>makes for much more interesting reading than most of the court-poetry of the<BR>age.<BR><BR>For some good examples of this kind of stuff, google "Carmina Burana" and<BR>"Francois Villon" (though Villon came a bit lat to really be called a<BR>Goliard).<BR><BR>"Laurels. We're like Google. Only with sarcasm."<BR></div><p>