Despite a century of scholarship troubling the boundary between medieval and early modern, one still encounters Jakob Burckhardt's periodization that sets apart a medieval classicism – distant, reverential, and decontextualizing from renaissance classicism, which, conscious of historical difference and change, engaged classical authors as peers and familiars. This development was epitomized by Petrarch's letters to Cicero upon his “discovery” of Cicero's familiar letters and was dramatized by Florentines giving orations in ancient Roman dress. Nevertheless, medieval scholars since Charles Haskins have found ever earlier instances of the kinds of discourse and self-representations that get called “humanism,” “classicism,” “individuality,” and so forth. The milieu examined in this chapter, north-western France in the late eleventh century, featured a small group of high-status men, the Loire Valley poets, who imitated classical authors, especially Ovid and Horace. They had a good ear for meter, a refined aesthetic sensibility, and a propensity for reimagining their lives and circumstances through poetic analogy to the lifeworld of high-status Roman men represented by ancient Roman lyric. The Loire Valley poets engaged with the classics in a playful, creative way, treating classical texts not as disembodied, ahistorical authorities offering phrases for colour and pomp, but as living utterance and social performance.

Like their early modern counterparts, highly educated literary men of the late eleventh century played in the wardrobe of personae offered by Roman lyric poetry, and there found costumes from which they fashioned authoritative masculine personae. The Roman patrician masks fit the roles these medieval poets played in their lives – not as spiritual authorities (though they were all highly ranked churchmen), but as heads of households and administrators of material property and ranked hierarchies of men at work. The lyric poetry they wrote on the playful and even erotic themes were not juvenile exercises to be replaced in maturity by more serious writing; according to internal references, these poets were already abbots, archdeacons, and bishops charged with the care of souls and significant temporal power.

Their poetic exchanges, then, were not then a discursive space of retreat from responsibility, but a signifier of their authority, status, social relations, even partisan affiliation in contemporary controversies over church governance.