One of my students looked at my website and suggested that I include a blog post or a lore entry about medieval music and lyric poetry. The student reminded me that the poetry and songs in Tolkien’s books, for example, are one aspect that many readers enjoy.

The suggestion was a good one. I knew that some educated knights and nobles had participated in chivalric culture as troubadours. I knew that traveling minstrels could earn their food, drink, and lodging.

But my musical knowledge is low and perhaps declining year by year, so I’m limited in what I can usefully offer here (until, or if, I follow up on my daughter’s command that I should learn about music so she could talk about it with me in musical vocabulary).

I know from my reading that minstrels performed regularly in noble halls, taverns, and trading fairs. I have created two bard or troubadour characters embedded inside my story arcs so far, and I have included some mentions of hiring traveling minstrels or giving guest rights to a troubadour.

From Aubrey’s book (see below) and other sources, I learned that many troubadours were knights or nobles who fully engaged with the practices of court chivalry. I know that some women were “poet-composers” (6).

According to Aubrey, music from forty-two (42) of the 460 known troubadours (named in one source or another) has survived into the present. A useful feature of her book is the brief biographical sketches of the forty-two composers (6). She offers a thorough treatment of troubadour lyrics and music.

I’m unlikely, however, to learn enough about music to pull off what Patrick Rothfuss did in The Name of the Wind. So I share this list of four music resources for those of you who want more musicality in your medievalist fiction.

Meanwhile, I’ll retreat, for now, back into my economic histories and military histories.

Relevant Books

Elizabeth Aubrey, The Music of the Troubadours

Robert Briffault, The Troubadours

John Haines, Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouvères: The Changing Identity of Medieval Music

Richard H. Hoppin, Medieval Music

Other Useful Books on Medieval History

Christopher Dyer, Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society: The Estates of the Bishopric of Worcester, 680–1540

S.C. Rowell, Lithuania Ascending: A Pagan Empire within East-Central Europe, 1295–1345

Anne F. Sutton, The Mercery of London: Trade, Goods and People, 1130–1578

Elspeth M. Veale, The English Fur Trade in the Later Middle Ages