Abstract

Whether known as jongleur, minstrel, gestour, disour, mimus, scurra, or by some other term, the professional entertainer who sings, tells jokes and stories, and declaims the deeds of great men is a ubiquitous figure in both medieval literature and modern scholarship. A large body of literature, not only heroic narrative such as the chansons de geste and the romances, but also fabliaux, political satires, and short comic monologues, has been confidently placed in the minstrel repertoire, and terms such as “minstrel tag,” “minstrel style,” and “minstrel text” are in common use. Although these attributions have met with increased suspicion in recent years, no one has fully challenged the widespread assumption that there exists somewhere a body of manuscripts that once belonged to minstrels, manuscripts that would offer codicological evidence of the practice and range of narrative minstrelsy