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Updated: June 3, 2025
When I return from the front, they almost devour me with questions." The early Methodist preachers, in the days when newspapers or books were few and scarce, and travel almost unknown, were in one respect not unlike the wandering minstrels or trouveres, not to say the Homeric singers of an earlier day.
The poets and reciters of tales, giving the name of Troubadour a French termination, called themselves Trouveres. They originated the brilliant romances of chivalry, the fabliaux or tales of amusement, and the dramatic invention of the Mysteries. Out of this legend arose some of the boldest creations of the human fancy.
The women sat before the doors in their pretty Sunday dresses, chattering with the young men, and no carriage nor any sound disturbed their low talk in that harmonious tongue on which the poems of the trouveres have shed such glory. It was exquisite. What a beautiful, nay, what an adorable country is France in all her varied aspects, east and west, north and south!
Aristophanes, by the vital and essential qualities of his humorous satire, is already more nearly our contemporary than Moliere; and even the Trouveres, careless and trivial as they mostly are, could fecundate a great poet like Chaucer, and are still delightful reading.
Ciullo d' Alcamo, flourishing about 1190, is the only Italian-writing poet absolutely contemporaneous with the earlier and better trouvères, troubadours, and minnesingers; and he is also the only one who resembles them very closely. Between Ciullo d' Alcamo and his successors there is some gap of time, and a corresponding want of gradation.
My reading, till now, had been almost wholly English or classical; she sent me to the old French literature to the Chansons de Geste; to the metrical romances of the Trouvères; to the Chronicles of Froissart, Monstrelet, and Philip de Comines, and to the poets and dramatists that immediately succeeded them.
Rutebeuf, one of the trouvères, thirteenth-century French poets, has a description of the scene in which one of the old herbalist doctors who used to go round and collect a crowd by means of songs and music, and then talk medicine to them just as is done even yet in many of the smaller towns of this country is represented as saying to the crowd when he wants to make them realize that he is no ordinary quacksalver, that he is one of the disciples of the great Madame Trot of Salerno.
For the metrical chronicle occupies an intermediate position between the prose chronicle, one of the favourite forms of mediaeval monastic production throughout Europe, and the metrical romance, which budded and blossomed most richly in France, where, during the last half of the twelfth century, it received its greatest impulse from Crestien de Troies, the most distinguished of the trouvères.
My knowledge of troubadours, trouvères, and minnesingers is obtained mainly from the great collections of Raynouard, Wackernagel, Mätzner, Bartsch, and Von der Hagen, and from Bartsch's and Simrock's editions and versions of Gottfried von Strassburg, Hartmann von Aue, and Wolfram von Eschenbach.
From the Moors of Spain, rhyme, which belonged to Arabian poetry, was introduced, and spread thence over Europe. After the thirteenth century the troubadours were heard of no more, and the Provencal tongue became a mere dialect. THE NORMAN WRITERS. The first writers and poets in the French language proper appeared in Normandy. They called themselves Trouveres.
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