(Good Lady, I ask you nothing else but that you take me as your servant, so that I could serve you as a good master, whatever my reward may be. You see me here at your orders, you who are honest and humble, cheerful and courtly. You are neither a lion nor a bear, who would kill me if I gave myself to you.)
Courtly Love
by Jennifer E. Mims
Drawings by Jennifer Mims
Courtly Love is the celebration of sexual love between men and women. According to C. S. Lewis (1936), the poetic conventions developed to express it became important elements in the literature of the west during the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The term "courtly love" is vague and complex because the kinds of behavior it is used to specify developed in different ways in many kinds of literature over a long period of time.
During the 11th century, chivalry arose in France. Later it spread to the other countries of Europe. Young boys of noble birth were trained the manners they would need to know as knights. They were taught to honor the Christian church, to respect women, and to devote their lives to the service of a lady. Such service was supposed to increase their abilities as warriors. Often a knight would worship his lady at a distance, never speaking to her and perhaps never even seeing her. The etiquette of courtly love was included in manuals of conduct even as late as the Renaissance. These manuals are called courtesy books. According to "Etiquette codes in Europe" on America Online (21 April 1997) one the most influential courtesy books was Il Cortegiano (The Courtier, published in 1528) and the first courtesy book was the Book of the Governor (1531).
The courtly lover is characteristically a knight, though the poet himself is more often than not a man of more humble origin. The troubadour (or poet) was the medieval equivalent of a traveling folksinger who played other people's songs as well as his own. If he was talented and lucky, and could find a hospitable lord or lady with money, he performed regularly at a castle.
According to A Natural History of Love (1994), the hero of the poems, the knight-lover, sings the praises and seeks the favor of a lady according to a well-defined ritual. The lady is ordinarily his superior socially and is nearly always presented as a paragon of beauty and virtue. The knight offers his song and his service in the hope of winning his lady's regard, her "grace," and perhaps ultimately her love. Final success (or the promise of it) produces the perfect joy that the lover seeks. The troubadour concentrates on this joy as a goal. It generates the excitement of the chase.
The beloved (the lady) to whom the song is addressed is a stereotype. Physically she is blond and fair, with stylized features and figure that vary little within the tradition. She maybe addressed with the masculine midons (my lord); and the relation, in many of its formal aspects, between lover and lady is a highly conventional sexual version of the feudal relation between lord and vassal, according to The Catholic Encyclopedia (1967). The code required a man to fall in love with a married woman of equal or higher rank, and, before consummating this love, to commit daring exploits proving his devotion. The lovers then pledged themselves to secrecy and fidelity, according to Concise Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia (1994). The lady was almost invariably someone else's wife. In medieval religious terms, therefore, courtly love is nearly always illicit and usually adulterous. A major source of excitement in the songs is the threat of discovery by a jealous husband.
The affair of the lover and his lady normally begins in April or May, and the stirrings of the lover are associated with the powers of nature in the springtime. Trees come to life, flowers bud, birds (especially nightingales, cuckoos, and larks) begin to sing and seek their mates, the whole earth is warmed by breezes and quickened by rain. The first stages of love fascinated the troubadours. According to A Natural History of Love (1967) the "flicking emotions and trembling moments" the lovers shared together were something wonderful. Sexual intercourse was believed to and was not of interest to the lovers. They preferred gazing into each other eyes, having secret codes, having the fear of being discovered and the ongoing pain of being separated. It is assumed that the songs of the troubadours were the direct reflection of the social behavior in the courts of France.
The troubadours developed a cult of platonic love and sang an impossible passion for an unattainable noblewoman, proclaiming how lovely she was and how, despite her scorn, they would continue to adore her. A troubadour was expected to think himself well regarded for ten years of devotion by the gift of a single rose (Eleanor of Aquitaine, 1979).
Courtly love has its rewards according to The Catholic Encyclopedia (1967). It is assumed to produce virtue in those who practiced it. The virtues of justice, wisdom, temperance, and fortitude are all increased by love and service virtues.
Troubadours play and sing for their king.
Troubadour poetry was of many kinds, only of some of which praised "true love"; and of these, some celebrated a love that seems more divine than human. The Allegory of Love (1936) gives a perfect example of the secret love story of Lancelot and Guinevere. The story turns mainly on the queen's captivity in the mysterious land of Gorre, where those that are native can go both in and out but strangers can only go in, and on her rescue from there by Lancelot. Lancelot sets out to find the queen but encounters many tribulations. When Lancelot finds Guinevere, she is very cruel to him and when she forgives him his trials are not yet over. The tournament at the end of the poem between other knights gives Guinevere another opportunity of exercising her position of power. Guinevere, in disguise, sends a message ordering him to do his poorest. Lancelot obediently lets himself be humiliated, mocked, and laughed at by his fellow peers. Lancelot's submission reveals his religious devotion towards Guinevere. He treats Guinevere with saintly, if not divine, honors. This is a perfect example of courtly love.
The conventions of courtly love continued as important elements in the poetry of the 14th century. According to The Catholic Encyclopedia (1967), in The Canterbury Tales and, most of all, in Troilus, Chaucer uses traditional modes of erotic behavior and imagery for effects that reflect the whole range of human love in the Middle ages. The influence of courtly love on literature and manners extended far beyond the Middle Ages. Courtly Love helped raise the status of women and of many knights. It also granted individuals the right to make certain choices about their fate, encouraged mutual affection, urged lovers to feel tenderness and respect for each other, according to A Natural History of Love (1994). In the variety of its forms it has gone beyond the medieval time period and has contributed to the culture, literature, and patterns of human behavior today.
More about Courtly Love
by Damaris Lockewood von Lubeck
First introduced as a term by Gaston Paris in 1883, Courtly Love received its finest expression in the songs of the twelfth century troubadours in Languedoc. The actual nature of this highly ritualized code of love remains debatable; several sources have been suggested —Ovid's Ars Amatoria, Hispano-Arabic poetry and Platonic thought, among others— but the language and imagery of Courtly Love reflect above all the feudal, courtly environment in which the concept evolved. To the earlier ideals of feudalism: courage, loyalty, service to Christendom and charity,— the troubadours added a new set of ideals which may be summed up in the word courtoisie, the courtly ideal. Courtoisie in the chivalrous sense employed by the troubadours implies gallantry, gentility, generosity, and the etiquette or mannerisms conventional in the courtly life of a castle.
The protagonists assumed distinct roles: the lover submitted to his lady as a knight to his lord, swearing loyal and enduring service. Drawing attention to his pretz (worth) and valor (courage)— further increased by his pure and noble love— he would reuest merce (pity) and some reward. Although the lady might seem the dominant partner in this private drama, she was bound by convention to comply with the knight's reasonable demands, much as a lord was bound to reward his faithful retainers; if she failed to offer some favor or hope she was branded cruel and heartless.
The adulterous nature of Courtly Love has been much debated and often exaggerated; there are very few cases in which the lady is explicitly a married woman. Some troubadours argued, in their poems, that love between man and wife was impossible or even unnatural. Others admitted the possibility and rejoiced when an instance of conjugal love came to their notice, but added that where there was no love each spouse was free, or even obligated, to seek love outside the bonds of matrimony. Nevertheless, whether married or not, she was almost always unattainable, by virtue of her high rank or physical distance, and by fear of social censure; it was, paradoxically, her very distance that lent value to the lover's patient suffering. The lady's worth could be increased by dispensing mercy to a worthy and deserving suitor, yet the lady who submitted too soon was to be condemned.
True love, or Fin'amors, was contrasted with the Fals'amors of the majority, characterized by inconstancy, insincerity and petty jealousy, and which excluded them from the loving elite. Fin'amors became increasingly "Christianized" in the later 12th century, as the image of the aspiring lover was assimilated into a code of religious striving toward God, in which Christian virtues were acquired through service to the Lady Mary. Some historians have wondered if there was a connection between the rise of women's status in the romance tradition and the tremendous devotion to the Virgin Mary observable in contemporary religious life.
The tradition spread from Languedoc to Italy, influencing the dolce stil nuovo (Dante's La Vita Nuova), and northwards, where it fused with the French allegorical tradition to produce such works as Chretian de Troyes' Lancelot and the Romance de la Rose of Guillaume de Lorris. Other responses include Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival in Germany, and in England, Chaucer's Troilus and Gower's Confessio Amantis. A late 12th century writer in Latin named Andreas Capellanus wrote what rapidly became recognized as a standard treatise on Courtly Love, De Arte Honeste Amandi (The Art of Courtly Love), which he composed at the request of Marie de Champagne. He based some of his ideas on Ovid's Ars Amatoria but was also strongly influenced by poetic notions transmitted through Muslim Spain. The amatory handbook of Capellanus' rapidly gained fame and respect throughout Europe as the first and only serious treatment of its theme.
Noble ladies, like Eleanor of Aquitaine, took the lead in holding courts of love after the example of feudal courts of law. These courts were great social occasions at which troubadours performed and the grievances or petitions of lovelorn damsels or their swains were presented for "judgment" by the "court". The assessors of Eleanor's court at Poitiers were a number of ladies, mostly between twenty-five and thirty years of age; Eleanor herself, her daughter Marie de Champagne, Isabella, Countess of Flanders (a niece of the Queen), and others. Andreas Capellanus devoted a chapter of his treatise on Courtly Love to five such cases brought before these "courts". It was a wonderful device for amusement and diversion, and the ladies of the castle took the lead in festivities which probably left their husbands somewhat befuddled. Courtly Love as portrayed by the troubadours allowed no room for promiscuity. True love was not an unregulated passion. Its essence was absolute loyalty and self-denial, service and travail, in favor of one's lady. Only by suffering and by the accomplishment of great deeds could the knight-errant prove his mettle and demonstrate the unblemished quality of his courtly love. The lover's inner struggle between his desire for immediate fulfillment and his awareness of the moral value implicit in striving for the unattainable; between individual ambitions and outward social constraints; between the self-imposed state of submission and the overwhelming need to express pain and resentment: these are the antitheses that lend the poetry of Courtly Love its dramatic tension and emotional richness.
Sources:
"The Middle Ages: A Concise Encyclopedia", edited by H.R. Loyn; Thames and Hudson Ltd., London; 1989.
"Europe in the Middle Ages", by Robert S. Hoyt; Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York; 1957.
"The Medieval World", by Friedrich Heer; Mentor, New York; 1961.