COINS/COINAGE
. See CURRENCY
COLIN MUSET
(fl. 2nd third of the 13th c.). Trouvèrejongleur of the second third of the 13th century.
Colin has been credited with a score of lyrics, varied in genre and unusually reflective of
the poet’s life; about half survive with music. He was from Lorraine, of humble
condition, and made his living as an itinerant entertainer. Colin was inventive in
compositional form and original in substance, less concerned with the constraints of
courtly love than with the delights, real or imagined, of a freer sensuality. Apart from
love, his themes include the pleasures of the table, spring, and revery, the satisfactions
and difficulties of a minstrel’s calling, the avarice of some patrons, the animation of
tournaments. The texts are striking in their relatively abundant concrete detail and
unhindered self-expression; the genres are no less so, including as they do such rare ones
as the lai/descort and reverdie. Colin Muset is perhaps the most markedly individual of
the trouvères.
Samuel N.Rosenberg
[See also: TROUVÈRE POETRY]
Colin Muset. Les chansons de Colin Muset, ed. Joseph Bédier. 2nd ed. Paris: Champion, 1938.
Rosenberg, Samuel N., and Hans Tischler, eds. Chanter m’estuet: Songs of the Trouvères.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981, pp. 450–64.
van der Werf, Hendrik, ed. Trouvères-Melodien II. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1979, pp. 435–45.
COLMAR
. Located on the plain of Alsace near the foothills of the Vosges, Colmar (Haut-Rhin)
dates back to at least the 13th century and possibly much earlier. Although the date of the
first Christian settlement in the south of Alsace has not been attested, it is known that in
823 Benedictine monks of the abbey of Münster arrived, and they had founded a religious
establishment west of the Harbourg by 865. A charter from the 10th century records a
donation from Empress Adelaide for the foundation of the priory of Saint-Pierre. Among
the many medieval buildings that have been preserved are the church of Saint-Martin, a
cloister and chapel of a former Dominican monastery now incorporated in the Musée
d’Unterlinden, a Franciscan house (now Saint-Matthieu), and a second church associated
with the Dominicans.
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