Courtly love
Court of Love in Provence in the 14th Century (after a manuscript in the
Biblioth?ue Nationale, Paris).
Courtly love is a system of attitudes, myths, beliefs and rules especially prevalent in medieval literature. It governed the real and imagined behavior of knights and their ladies as they pursued one another in a flirting and adulterous relationship which was supposed to flatter the lady and elevate, ennoble, and energize the knight.
Background
Courtly love was a particular ideal and practice during the Middle Ages in Europe, which had its origins in courtly circles of Aquitaine, where William IX, Duke of Aquitaine, was one of the first troubadour poets, of Provence. Courtly love was one aspect of a renewed pleasure in the refinements of the better kind of life, evidenced in the "delightful understanding" or gai saber of the Proven?l poets, beginning about the time of the First Crusade.
Courtly Love comes in the basket
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 grounded in 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, but 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 in many respects non-Christian, providing an alternative to the love of God as taught by the Church, and placing salvation in the love of a lady (or man). Marriage had only recently been made 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 heretical. The church channeled many of these energies into the cult of the Virgin Many; it is not a coincidence that the cult of the Virgin began in the 12th century as a counter to secular, courtly and lustful views of women. Francis of Assisi called poverty "his Lady".
The practices of courtly love had a civilizing effect on knightly behavior. It has been suggested that the prevalence of arranged marriages required other outlets for the expression of a more personal and romantic love. New expressions of a 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 this piety was also transferred to the conventions of courtly love.
Thus feudalism, piety, and romantic love fused into a new culture, without precedents in Europe, one that was isolated, however, 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 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 already 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 for the first time in European history to a largely female audience. 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 Chr?ien 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 an actual affair. In other cases, at least the intention of consummation was 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 and insulting invitation to disaster.
It was (sometimes hotly) debated whether possessive jealousy had any place in the pageant of courtly love, with proponents on both sides of the issue. In most cases, however, having the object of admiration was seen as raising and ennobling the holder of the passion.
Courtly love was perhaps most commonly expressed in the compositions of the troubadours and poets (later reflected in such forms as the sonnet), though it found expression in other such 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. Well into the 15th century numerous actual political and social conventions were largely based on formulas dictated by the "rules" of courtly love.
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 to win the lady's heart
- Consummation of the secret love
- Endless adventures and subterfuges to avoid detection
- A catastrophe
Further reading
- Duby, Georges. The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest: the Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France. Translated by Barbara Bray. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983. (ISBN 0226167682)
- Gaunt, Simon. Marginal Men, Marcabru, and Orthodoxy: The Early Troubadours and Adultery. Medium Aevum 59 (1990): 55-71.
- Lewis, C. S. The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1936. (ISBN 0192812203)
- Newman, Francis X. The Meaning of Courtly Love. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1968. (ISBN 0873950380)
External links
References
- ↑ Tuchman, Barbara Wertheim. A Distant Mirror: the Calamitous 14th Century. New York: Knopf, 1978. ISBN 0-394-40026-7.