Courtly love

• 1. Introduction

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  Courtly love appears by name in only one surviving medieval text: a late 12th-century poem in Provençal, by a poet named Peire d'Alvernhe. The idea the phrase described, however, spread from the castle courts of southern France across centuries of writing and social ritual. Knights pledged devotion to ladies they could never openly claim. Poets addressed their beloved as "my lord," using flattery and careful code to hide her identity. Scholars have disagreed for well over a hundred years about whether the whole tradition was a coherent idea at all. Was courtly love a genuine social practice or a fiction designed for noble entertainment? Was it spiritual, adulterous, or somehow both? And did it arise in Christian France, or did its deepest roots run through the Arabic poetry of Andalusia? The rules governing this tradition were eventually written down by Andreas Capellanus. His late 12th-century text De amore included such maxims as "He who is not jealous cannot love."

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• 2. Courts of the South

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  Eleanor of Aquitaine, born in 1124, was among the key figures who carried these ideals outward from their source. She brought the culture of courtly love from Aquitaine first to the French court, then to England. She became queen-consort of each realm in succession. Her daughter Marie, Countess of Champagne, born in 1145 and living until 1198, extended the same culture to the court at Champagne. William IX, Duke of Aquitaine, who lived from 1071 to 1126, is counted among the earliest troubadour poets.

  Declaring themselves the "vassal" of their chosen lady, troubadour poets turned the hierarchies of medieval life to new purposes. The ideal object of devotion was the wife of the poet's own lord or employer. She was typically a woman of higher status, often the powerful head of a castle. When her husband rode off on crusade or other business, the lady governed cultural life entirely. Sometimes that held true even when the husband remained at home.

  A "game of love" developed in the High Middle Ages around courtly ideals, taking shape as a set of social practices. Worth in this tradition was measured not by wealth or lineage but by devotion, piety, and gallantry. That appeal was especially strong for poorer knights, who found in this culture a language for advancement. Medieval poets rarely used the phrase "courtly love." Their preferred term was fin'amor, a Provençal word meaning "fine love." Its German equivalent was hohe Minne.

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• 3. A Term in Dispute

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  Gaston Paris introduced the phrase amour courtois in an 1883 article. It examined the relationship between Lancelot and Guinevere in Chrétien de Troyes's Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, written around 1181. Paris meant it as a descriptive phrase, not a fixed technical category. He used it interchangeably with amour chevaleresque. Other scholars then took it as a technical term, and the category began to stretch.

  In 1896, Lewis Freeman Mott applied the term to Dante Alighieri's devotion to Beatrice in La Vita Nuova, written in 1294. Dante and Beatrice met only twice in their entire lives. Their relationship bore little resemblance to the adulterous secret passion of Lancelot and Guinevere. Yet the manner in which both men described their devotion, a quasi-religious adoration of their ladies, showed a recognizable resemblance.

  In 1936, C. S. Lewis wrote The Allegory of Love, bringing the phrase to a wide readership. Lewis defined it as "a love of a highly specialized sort." Its characteristics, he wrote, were "Humility, Courtesy, Adultery, and the Religion of Love." Moshe Lazar, writing in 1964, went further and differentiated three separate categories within the concept.

  D. W. Robertson Jr. called the term's connotations "so vague and flexible that its utility for purposes of definition has become questionable." John C. Moore called it "a mischievous term which should be abandoned." E. Talbot Donaldson criticized its use as a technical term, calling it an anachronism or neologism.

  Irving Singer proposed keeping the term while revising its meaning. In his revised version, courtly love stands for a cluster of related ideas. Chief among them: sexual love between men and women is "in itself something splendid, an ideal worth striving for." Singer also held that love ennobles both parties, and that it "establishes a holy oneness between man and woman."

  Roger Boase admitted the concept "has been subjected to a bewildering variety of uses and definitions." He defended it as real and worth preserving nonetheless. That dissent kept the debate open rather than closing it.

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• 4. The Andalusian Thread

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  Ibn Hazm's treatise Ṭawq al-Ḥamāmah is known in English as The Ring of the Dove. This Andalusian work on love emphasized restraint and chastity. It sat within a broader Arabic literary tradition that had long explored love's ennobling power. Gustave E. von Grunebaum traced these ideas to a much earlier source. He found "love for love's sake" and the "exaltation of the beloved lady" in Arabic texts of the 9th and 10th centuries.

  Ibn Arabi's Tarjumān al-Ashwāq, known as The Translator of Desires, weaves together sensual and divine love. Ibn Sina's Risala fi'l-Ishq, or Treatise of Love, does the same; its treatment of love's ennobling power is overt. Ibn Dawud's Kitab al-Zahra, or Book of the Flower, offers a roughly contemporary treatment.

  In 1987, María Rosa Menocal published The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History, arguing for a direct line of influence from Andalusia to France. In 11th-century Spain, she noted, wandering poets traveled from court to court and sometimes into the Christian courts of southern France. Their metrical forms resembled those that French troubadours would later adopt. Contacts between these Spanish poets and the troubadours were frequent.

  The tradition von Grunebaum identified predates the flowering of similar ideas in France by roughly a century. The troubadours who emerged in France built their poetic code around a single ambiguous term: midons.

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• 5. The Language of Concealment

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  Midons comes from the Latin phrase meaning "my lord." Troubadours beginning with Guilhem de Poitou addressed their ladies with this word. By calling a woman his lord, the poet both flattered her and withheld her name from the audience.

  Every woman in the audience, including the patron's own wife, could believe she was the poem's secret subject. The concealment was not incidental; it was the point. By making the lady his lord, the troubadour offered her "an aggrandized image of herself" while also serving his own social ambitions.

  Bogin's analysis captures the double movement at the heart of midons. Male troubadours used the image of women as a way to gain standing with other men. At the same time, the poetry gave voice to something more genuine in the audience. As one analysis put it, "the sexual expressed the social and the social the sexual." In the poetry of courtly love, "the static hierarchy of feudalism was uprooted and transformed to express a world of motion and transformation."

  Ardis Butterfield described courtly love as "the air which many genres of troubadour song breathe." The lyric, the romance, and the allegory each carried it. The genre spread to the German Minnesänger, including Walther von der Vogelweide and Wolfram von Eschenbach. It also reached the Iberian peninsula and influenced the Sicilian School of Italian vernacular poetry.

  Marie de France's lai "Eliduc" took the tradition into allegorical territory. In it, two people love each other so completely that both leave for God, separating into different religious environments. The main character's first wife becomes a nun so that he can marry his new love. The Roman de la Rose, by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, depicted a man falling in love with a single rose. He strives throughout to pick it. The rose represents the female body. The work also contains long digressions on free will versus determinism, and on how heavenly bodies were thought to influence human behavior.

  Whether any of this translated into actual practice, beyond the page and the performance space, became one of the most contentious questions in medieval studies.

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• 6. Rules Written and Unwritten

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  Andreas Capellanus gathered the customs of courtly love into a single codified text by the late 12th century. De amore set down rules such as: "Marriage is no real excuse for not loving"; "He who is not jealous cannot love"; "No one can be bound by a double love"; and "When made public love rarely endures."

  De amore also introduced the idea of "courts of love." These were supposed tribunals of 10 to 70 women. They would hear cases of romantic dispute and rule on them by the laws of love. Nineteenth-century historians took these courts as fact. Later scholarship was far more skeptical. Historian John F. Benton found no documentary evidence of them in law codes, court records, or chronicles.

  Feminist historian Emily James Putnam wrote in 1910 that secrecy was "among the lover's first duties" in courtly love's ideology. She found it "manifestly absurd" to suppose that a sentiment requiring concealment could be put before a public tribunal. Diane Bornstein proposed that the courts functioned instead as literary salons, where people read poems, debated questions of love, and played word games of flirtation.

  Christine de Pizan's Book of the Three Virtues, written around 1405, disapproved of courtly love and said as much. Its criticism revealed that the conventions were being used to justify and conceal actual illicit love affairs. In 1454, Philip le Bon drew on courtly love parables at his Feast of the Pheasant. He used them to urge his nobles to pledge support for a crusade.

  Capellanus addresses his text to a young man he calls Walter, and the work's structure has puzzled scholars ever since. The first two books explain how to achieve love and lay down its rules. In the third book, he tells Walter to shun love entirely in favor of God. That reversal has led many scholars to read the first two books as satire, with only the third expressing Capellanus' actual beliefs.

  The Church condemned courtly love as heretical at the beginning of the 13th century. Some scholars read this as an attempt to suppress what they see as a form of sexual rebellion. Others argue that courtly love was actually aligned with the Church's own effort to civilize the cruder feudal codes of the late 11th century. Still others point to arranged marriages as the driving force. In a world where personal romantic love had no sanctioned outlet, courtly love provided one.

  Capellanus defined "pure love" in De amore. It went, he wrote, "as far as the kiss and the embrace and the modest contact with the nude lover, omitting the final solace." Denis de Rougemont argued the troubadours were shaped by Cathar doctrine, which rejected the pleasures of the flesh. Scholars such as Mosché Lazar argued the opposite: that it was adulterous sexual love, with physical possession the desired end. The troubadour poems themselves do not resolve the argument; within the same corpus, some are physically sensual and others border on the platonic.

  De amore's influence, and the later works of Petrarchism, carried these themes into early modern Europe.

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• 7. The Long Afterlife

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  Shakespeare put the conventions of courtly love on stage and then let one of his characters mock them. In Romeo and Juliet, Romeo woos Rosaline in what reads as a contrived, almost theatrical courtly fashion. Mercutio mocks him for it. The same conventions appear in Shakespeare's sonnets, where the writer bends them to his own purposes rather than simply adopting them.

  Paul Gallico's 1939 novel The Adventures of Hiram Holliday depicted an American who consciously models himself on the ideal medieval knight. In the novel, Holliday finds himself in Austria in the aftermath of the Anschluss. He rescues a Habsburg princess threatened by the Nazis. He acts toward her in strict accordance with the maxims of courtly love. He wins her only after fighting a duel with her aristocratic betrothed.

  The stages that Barbara W. Tuchman reconstructed from medieval sources trace a recognizable arc. They begin with attraction at a glance and move through worship from afar. Then come declaration of devotion, the lady's rejection, renewed vows, and expressions of lovesickness. Heroic deeds follow, then secret consummation. The ninth and final stage is not rest: it is "endless adventures and subterfuges avoiding detection." In courtly love, concealment did not end when love was found. It was the permanent condition of love itself.

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