A translation of the mediaeval Latin songs known as the Carmina Burana, this collection makes use of various types of translation (identification with the text, use of the text as a means of experimentation, physical abuse of the text, and extension beyond it) in order to examine specific linguistic and social histories, and to engage their contemporary traces. The writers of the verses collected together as the Carmina Burana were travellers, masterless clerks who studied, drank, wrote, prayed, screwed, gambled, and begged their way around 13th century Western Europe. Their decidedly vernacular use of Latin, the language of religious and secular authority, is strikingly heretical.