(b England, c1110; d c1181). English poet. He settled early in Paris, where he was a brilliant teacher in the schools, writing Latin didactic grammatical poems and erotic lyrics until his spectacular repentance, after which he retreated into the Cluniac monastery at La Charité-sur-Loire; there he found the discipline too lax, and moved to the Cistercian abbey at Aumône, becoming its abbot in 1171. From his conversion come his moralistic poems Versus de contemptu mundi, but by far his best works are his youthful love-lyrics. His 84 surviving poems are mostly in hexameters (generally leonine), pentameters and elegiac distichs. He displays a profound knowledge of the classics and shows great mastery of rhyme and flexibility of rhythm. Serlo’s language was much imitated, and its influence can be seen in the texts of contemporary Notre Dame and related conductus.
B. Hauréau: ‘Notice sur un manuscrit de la reine Christine, à la Bibliothèque du Vatican’, Notices et extraits des mss., xxix/2 (1880), 233, 334
B. Hauréau: Notices et extraits de quelques manuscrits latins de la Bibliothèque nationale, i (Paris, 1890/R), 303
F.J.E. Raby: A History of Christian-Latin Poetry from the Beginnings to the Close of the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1927, 2/1953), 340
M. Manitius: Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters, iii (Munich, 1931/R), 905
F.J.E. Raby: A History of Secular Latin Poetry in the Middle Ages, ii (Oxford, 1934, 2/1957), 111–15
A.C. Friend: ‘The Proverbs of Serlo of Wilton’, Mediaeval Studies, xvi (1954), 179–218
J. Öberg: Serlon de Wilton: poèmes latins (Stockholm, 1965)
P. Dronke: Medieval Latin and the Rise of the European Love-Lyric (Oxford,1965–6, 2/1968)
J. Öberg: ‘Einige Bemerkungen zu den Gedichten Serlos von Wilton’, Mittellateinisches Jb, vi (1970), 98
L.C. Braceland: Serlo of Sauvigny and Serlo of Wilton: Seven Unpublished Works (Kalamazoo, MI, 1988)
For further bibliography see Early Latin secular song.
GORDON A. ANDERSON/THOMAS B. PAYNE