Not all those who wander are lost.
—J. R. R. Tolkien It is high time to read beyond the title and to think about the protean character to whom it refers in its first part. In French as in English, jongleur can now designate performers of innumerable different complexions. It behooved the practitioners of this profession to wear many hats. In their versatility, they diverted their audiences, both lay and ecclesiastical, with displays of verbal, musical, and physical skill. Even a very approximate taxonomy of these entertainers ramifies into a many-branched family tree. As artists of the word, they composed, ad-libbed, or rattled off verses and told tales. To detail these activities in composition and delivery more specifically, a jongleur could be a singer or composer of love songs, comic narratives, heroic lays, or other narratives such as histories and saints’ lives. In the fullest sense of the expression, they would sing for their supper.
What is more, jongleurs were actors. At the humblest level, they mimed and mummed in dumb shows. Likewise, they tried their hands (truly) as puppeteers.
Then too, they served as buffoons, clowns, fools, and jesters. Beyond acting, they ventured before their audiences as musicians, singers and instrumentalists alike. In another direction, they could perform physically as acrobats, contortionists, dancers and dance masters, fire-eaters, gymnasts, jugglers, ropewalkers, stiltwalkers, and sword-dancers, -jugglers, and -swallowers. Among other things, they were conjurors and magicians. To go beyond the purely human, they tamed, trained, and exhibited animals, such as bears, dogs, and snakes, and they entered the fray as equestrians too.
All told, it may sometimes seem harder to determine what they were not than what they were. They acted as the archetypal and ultimate crossover artists, prepared to do whatever would attract medieval thrill-seekers.
The repertoires of such entertainers were not restricted merely to acts of physical adroitness such as acrobatics, prestidigitation, and juggling. Their stock-in-trade also had a verbal (and voluble) dimension. Indeed, these performers drew upon all the sorts of words and music associated with the wandering minstrels and court jesters who long ago became embedded in modern conceptions of medieval life (see Fig. 2.2).
Although sometimes courtly, such figures were often related to discreditable places and activities, such as taverns and throwing dice. A jongleur could be a professional gambler, instrumentalist, or contortionist—or all of the above. Likewise, he could be a mountebank, an individual who would hop onto a long seat to do his act. The last designation, originating in the Italian imperative “climb on (the) bench!,” is a metonymy
that tends to imply an inn or alehouse, where the bare minimum of furniture would have been trestles, tabletops, and benches. We are not talking about fancy marquetry.
In worlds without theaters, the altitude of such seating was often as close as actors and audiences could get to stages or circus rings. In time, the mountebank became as we know him today, a nomadic charlatan who stands atop an elevation, maybe even a plank on two sawhorses, not so much to enact an entertainment routine as to peddle a nostrum or some other overpriced product of quackery.
Fig. 2.2 Postcard depicting court jesters (L. Vandamme et Cie, 1905).
Guiraut de Calanson, often termed (with only flimsy support) a Gascon troubadour, frequented the courts of northern Spain. In the first two decades of the thirteenth century, he composed a dozen poems in Occitan that are extant today. In one of these compositions, he lays out the talent that a performer worthy of being called a jongleur should have. In enumerating an ideal repertoire, he touches upon the abilities to speak and rhyme wittily, be steeped in the Trojan legend, balance apples on the tips of knives, juggle, jump through hoops, and play multiple musical instruments.
What can the etymology of jongleur tell us? The English is scrounged from the French, which in its turn is a direct blood relative of the Latin ioculator. By whatever name, the term denoted then a joker or jokester, usually professional. At its broadest, the word meant any kind of entertainer. The primary sense of the original noun in the learned language derived from iocus, meaning “game, play, or jest.” The English word
“joke” comes from the same noun. In the Middle Ages, both the Latin and vernacular nouns became contaminated by association with a similar-sounding term of Germanic origin, jangler (babbler, chatterbox, gossip, liar, scandal-monger, calumniator). Yet the early medieval labor market did not allow many entertainers to specialize in the arts of speech alone. They learned to move among verbal, musical, and physical skills.
Therefore the Latin noun gave rise in English not only to “joker” but also to “juggler.”
Ioculator was but one item in the sprawling Medieval Latin nomenclature to indicate this ilk. In the ferocious Darwinian battleground that language can constitute,
this noun rode roughshod over its closest predecessors and eventually displaced them. The results can be cross-checked in many European tongues, including English. Throughout Europe, the Latin word has progeny that go back to the Middle Ages. In contradistinction, the root of histrio survives mainly as a later and learned reintroduction from Greek, whence the adjective histrionic. Likewise, the stem of the other derivative from the same language, mimus, has become largely restricted to the ambit of mime-player. Finally, the Latin scurra has persisted solely as embedded in scurrilous and scurrility. As performers became more professionalized, stark shifts took place in the old meanings of words. In English, the most common derivative of the Latin ioculator became not a “joker” in general, but much more narrowly a
“juggler.” In medieval French, it denoted above all entertainers who specialized in song.
Similarly, the jester turned into a clown-like figure, even though the name originally implied an artist or teller of tales or stories. A gestour was a teller of gestes, or “stories.”
From him descended the jester as we know him. Another Latin noun of the Middle Ages has been largely omitted so far.
The ioculator had a major competitor in the ministerialis. The two, jongleurs and minstrels, were sometimes conflated. The medieval Latin ministerialis, better known now as minstrel, signified literally “of a little minister, servant,” but more commonly
“minor court official.” In turn, the term in the learned language came from the noun ministerium for “service, office,” itself derived from minister. It signified the hireling of a lord, either secular or ecclesiastical, or prince. The French for “minstrel” derived from this Latin. The vernacular word soon referred to a person who had mastered a craft. The word to describe what a minister does is ministerium “ministry.” Mestier, the medieval French derivative of that noun, gives us métier.
To slip from conflation to its opposite, a primary distinction has been predicated between jongleurs and trouvères. Cognates of these two terms exist in the language of southern France and other neighboring Mediterranean regions. In presentations of poetics in this other Romance tongue, the two groups are sometimes differentiated by stressing that the joglar performs, whereas the trobador invents or composes. By this standard, the two types of professionals were as distinct or indistinct as artisans from artists. The underlying premise is that the jongleur or joglar is a professional musician and singer, whereas the trouvère or trobador is a songwriter and lyricist—not quite gentlemen scholars, but much closer to them than the jongleurs. The last-mentioned were marginal beings whose social standing and reputation could be deemed equivocal, at best. They were edgy in every sense of the word: they specialized in brinkmanship, by operating at the margins. In contrast, trouvères could have achieved exalted status through their affiliation with noble courts.
The dichotomy can apply as well to Latin. Cognates for trouvères and troubadours are not used there, but substantially the same line is drawn between functions. Clerics could concoct texts in Latin or even in vernacular languages, such as medieval French.
Often, they relied upon lay entertainers to deliver them. In this schema, jongleurs perform orally in the vulgar tongue before lay audiences. All the same, we should not
suppose that the writers in the Middle Ages who used these words upheld the nuance regularly. We should be even less disposed to credit that composers and performers themselves had fixed terminology to describe themselves. The relevance, or even existence, of such glib sociocultural distinctions between trouvères and jongleurs has been rightly challenged. The differences in meaning between the two are not nearly so straightforward and schematic as some would wish us to believe. Take the courts, for example, where minstrels and jongleurs are often discussed as if they were transposable. As the associations of their name suggest, minstrel is the diminutive of the noun minister. A minstrel can be then a minor official attached to a set retinue. To warrant being named what they were, they may have largely abandoned the rootless itinerancy that put wandering players into friction with the sedentariness and stability esteemed within much of medieval society.
Another factor to weigh is a reshuffling that may have occurred over time.
Troubadours who became impoverished may have cascaded many rungs to become jongleurs, while jongleurs who succeeded may have scaled the social ladder. Whatever the causes, over time the neat differentiation between troubadours and jongleurs seems to have become muddied. In 1274, a late troubadour penned a lengthy poem of supplication to King Alfonso X of Castile. In it, he asked that the inhabitants of his kingdom maintain bright-line distinctions between the two groups. This poet approved that the Castilians still discriminated among instrumentalists, imitators, troubadours, and even more reprehensible performers. In contrast, in Provence at the time, the troubadours had become déclassé and lost the cachet of their name, the supremacy that originated in their ability to compose. They were all called jongleurs without differentiation.
Certain proclivities of jongleurs stand beyond dispute. For a start, these performers tended to be transients who subsisted and worked on peripheries. With their special privilege of laissez-aller, they existed at the fringes of princely and ecclesiastical courts, villages, and everywhere else they circulated. The marginality in which the entertainers were enveloped because of their profession meant that they were often considered disreputable—personae non gratae. Yet their rakishness was not an undiluted negative. For instance, they could venture into places where, and at times when, others could not. The protagonist of Our Lady’s Tumbler may have benefited from the carte blanche accorded jongleurs, at least when they appeared as characters in fiction. He seems to have enjoyed license to roam the monastery at will.
When considering the medieval French poem, we must take note that the hero is not a street performer in straitened circumstances, however often grinding poverty and professional failure are assumed to be the case in post-medieval adaptations of the tale. On the contrary, the tumbler has proven himself to be a successful entrepreneur in entertainment. Unlike the visionaries who experienced many of the most important apparitions of Mary in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the dancer betrays no sign of enduring economic deprivation, political upheaval, or brewing war. What he
does let drop is that he lives in a time of high religiosity, particularly when devotion to the Virgin enters consideration.
Traditionally, jongleurs were expected to be multitalented. Yet no one individual could be a true jack-of-all-trades, thoroughly competent in all the arts that were ascribed to this class of entertainers. A little before 1215, Thomas of Chobham produced a vade mecum of practical theology on penance and confession for priests, which accrued wide favor. In it, the English-born but Paris-educated ecclesiastic distinguished among three classes of performers, referring to all of them generically as histriones. Thinking of ‘histrionic’ gives a clue. The first category in his taxonomy comprises those who specialize in what we might call physical comedy or burlesque.
Part of their disgrace consists in their habit of disrobing to a level of attire (or should we say non-attire?) that common folk found shocking, even horrid. These entertainers rate the lowest in Thomas’s hierarchy. The second of his groupings encompasses gossips, while the third comprises singers. The last two have in common that their tongues wag. He subdivided the vocalists in turn into two clusters, one praiseworthy and the other not worth a tinker’s damn.
The ethical framework of this manual tags as bad those jongleurs who do not direct the body to spiritual goals. These lowlifes do not shrink from unabashed buffoonery in either words or deeds. In effect, they submit the spirit to the flesh. Still worse, they engage as agents provocateurs to sin. By engaging in obscene movements of the anatomy, they incite concupiscence in other people. From Genesis 1:27 on, we know that a person’s frame is made in God’s image. As such, the human body is not to be deformed. Neglectful of this divine analogue, acrobats writhe their limbs out of shape.
By employing their physique to despicable ends, they have the look of streetwalkers.
If the tumbler were truly like such gymnasts, he would resemble at best a harlot saint like Mary Magdalene or Thaïs before conversion. That is, he would earn his living by selling his body through enactment of base acts. Yet his solution differs, since he does not so much turn away from his profession by leaving it as redeem it by inventing a means of making the performance private and transcendent.
As a caste, physical jongleurs deserve their comeuppance. They not only indulge in frivolity themselves, but even worsen matters by implicating others. Through their sensuality, they stimulate lustfulness and turpitude among their audience.
But what can be said of good jongleurs? On the positive side, Thomas excepts from condemnation jongleurs who “sing the lofty deeds of princes and lives of saints, furnish solace when a person is sick or unsettled, and do not commit the disgraceful acts that male and female acrobats perform, as well as those who put on shameful shows.”
This laudable type of trouper serves the aims of the Church and elicits wary approval above all for helping to propagate the cults of saints and pilgrimage. The approved kind restricts physicality to a sober-minded bearing and to the playing of musical instruments. To this top-flight echelon in his classificatory system the ecclesiastical writer grants careful but ungrudging approbation. In concluding his consideration,
he relates an anecdote about a jongleur. This individual addresses himself to Pope Alexander III to test the waters about his fate in the afterlife. He wants to find out if he can win salvation. His holiness asks him if he knows another trade. Despite receiving a negative answer, the supreme pontiff assures his jumpy inquirer that he can live without fear so long as he avoids suggestive conduct or obscenity.
In the Romance of Flamenca we again encounter three genera of jongleurs, but the taxonomy is not at all the same as in Thomas of Chobham. First come those who sing songs, lyric and narrative; then instrumentalists; and finally, physical performers.
Before entering a monastery, the artist in Our Lady’s Tumbler would have been completely at home in this third cadre. By the same token, the acrobat in the medieval French poem belongs to the final one in Thomas’s three ranks of entertainers. His flair, like theirs, lies in the body. So far as we are given to know, our tumbler is an old hand solely in acrobatics, including what we would regard as dance. Indeed, we are told explicitly that he knew only to make his leaps and that he was incapable of anything else. He is not an odd-job man in the entertainment field.
What accounts for the permafrost distrust and disregard in which performers, especially of the physical sort, were held? One pat answer would be that Christians in the Middle Ages were meant to leave the body behind, and not to dwell upon it. The anxieties of people across the centuries about the human plight of having an immortal spirit caged within a mortal frame were captured starkly in medieval debates. In the culture of the Middle Ages, body and soul were often presented as antithetical.
Debate poems abound in which the two are pitted against each other. This makes sense, considering that the tension between them is a common and perhaps even a fundamental human dilemma. How do we reconcile two such different pulls upon us?
In such exchanges, the soul often occupied a position of superiority over the body.
It held the moral high ground. In other cases, the two were equally inculpated. Within the asceticism and body-denying spirit of medieval Christianity, it was questionable enough for the entertainer to have a sharpened sensitivity to his own body. How could the joy of dance qualify as asceticism? Even worse, spectators would have been inspired too by the tumbler to pay closer heed to their corporeality as human beings.
Yet we must also remember that the acrobat kills himself through the mortification of his devotion. He makes his physicality the means to an end: his body serves as the instrument for the expression of his soul in worship. He makes the prison of the spirit into an escape hatch.
Physicality thrusts the tumbler to the bottom of the scale for jongleurs and minstrels.
It took a long time for the shame of his corporeality to be destigmatized. Generally, both kinds of artists are portrayed in vernacular literature as being able to sing and play the fiddle-like vielle or harp, as well as perhaps to tumble and perform acrobatics.
A manuscript of the Old Spanish Canticles of Saint Mary portrays King Alfonso X the Wise on bended knee before Mary as he calls upon a gaggle of jongleurs, both
instrumentalists and dancers, to join him in performing in her honor (see Fig. 2.3).
The fragmentary Old Occitan epic Daurel and Beton depicts a professional jongleur named Daurel who possesses both skill sets, musical and athletic. Yet he refrains from imparting his gymnastic arts to his king’s son Beton, and instead gives him a boot camp in music and song alone. Implied is that the physical stunts would ill besuit the station of a nobleman. Whatever their menu of professional skills, jongleurs tended to be regarded with suspicion but not with universal condemnation. A more benevolent outlook upon them can be detected in a thirteenth-century poem by the troubadour Cerveri de Girona, which gives utterance to nail-biting about the spiritual salvation of jongleurs. After initially exhorting them to renounce their wrongful and debasing
The fragmentary Old Occitan epic Daurel and Beton depicts a professional jongleur named Daurel who possesses both skill sets, musical and athletic. Yet he refrains from imparting his gymnastic arts to his king’s son Beton, and instead gives him a boot camp in music and song alone. Implied is that the physical stunts would ill besuit the station of a nobleman. Whatever their menu of professional skills, jongleurs tended to be regarded with suspicion but not with universal condemnation. A more benevolent outlook upon them can be detected in a thirteenth-century poem by the troubadour Cerveri de Girona, which gives utterance to nail-biting about the spiritual salvation of jongleurs. After initially exhorting them to renounce their wrongful and debasing