During the Middle Ages, poetry, singing, and dance flourished primarily within courtly circles, fostered by the patronage of the nobility and royalty. Thanks to this, the payment records and letters preserved in the Archive of the Crown of Aragon in Barcelona (ACA) contain a wealth of data about the presence and movements of minstrels, their social status as entertainment professionals, and their participation in public or private events linked to the Crown.

What do the documents from the ACA tell us about the minstrels of the medieval Catalan courts? To answer this question, the MiMus project has edited and analyzed an extensive corpus of documents about the artists who participated in the musical life of the courts of the kings of the House of Barcelona from the mid-13th century to the mid-15th century. The characteristics and scale of this corpus make it a collection capable of addressing some of the questions that scholars have posed about the production of music and poetry in the Middle Ages, its dissemination, and its potential function in the system of medieval courts.