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Courtly Love
Barbara Tuchman offers a fairly concise discussion
of courtly love in her book A Distant Mirror. While
much of the book should be used with caution as a guide to
the fourteenth century, her words below do capture the essence
of courtly love quite nicely:
"If tournaments were an acting-out of
chivalry, courtly love was its dreamland. Courtly love was
understood by its contemporaries to be love for its own sake,
romantic love, true love, physical love, unassociated with
property or family . . . focused on another man's wife, since
only such an illicit liaison could have no other aim but love
alone. . . . As formulated by chivalry, romance was pictured
as extra-marital because love was considered irrelevant to
marriage, was indeed discouraged in order not to get in the
way of dynastic arrangements.
"As its justification, courtly love
was considered to ennoble a man, to improve him in every way.
It would make him concerned to show an example of goodness,
to do his utmost to preserve honor, never letting dishonor
touch himself or the lady he loved. On a lower scale, it would
lead him to keep his teeth and nails clean, his clothes rich
and well groomed, his conversation witty and amusing, his
manners courteous to all, curbing arrogance and coarseness,
never brawling in a lady's presence. Above all, it would make
him more valiant, more preux; that was the basic premise.
He would be inspired to greater prowess, would win more victories
in tournaments, rise above himself in courage and daring,
become, as Froissart said, 'worth two men.' Guided by this
theory, woman's status improved, less for her own sake than
as the inspirer of male glory, a higher function than being
merely a sexual object, a breeder of children, or a conveyor
of property.
"The chivalric love affair moved from
worship through declaration of passionate devotion, virtuous
rejection by the lady, renewed wooing with oaths of eternal
fealty, moans of approaching death from unsatisfied desire,
heroic deeds of valor which won the lady's heart by prowess,
[very rarely] consummation of the secret love, followed by
endless adventures and subterfuges to a tragic denouement.
. . . It remained artificial, a literary convention, a fantasy
. . . more for purposes of discussion than for every day practice."
(66-68)
The phrase "courtly
love" is a modern scholarly term to refer to the idea espoused
in medieval French as "Fin Amour." This phenomenon is a cultural
trope in the late twelfth-century, or possibly a literary convention
that captured popular imagination. Courtly love refers to a
code of behavior that gave rise to modern ideas of chivalrous
romance. The term itself was popularized by C. S. Lewis' and
Gaston Paris' scholarly studies, but its historical existence
remains contested in critical circles. The conventions of courtly
love are that a knight of noble blood would adore and worship
a young noble-woman from afar, seeking to protect her honor
and win her favor by valorous deeds. He typically falls ill
with love-sickness, while the woman chastely or scornfully rejects
or refuses his advances in public, but privately encourages
him. Courtly love was associated with (A) nobility, since
no peasants can engage in "fine love"; (B)
secrecy; (C) adultery, since often the one or both participants
were married to another noble or trapped in an unloving marriage;
and (D) paradoxically with chastity, since the passion
could never be consummated due to social circumstances, thus
it was a "higher love" unsullied by selfish carnal
desires.
An example of this attitude is found in Castiglione's
The Courtier, which presents a Renaissance outlook
on this medieval ideal:
I hold that a gentleman of worth, who is
in love, ought to be sincere and truthful in this [labor]
as in all other things; and it if it is true that to betray
an enemy is baseness and a most abominable wrong, think how
much more grave the offense ought to be considered when done
to one whom we love. And I believe that every gentle lover
endures so many toils, so many vigils, exposes himself to
so many dangers, sheds so many tears, uses so many ways and
means to please his lady love--not chiefly in order to possess
her body, but to take the fortress of her mind and to break
those hardest diamonds and melt that cold ice, which are often
found in the tender breasts of women And this I believe is
the true and sound pleasure and the goal aimed at by every
noble heart. Certainly, if I were in love, I should wish rather
to be sure that she whom I served returned my love from her
heart and had given me her inner self--if I had no other satisfaction
from her--than to take all pleasure with her against her will;
for in such a case I should consider myself master merely
of a lifeless body. Hence, those who pursue their desires
by these tricks, which might perhaps rather be called treacheries
than tricks, do wrong to others, nor do they gain that satisfaction
withal which is sought in love if they possess the body without
the will. I say the same of certain others who in their love
make use of enchantments, charms, sometimes force, sometimes
sleeping potions, and such things. And you must know that
gifts do much to lessen the pleasures of love; for a man can
suspect that he is not loved but that his lady makes a show
of loving him in order to gain something by it. Hence, you
see that the love of some great lady is prized because it
seems that it cannot arise from any other source save that
of real and true affection, nor is it to be thought that so
great a lady would ever pretend to love an inferior if she
did not really love him.
--The Book of the Courtier, Book
2, Paragraph 94.
Castiglione's writings originate in the early
sixteenth and late fifteenth centuries, but they very much embody
earlier ideals. In the late twelfth-century and early thirteenth-century,
Andreas
Capellanus' Rules of Courtly Love provides
a satirical guide to the endeavor by offering a set of hyperbolic
and self-contradictory "rules" to this courtly game.
Chretien de Troyes satirizes the conventions in his courtly
literature as well. Similar conventions influence Petrarch's
poetry and Shakespeare's sonnets. These sonnets often emphasize
in particular the idea of "love from afar" and "unrequited
love," and make use of imagery and wording common to the
earlier French tradition.
Good
sources might be C. S. Lewis' Allegory of Love, or
a historical text such as Andreas Cappellanus' "Rules of
Courtly Love," Ruiz's Libro de Buen Amor, or Castiglione's
Book of the Courtier.
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