The citole, a plucked fingerboard instrument of the 13th and 14th centuries, is today the most misunderstood of all medieval instruments. It is regularly wrongly identified as a plucked fiddle or a guitar, often confused with the cetra, and mistaken assumptions are made about its string material and its distinctive wedge neck with a thumb-hole.
Using the surviving British Museum citole, medieval iconography and medieval testimony, these two articles set out the evidence, drawing on the ground-breaking research of Laurence Wright, Crawford Young and Alice Margerum, with some additional observations.
This first article describes the citole’s physical form, string material and tuning. The second article describes the playing style and repertoire of the instrument.
We begin this article with video of a copy of the British Museum citole playing music from c. 1300: La seconde Estampie Royal – The second Royal Estampie. Read more