Courtly love

Courtly love was a medieval European system of attitudes, myths and etiquette that spawned several genres of medieval literature, including Romance. It governed the real and idealized behavior of knights and their ladies as they pursued one another in a flirting, often only verbal, and principally chaste relationship that was intended to flatter the lady and elevate, ennoble, and energize the knight. Although the English expression courtly love in general modern use means an unconsummated relationship, courtly love in medieval Europe was in fact often adulterous.

Background

Courtly love had its origins above all in four courtly circles, that of Aquitaine, where William IX, Duke of Aquitaine, was one of the first troubadour poets, that of Provence, where it was known as fin'amor, that of Champagne and that of ducal Burgundy. Courtly love was an aspect of a renewed pleasure in the refinements of the better kind of life, the "delightful understanding" or gai saber of Provençal poets, beginning about the time of the First Crusade.

In essence, courtly love was a formalized system of admiration and courtship, modeled after feudal obligations of fealty translated to the part of a "gentle" knight towards an unavailable lady, usually a person married to someone other than the admirer, and generally of higher status. Courtly love was the idea that a noble man would dedicate his life to the love of a lady. Such a love could not exist within marriage, it was believed, but had to be love from afar — at least in the view of the purists. Although many accounts insisted that love between a married couple was impossible, because they were bound to honor and serve each other, the cases proposed to "Courts of Love" showed women insisting they had not lost their knights' love by marrying them.

At times, the lady could be a princesse lointaine, a far-away princess, and some tales told of men who had fallen in love with women whom they had never seen, merely on hearing their perfection described, but normally she was not so distant that it could not also include consummation. As the etiquette of courtly love became more complicated, the knight might wear the colors of his lady: blue or black were the colors of faithfulness; green was a sign of unfaithfulness. Salvation, previously found in the hands of the priesthood, now came from the hands of one's lady. In some cases, there were also women troubadours who expressed the same sentiment for men.

The courtly love tradition was non-Christian, providing an alternative to the love of God and the Church, placing salvation in the love of your lady (or man). Marriage had recently been declared a sacrament of the Church, at the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215, and within Christian marriage, the only purpose was procreation with any sex beyond that purpose seen as non-pious. The ideal state of a Christian was celibacy, even in marriage. By the beginning of the 13th century the ideas of courtly tradition were condemned by the church as being heretical. The church channeled many of these energies into the cult of the virgin; it is not a coincidence that the cult of the Virgin Mary began in the 12th century as a counter to the secular, courtly and lustful views of women. Francis of Assisi called poverty "his Lady".

Such a courtly love had a civilizing effect on knightly behavior, beginning in the late 11th century; it has been suggested that the prevalence of arranged marriages required other outlets for the expression of more personal occurrences of romantic love. New expressions of highly personal private piety in the 11th century were at the origins of what a modern observer would recognize as a personality, and the vocabulary of piety was also transferred to the conventions of courtly love.

Thus feudalism, piety and a covert non-Christian ideal of love fused into a new culture, without precedents in Europe. The culture, however, was isolated within a few aristocratic courts. Such refined feelings, the readers of Guillaume de Lorris's Roman de la Rose assumed, were not a matter for the peasant or the townsman, whose natures were considered too coarse and who were too busy trying to survive to take part in elaborate courtship rituals. Later, a robust bourgeois "anti-courtly" literature in vernacular languages developed in the 14th century, when many of the new courtly elements, such as the yearnings of romantic love, had in fact permeated the urban middle class.

Ideals of courtly love were expressed in the vernacular court poetry called the romans courtois, some of them set within the cycle of poems celebrating King Arthur's court (Tristan, for example). This was a literature of leisure, directed to a largely female audience for the first time in European history. Eleanor of Aquitaine brought ideals of courtly love from Aquitaine first to the court of France, then to England, where she was queen to two kings. Her daughter Marie, Countess of Champagne brought courtly behavior to the Count of Champagne's court. There the late 12th century Andreas Capellanus wrote the tongue-in-cheek Art of Courtly Love and dedicated it to her, and Chrétien de Troyes introduced in her honor the love of Lancelot for Guinevere, in the romance The Knight of the Cart.

Particular standards of etiquette and custom were attached to courtly love, though these varied somewhat with region and time period. Sometimes the ideal love was chaste or Platonic admiration, with no intimation of actual affairs. In other cases, at least the intention of consummation is expressed, if only to lament the impossibility of the act. This ritual of walking the knife's edge between admiration and consummation is still seen in such Western European social practices as the seating of ladies at table next to gentlemen who are specifically not their husbands. In cultures not much influenced by the courtly love tradition, this would seem to be a scandalous, insulting invitation to disaster.

It was (sometimes hotly) debated whether jealousy had any place in the pageant of courtly love, with proponents of both sides of the issue. In most cases, to have the object of admiration is seen as raising and ennobling the holder of the passion and/or gives a feeling of solitary possession to the lover over the contested mate.

Courtly love was perhaps most commonly expressed in the compositions of the troubadours, trouvères and poets (later reflected in such forms as the sonnet), though it found expression in such other customs as the crowning of a "Queen of Love and Beauty" at a tournament, or the formal though unofficial "Courts of Love" presided over by prominent nobles, usually women. During later phases of the Middle Ages the practice increasingly became the topic of satire; the second half of the Romance of the Rose, the part written by Jean de Meung, is considered by some to be a parody on the subject, although it was actually written in the middle of the period. Whether parody or not, the Romance made a lasting impression and its imagery and characters continued to appear in works throughout the medieval period and into the renaissance. While some feel that Courtly Love was primarily a literary convention, occasions such as Philip le Bon's Feast of the Pheasant in 1454 relied on parables drawn from courtly love to incite his nobles to swear to participate in an anticipated crusade and numerous actual political and social conventions were largely based on the formulas dictated by the "rules" of courtly love well into the 15th century.

Accounts of courtly love often overlook the Arabist hypothesis, which has been posed in some form almost from the term's beginnings in the modern period. Given that practices similar to courtly love were already prevalent in Al-Andalus and elsewhere in the Islamicate world, it is very likely that Islamicate practices influenced the Christian Europeans. William of Aquitane, for example, was involved in the First Crusade, and in the ongoing Reconquista in Spain, so he would have come into contact with Muslim culture a great deal. The history of this argument is outlined by Maria Rosa Menocal in The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History.

More recent writers, taking literary conventions at face value, have postulated that courtly love may have involved elements of what would today be called fetishism and masochism.

Stages of Courtly Love

(Adapted from Barbara Tuchman^[1])

Attraction to the lady, usually via eyes/glance
Worship of the lady from afar
Declaration of passionate devotion
Virtuous rejection by the lady
Renewed wooing with oaths of virtue and eternal fealty
Moans of approaching death from unsatisfied desire (and other physical manifestations of lovesickness)
Heroic deeds of valor which win the lady's heart
Consummation of the secret love
Endless adventures and subterfuges avoiding detection

External links

References

^ Tuchman, Barbara Wertheim. A Distant Mirror: the Calamitous 14th Century. New York: Knopf, 1978. ISBN 0-394-40026-7.

[1] Tuchman, Barbara Wertheim. A Distant Mirror: the Calamitous 14th Century. New York: Knopf, 1978. ISBN 0-394-40026-7.

[1]

Courtly love

Background

Stages of Courtly Love

Further reading

See also

External links

References