Hugh Primas of Orléans was a Latin lyric poet of the 12th century, a scholar from Orléans

Orléans

-Prehistory and Roman:Cenabum was a Gallic stronghold, one of the principal towns of the Carnutes tribe where the Druids held their annual assembly. It was conquered and destroyed by Julius Caesar in 52 BC, then rebuilt under the Roman Empire...

 who was jokingly called Primas, "the Primate", by his friends at the University of Paris

University of Paris

The University of Paris was a university located in Paris, France and one of the earliest to be established in Europe. It was founded in the mid 12th century, and officially recognized as a university probably between 1160 and 1250...

. He was probably born in the 1090s and may have died about 1160. Along with his younger contemporary, the Archpoet

Archpoet

The Archpoet , or ' , is the name given to a 12th century anonymous author of ten poems from medieval Latin literature, the most famous being his "Confession" found in the manuscript...

, he marks the opening of a new period in Latin literature.

The earliest and best-known source for Hugh Primas's life is in a passage added to the text of the Chronica of Richard of Poitiers

Richard of Poitiers

Richard of Poitiers , also known as Richard of Cluny, was a monk of the Benedictine abbey of Cluny, and author of a small number of historical works , treatises and poems.-Life:...

 for the year 1142:
Hugh is also mentioned in the Chronicle by Francesco Pippino, and he may be "Primasso", the subject of a story in Boccaccio

Giovanni Boccaccio

Giovanni Boccaccio was an Italian author and poet, a friend, student, and correspondent of Petrarch, an important Renaissance humanist and the author of a number of notable works including the Decameron, On Famous Women, and his poetry in the Italian vernacular...

's Decameron (1.7).

Other medieval writers say very little about his life: they knew "Primas" for his poems. Yet they rarely quoted them under his name. Modern scholars were therefore able to attribute no work to Hugh Primas until Wilhelm Meyer

Wilhelm Meyer (philologist)

Wilhelm Meyer was a German classical scholar, initially a librarian and literary scholar, who worked also on musicology. He became professor of Classical and Medieval Latin Philology at the University of Göttingen...

 observed, in 1906, that one poem actually contains the name "Primas". Meyer then realised that the Oxford

Bodleian Library

The Bodleian Library , the main research library of the University of Oxford, is one of the oldest libraries in Europe, and in Britain is second in size only to the British Library...

manuscript containing this one poem includes a collection of twenty-two others that are probably by the same author, including another seven containing the internal signature "Primas".

The twenty-three poems identified by Meyer, and edited by him in 1907, are now generally accepted as the work of Hugh Primas, though A. G. Rigg has expressed doubts about some attributions.