Jongleurs (Joculari, Joculatores)

JONGLEURS (Joculari, Joculatores). - In the Middle Ages, "G." was the name given to those who practiced the profession of entertaining audiences of the various social classes, from commoners to nobles, in the piazzas as well as in the courts. They were also called histriones, mimi, bufones, etc. Such names were mostly used generically and interchangeably, because in reality a clear division was not possible either with regard to the repertoire or with regard to the different categories that formed the varied and multiform class of the g. Preferably, however, the name joculares was used to indicate the higher categories of those who practiced poetry, song and music. The tradition of the g. connects without a break to the histrionism of the classical age and extends down to the Renaissance.

Throughout this time the activity of the g. was intense in Western Europe, in Spain and Portugal, as in England, France, Provence, and Italy. To entertain their audiences the g. sang, played instruments, danced, performed dramatized monologues, often even dressing up and wearing masks; they acted as acrobats. They were ever-present at festivals, fairs, pilgrimages, and weddings. For the people they sang in the public square or at the street corner the chansons de geste, the facolelli or even love songs and jesting songs. Others, by contrast, frequented the courts, some wandering from one court to another, some instead remaining for many years with the same lord: for this reason in Italy they were often called uomini di corte or milites de curia, sometimes becoming confused, given also their not well-defined functions, with true courtiers. The g., together with buffoons and mimes, formed a numerous, varied, restless troop that wandered from country to country, so that R. Menéndez y Pidal rightly insists on the «international character of the guilleria»: thus, in Italy there came Breton, Norman, French, and Provençal g., while in Spain Italian g. are found. Sometimes women also practiced the profession of g. From the mid-12th century to the 14th century the number of g. in Italy was considerable, especially in the northern regions where they found wide favor with the aristocracy of the courts and the flourishing bourgeoisie of the Communes. Boncompagno da Signa, narrating a jest played by Guido Guerra on g. who had flocked to his court, puts their number at several hundreds. The importance of their poetic-musical activity in the history of our literature of the early centuries is greater than is usually said. «Through the work of the g. we had the first literary elaborations of the mother tongue» (De Bartholomaeis): their nomadism served to unify the different vernaculars, or at least to attenuate their differences, and to create in a certain sense a common «vernacular culture». What the repertoire of the g. was can be gathered, for Italy, from the Sirventese del maestro di tutte le arti by Ruggero Apuliese of Siena (mid-13th century) and from the later Cantare dei cantari; for Provence from the so-called Insegnamenti pe' giullari of Giraut Cabreira and others; for France from the dit dei Deux bordeors ribants.

No less important is the activity of the g. in the dramatic field, inasmuch as it is to them that the prolongation, throughout the Middle Ages, of the tradition of the mimi and histriones is due; many poetic productions of the early centuries, such as, for example, the Ritmo cassinese, the Lamento della sposa

Paduan, the Canzone del Castra, etc. are interpreted by some scholars as minstrel monologues, which the g. not only recited but performed. The Church fought the g. for the whole histrionic and buffoonish part, often distorted and irreverent; but, later, it also made use of their work for the spread of the cult of the Saints, in connection with pilgrimages and sanctuaries, and, without there being any need to think of a special category of "g. of God," one must bear in mind the rich poetic production of a hagiographic character, owed to the g., and which left its mark on the origins of the Romance literatures.

Paolo Toschi