Viols and other historic bowed string instruments

Abstract

While plucked strings have been used for musical purposes since at least the third millennium BCE, the idea of sounding a string by bowing it is a much more recent development. Bowed string instruments seem to have originated in Asia toward the end of the first millennium CE, and were in widespread use in Western Europe by the end of the eleventh century. For the next three centuries many different types of bowed instrument, with a bewildering variety of names, were in common use throughout Europe. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.