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Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC

History magazine. Composing songs of courtly love and war in the high middle ages, the troubadours

were the poet musicians of Western and Southern Europe, especially Southern France. But were they really the

lovesick, wandering minstrels that popular culture would have as believe? Or was there more to their

artistry? Speaking to Emily Briffitt, Professor Linda Patterson, author of The Trubedores,

answers your top questions on their lives and their enduring poetic and

musical legacy. As with all of our everything you wanted to know episodes, we have lots of lovely

listener questions for you. But as we're talking about troubadours today, I think we need to start

with the broad strokes, the contextual question. What exactly was a troubadours today, I think we need to start with the broad strokes,

the contextual question, what exactly was a troubadour? Okay. Well, a troubadour was a poet musician,

active in the south of France and many other places in the 12th and 13th centuries, starting actually

at the very end of the 11th century, and they sang in a language

which we call OxyTam, which is a fancy word for Provensal.

Perfect. And this is a question we have had from Dinah Stanford on Facebook, who's just asked,

could we say they were essentially medieval buskers? Yes, I like that question. In a way, but I think it's important

to make a distinction between troubadours and janglers, or jugglers, as they said in Oxtan. Just to

keep it simple, there's a difference between a troubadour who is a composer and a jangler who is a performer, a singer, although they could be the same

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