Carmina gallica, French songs... The literal translation of this title has special, very contemporary resonances for the man of the 21st century, but the poetry and music in our program all date from the period from the end of the 11th at the very beginning of the 13th century. It is largely secular music, some paraliturgical pieces having nevertheless their place, justified by the very close links that bind secular and sacred poetry at that time. All are in Latin and are the work of clerics: songs of love, of lamentation, of jubilation, narrations, dance songs, sequences, pious conduits;;; All these poems, written in a language that is now dead, testify to an unsuspected greenness and freshness. Singing them nearly eight hundred years later is the best way for us to be touched by this 12th century so far removed from us and to understand it.