In an overview of the amatory verse of the Middle Ages, Jan Ziolkowski offers a brief comment, representative of the communis opinio, on what he rightly calls the particularly pressing necessity of evaluating the sources of, and influences on, a literary tradition as fundamentally bound up in its own textuality as that of Latin poetry. From its earliest beginnings, through to the twelfth century and beyond the period with which we are concerned, Latin poetry had a ‘love of allusion’ which meant that ‘many Latin poems were fully comprehensible only to the cognoscenti’: to those who were able to recognise verbal allusions and references to myth, and to evaluate the constituent parts of a new poetic composition in the light of earlier literature. Ziolkowski outlines the challenge that faces scholars of medieval Latin, who ought to explore ‘the absorption and adaption’ of aspects of Classical, scriptural, and Christian texts into the literature of the Middle Ages, whilst not yielding to the ‘misleading temptation’ to read the latter as exclusively literary works (‘fenomeni squisitamente libreschi’), subject to the sort of Quellenforschung undertaken by students of literature with works of reference to hand. Ziolkowski's underlying concern is that the greater part of the audience of these poems would have encountered them not as written texts, but as performed pieces.

The tension inherent in some of the discussions surrounding the interpretation of medieval Latin verse, its intertextual and allusive relationship with its literary predecessors, and the ways in which this relationship affects the sort of (readerly?) audience we envisage, is one that has not been explored or negotiated satisfactorily in scholarly treatments of the poems that constitute the Codex Buranus. This is, to a great degree, because of the diverse nature of the collected carmina and the varied audiences – some learned, some apparently less so – for which these poems were composed, and, in part, because of the not infrequent attempts by scholars to comment on wider parts of the collection (as opposed to individual pieces) with the result that a consideration of the distinctions between different carmina, their respective source-texts (intended or otherwise), and their possible audiences (intended or otherwise) are overlooked.