Mediaeval Latin Lyrics

Writing excitedly to her sister Meg in 1929, Helen Waddell quotes an early review of Mediaeval Latin lyrics: 'Miss Waddell has kept her promise well: she promised a volume of translations from those fascinating "vagantes". Some indeed are among the loveliest in any literature; and Miss Waddell has not dulled their brightness. She has come to them not merely with scholarship and literary tact, but with a soul attuned to the thought and feeling and the very idiom of another day. She has the most important of the translator's qualifications - a perfect empathy with her material.' Through the marvellous empathy this reviewer unerringly describes, Waddell unlocked some of the secrets and literary achievements of the Middle Ages for the scholar and the general reader alike. The vagantes, to whom the reviewer refers, are the subject of her earlier book, The wandering scholars (1927) which similarly won golden opinions. These two books and her novel Peter Abelard (1933) made her the most famous medievalist of her generation. And this was no passing fashion. Helen Waddell's books, particularly this one, have informed and inspired generations of medievalists.