Troubadours: everything you wanted to know

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Composing songs of courtly love and war in the High Middle Ages, the troubadours were the poet musicians of Western and southern Europe, especially southern France. But were they really the lovesick, wandering minstrels that popular culture would have us believe, or was there more to their artistry? Speaking to Emily Briffitt, Professor Linda Patterson, author of The Troubadours, answers your top questions on their lives and their enduring poetic and musical legacy. As with all of our Everything You Wanted to Know episodes, we have lots of lovely listener questions for you.

But as we're talking about troubadours today, I think we need to start with the broad strokes, the contextual question. What exactly was a troubadour? Okay, well a troubadour was a poet musician. active in the south of France and many other places in the 12th and 13th centuries, starting actually at the very end of the 11th century, and they sang in a language which we call Occitan, which is a fancy word for proven sale. Perfect.

And this is a question we have had from Dina Stanford on Facebook, who's just asked, could we say they were essentially medieval buskers? Yes, I like that question. In a way, but I think it's important to make a distinction between troubadours and jongleurs, or jonglars, as they said in Occitan, just to keep it simple, there's a difference between a troubadour who is a composer and a jongleur who is a performer, a singer. Although they could be the same person and somebody could start off as a jongleur and become a composer or vice versa. They're going to be mainly interested in performing where people are going to pay them well or give them a nice present, like a horse or a cloak, say.

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