Jongleurs

Those who told stories in the Middle Ages have been called by many names: minstrel, jongleur, troubadour, trouvÐ"Ёre, bard, scÐ"Ò'p, gleeman. But what more do we know of those performers of the Middle Ages, and more specifically those of Medieval France? The easy answer is not a lot. However, if we delve deeper into what artefacts remain of medieval society, we are able to fill in the gaps of our knowledge of these integral parts of medieval culture. My goal in this paper is to analyse the presence of the jongleur in a number of texts and images and to look at the inherent difficulties in determining their role both in contemporary medieval society and within the stories they told.

Because these performers were known by so many different names, it is important to distinguish the one from the other. William Quinn and Audley Hall tell us that "Jongleur is the term now commonly used to designate the professional reciter of extended narrative poetry..." . The term minstrel is many times used interchangeably with jongleur, as it will be in this paper; however, minstrel or mÐ"©nestrel carries with it multiple connotations that jongleur does not. Jongleur is specific to the Middle Ages; whereas minstrel is also used to describe musicians specifically, in addition to the black-faced performers of Vaudeville. Bard, scÐ"Ò'p, and gleeman are of Celtic, Scandinavian, and Anglo-Saxon derivation, respectively.

A further distinction that must be made is in social standing. All of the previously mentioned performers were of more or less the same status in society. The two that do not fit into that category are troubadour and trouvÐ"Ёre. These two types of performers, troubadour from Southern France and trouvÐ"Ёre from Northern France, belonged mostly to the noble class; whereas the jongleur and minstrel were considered to be lower than peasants on the ladder of social hierarchy. I will be further