Clerici vagantes or vagabundi (singular clericus vagans or vagabundus) is a medieval Latin term meaning "wandering clergy" applied in early canon law to those clergy who led a wandering life either because they had no benefice or because they had deserted the church to which they had been attached.
The term refers also to wandering students, ex-students, and even professors, "moving from town to town in search of learning and still more of adventure, nominally clerks but leading often very unclerical lives".[1] Recently, the belief that the clerici vagantes played an important role in the literary atmosphere of the so-called Renaissance of the 12th century, for the kind of fresh poetry in medieval Latin called goliardic poetry, in which famous wandering scholars (scholares vagantes; in German fahrenden Schüler) like Hugh Primas and the anonymous Archpoet (both 12th century) satirically criticised the Medieval Church, has been questioned.[2]
- ^ Charles Homer Haskins, Rise of Universities, p. 111
- ^ Marian Weiß, Die mittellateinische Goliardendichtung, p. 387-388