Celebrating Christmas with Drinking, Lust, and Gambling

Date: December 21, 2009

David Griggs-Janower gives us a more profane way to celebrate the season:

Nothing quite says Christmas like a concert about gambling, drinking and lust, right? The texts of Orff’s famous Carmina Burana were mostly written by itinerant students wandering from inn to inn to study with great teachers, before there were university centers, and we are not surprised that in their spare time they wrote poetry and sang about wine, women and song. (That these songs were ever collected and discovered is the surprise.) And after all, drinking and lust are traditional at this time of year, though usually we call it the office Christmas party…

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So I’m celebrating finished-Hanukkah and almost-Christmas on Monday by singing about gambling, lust and drinking. And I’m okay with that.

See the whole post here.

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Nancy Menk on December 21, 2009 4:11am

Cool...

Robert Howard on December 21, 2009 12:08pm

Solstice and Saturnalia come to mind.

John Howell on December 21, 2009 4:03pm

Philip: I've always been conflicted about how to describe those Good Ol' Boy Golliards. Seminary dropouts? Wandering students? Teenagers being teeagers?

The fact is that they were educated--they could read and write, and at least some of them could read and write music notation. That does suggest seminary, since all education was under the Church and all education (as opposed to apprenticeships) was religious education. And the fact is that European universities were probably following the format we inherited in the modern era: Lectures by famous professors, at which attendance was optional; meetings with tutors to discus the lectures; and final examinations. So the thought of free spirits (and there were plenty of them back in the '70s when I taught in the Big Ten!) moving from university to university with no intention of taking the exams, and banding together for self-protection as they traveled, isn't all that weird.

I'd have to question David's assumption that the 13th century was "before there were university centers," though, given that Charlemagne founded the first (?) university in the 9th century to train bureaucrats to run his empire and imported the monk Alcuin from England to organize and supervise it. How fast that idea caught on, of course, I'm not at all sure.

All the best,

John

Doreen Simmons on December 30, 2009 11:13am

Cambridge just celebrated 800 years -- and Oxford was about century earlier. Don't forget that 'universitas - university' comes from the Latin word 'universi' meaning 'everybody'. The whole point of the (now miscalled) 'public' schools in England was to provide an education to boys who were not destined to enter a monastery but would lead 'public' lives. Likewise the post-primary English 'grammar' schools of a slightly later time (Shakespeare went to one in Stratford) were founded by local benefactors to provide the children of the townsfolk with a grounding in Latin grammar and other essentials to a 'public-style' education that would allow boys to advance to the already-flourishing universities.

The original high ideals soon became muddied -- after all, money talks in any society, and the rich still have no problem in buying their less-than-bright offspring in, provided you get them early enough into a prep school -- but there has always been a strong tradition in the UK of opportunities being made for bright hard-working children (since Victorian times, girls as well as boys) to have what was seen as the best available education.

Doreen Simmons, one of the beneficiaries of the 'open-door' system

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