Linda Paterson, The Troubadours, London, Reaktion, 2024
ISBN 9781789149197, 256 pp.
Composing songs of love and war in medieval Western and Southern Europe, troubadours spanned the social spectrum from kings and nobles to penniless minstrels. This book tells the story of the lives and art of these remarkable poet-musicians, famed for their brilliant, innovative use of words and music, and the emotional power of their compositions. The troubadours’ songs explored new ideas of love – the infamous ‘courtly love’ – as well as medieval perceptions of gender, class, war, chivalry, religion and the Crusades. Linda M. Paterson examines the troubadours’ music and performance, as well as their legacy, balancing insightful quotations in English translation with the original texts to highlight the forms and sounds of the poetry.