2025/04/06 by Jenni Hyde · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Medieval Literature and History
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/1468-229x.70010
openalex publication_date 2025/04/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/15
Up to now, academic literature on minstrels and minstrelsy in late medieval England has been less than comprehensive, and for good reason: the fragmentary nature of the evidence makes reconstructing the life and work of English minstrels difficult.Rastell's book is a strong attempt to do just that.Social historians might bridle at the suggestion that 'the exploration of the circumstances of their lives and work concerns social history, whereas the more desirable end-product is the recovery of the minstrels' artistic achievement' (p.228) but even so, along with his coauthor, the literature scholar Andrew Taylor, Rastell combines both quite successfully.Despite his (perhaps refreshing) concession that the book offers 'no startling breakthroughs' (p.395), Rastell is right to highlight the ways in which understanding the minstrel's day-to-day life increases not only our knowledge of their culture, careers and employment but also helps to flesh out individuals' life stories.Rastell has completed a painstaking search of financial records in order to pull together the fragments of information which provide the basis for Parts I-III, which consider minstrelsy in elite households, urban settings and on the road.Minstrelsy was, Rastell argues, 'part of the under-lying structure of daily life' (p.395).These chapters give us a sense of how far minstrelsy was a career with relatively secure employment prospects.Indeed, it seems that many royal and noble masters provided financial support to allow their musicians to travel to the minstrel schools that were held during Lent in the Low Countries, France and Germany.In Part IV, the authors turn to more subjective accounts to supplement their evidence.Just how little source material remains from England is highlighted by the amount of substantiation that comes from Occitan trouvre sources in Taylor's chapters.Nevertheless, these sections rally the extant literary and artistic sources to consider not just what it was they sang, but how minstrels learned and performed their pieces.Rastell suggests, for example, that they might have used techniques such as playing in fifths to create music in two or three parts.Throughout, Minstrels and Minstrelsy does much to debunk persistent myths, such as that of the minstrel manuscript (in which an itinerant minstrel kept his songs) or the existence of the 'wandering' minstrel.Chapter 11, for example, deconstructs the myth of the sance pique: originating in the late nineteenth century, Lon Gautier's claim that visiting minstrels regularly entertained households with performances of thousands of lines of poetry, reciting chansons de gestes -epic narrative poems -over several hours in one sitting, has proved surprisingly persistent, given the paucity of supporting evidence.Taylor convincingly shows that shorter, sung performances were more likely the norm.This work will not only be of interest to medievalists.For those who work on early modern popular politics or popular culture, there is a tantalizing description of songs of abuse being sung by the population at large (pp.308-9), which might foreshadow the later scurrilous ballads which were the subject of repeated royal proclamations.Moreover, the examination of minstrel music in Chapter 15 might give us food for thought about the transition, if indeed there was such a thing, from minstrelsy to balladry, and go some way to explaining the existence of some of the anomalous early printed part-songs.There are a few caveats.In places, the text strays into (albeit well supported) conjecture, but this is perhaps to be expected of a book which deals with such patchy source material.There is also, at times, something of an assumption that readers will understand Latin and