Troubadours and minstrels

Fiction set in the Middle Ages often features troubadours and minstrels, fairly low-born men who wandered around from castle to castle, singing songs and eyeing the ladies.  This image is true at least in part, but as anyone who has been paying attention to this blog probably expects, it was more complicated.

For starters, troubadours were not all low-born.  Indeed, the person usually considered the first troubadour was William IX, duke of Aquitaine, Eleanor of Aquitaine's grandfather.  He was credited with writing all sorts of songs and poems in Occitan, the local French dialect.  Troubadours and minstrels became common in the twelfth century, some of them wealthy lords, others the wandering singers of popular imagination.

Troubadours, those who composed elegant love songs (as opposed to people who just sang others' songs), were especially common in southern France, where they began.  A lot of their songs were addressed to powerful ladies, but often written in code, so that a lady whom the troubadour admired might be addressed as "She who says No."  In practice, people might well guess who was meant, but the lady could either deny it or claim it as she preferred.

Although scholars once wondered why so many noble women were addressed by the troubadours as powerful people who could order around those under them, including their would-be lovers,  the answer is simple.  A whole lot of noble women were powerful people who ordered around those under them.  As soon as one stops thinking of medieval women as weak, the question "Why would songs show them as in charge?" is answered.  It's because they were in charge.

Some of these songs were yearning songs of love for ladies too far away or too socially elevated ever to be romantically interested in the troubadour.  Others were fairly explicit about what he expected—and it was not admiration from afar.  Although scholars once credited the troubadours with creating "courtly love" (on which see more here), perhaps even (in a burst of desperate scholarly enthusiasm) influenced by Arabic songs, there was never a recognizable male-female form of interactions that medieval people would have called courtly love.

For one thing, modern scholars can't even decide what "courtly love" supposedly entailed, whether it was rank adultery or chaste admiration from a distance.  Let's get real.  It can't be both.    Courtly love isn't even a medieval term.  Back to the troubadours.

Although the elegant love songs began in southern French, they were soon imitated and sung all over Europe.  Northern French trouvères translated them into their own version of French, as well as writing their own.  In Germany Minnesingers, those who composed elegant songs of love in German, became common in the thirteenth century.  Spain,  England, and Italy developed their own love songs.  Women sometimes wrote songs in the tradition, often about unfaithful lovers—some who made their beloved woman expire in sorrow, some who were rightly punished.  Knights who spent most of their time in fighting or training to fight still felt it appropriate to try to write such songs, some sad and thoughtful, some downright bawdy.  Everybody plagiarized everybody.

The minstrels, those who made a living wandering around singing songs they picked up everywhere, were essentially indistinguishable from jongleurs, wandering entertainers who were welcomed to town or court with both keen enjoyment and sharp suspicion.  Women often were part of a jongleur troupe.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For more on troubadours and minstrels,  see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.

Falling in Love

In the second half of the twentieth century, the popular songs were all about love.  From "She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah," to "Paint it black," to "Leader of the pack," they were about falling in love, being in love, losing one's love.  In spite of some modern rap songs about going out and shooting people, love still dominates the airways.

This focus on love seems so normal that it may be hard to realize how unusual it is.  But in fact the twelfth century and the twentieth century have been the predominant times in the West when love dominated popular culture.

Vernacular literature, that is stories written in the everyday language rather than in learned Latin, had its start at the beginning of the twelfth century with the epic "Song of Roland."  But this epic, in which the only appearance of love is when (spoiler alert!) Roland's fiancée faints and dies after hearing of his death, was quickly joined by romances, in which falling in love drove the plot.

The romances both glorified and critiqued love--never following any set "code" such as one might now mistakenly call "courtly love."  King Arthur stories were a creation of the twelfth century, and love dominated these stories, but very often it was forbidden, adulterous love.  Both the love between Lancelot and Queen Guinevere, and the stories of the love between Tristan and Isolde which inspired the Lancelot stories, are descriptions of sin.  The characters, the authors, and the audience all knew this.  It could be fun, but you were going to hell.

In twelfth-century epics (after "Roland") and romances, the women were all very active participants.  In some cases they led men astray, but more often they saved the day.  In "Guillaume de Dole," the heroine personally pleads her case in court and ends up tricking the man who untruthfully boasted that he had had an affair with her into confessing.  In the epic "Raoul de Cambrai," even though most of the men end up killing each other, it is clear that their problem was that they did not listen to the women.

The romances that glorified love suggested that it was a reason to get married.  Now it had always been assumed that husbands and wives should love each other and be true to each other (see more here on medieval marriage and medieval sex), but for the first time in the twelfth century falling in love came first, as a reason to get married rather than something that came after the wedding.

In practice, no aristocratic parent was going to allow their teenage children to wander around the countryside, find an appropriate partner, fall in love, and then get married.  Marriage alliances were too important to allow that kind of randomness.  But that is what happened to the heroes and heroines of medieval romance.  Interestingly, they generally fell for someone who it was right that they should marry anyway.

Twelfth-century courts, where unmarried men and women mingled, must have been full of meaningful glances, stolen kisses, passed notes, and broken hearts.  The romances described the symptoms of falling in love as fevers and burning aches.  The adults appear to have tolerated such behavior as long as everything stayed platonic--and a medieval castle would have had very few opportunities for privacy.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014