The Myth of the Minstrel Manuscript

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 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. The manuscripts in question are the small, plain, battered working texts that the minstrels are alleged to have carried with them on their travels. Per Nykrog, without obvious ironic intention, sums up the consensus perfectly: Personne n'a doute, je crois, de l'existence de 'manuels' dans lesquels les jongleurs conservaient leur repertoire.2 Certainly scholars have raised doubts about the ownership of individual manuscripts, but their doubts have been frequently overlooked or ignored. The diversity of minstrelsy compounds the problem: it is all too easy to assume, as Nykrog does, that while one's own area of expertise yields no firm examples of manuscripts, there must be plentiful examples in those of others. Although in many cases the individual manuscripts have already been the subject of