Linda M. Paterson, The Troubadours. Medieval Lives. London: Reaktion Books, 2024. 256 pp., 7 b/w and 33 color ill.

Linda Paterson is an esteemed and highly respected scholar of the troubadours whose interests in these poet-musicians encompass a profound knowledge of their literary skill and their historical setting. For these reasons and others, she is the perfect person to write a volume on the troubadours for the series Medieval Lives, a collection whose purpose is to present “medieval people, concepts and events, drawing on political and social history, philosophy, material culture …. These books are global and wide-ranging in scope … and span the fifth to the fifteenth centuries.” Paterson herself states, “This book is designed to be accessible to anyone interested in or curious about the medieval troubadours” (7). The series addresses the general reader, not the specialist, and hopes to give that reader background that will incite further investigation, in other words, a college-student audience. I have read the book with this audience in mind.