Trouvère

Trouvère refers to poet-composers who were roughly contemporary with and influenced by the trobadors, both composing and performing lyric poetry during the High Middle Ages, but while the trobadors composed and performed in Old Occitan, the trouvères used the northern dialects of France.

Itinerant singers and performers existed, but they were called jongleurs and minstrels—professional entertainers, usually of somewhat lower social status.

Troubadours and trouvères, on the other hand, were often of higher social class and did not typically rely on music making as a trade.

They were either poets and composers who were supported by the aristocracy or, just as often, were aristocrats themselves, for whom the creation and performance of music was part of the courtly tradition.

However, these distinctions were not always clear, and varied by community[2] The texts of these songs are a natural reflection of the society that created them.

[9] The lexicographer Frédéric Godefroy defined the Old French word trouverresse as "she who composes, invents", citing a manuscript of a continuation of Robert of Auxerre's Chronicle.

The spelling troverresse also appears in the late 14th-century French–Latin dictionary Aalma, where it corresponds to Latin inuentrix (inventor).