Courtly love

Warfare imagery: the Siege of the Castle of Love on an ivory mirror-back, possibly Paris, ca. 1350–1370 (Musée du Louvre)

Hispano-Arabic literature, as well as Arabic influence on Sicily, provided a further source, in parallel with Ovid, for the early troubadours of Provence—overlooked though this sometimes is in accounts of courtly love. The Arabic poets and poetry of Muslim Spain express similarly oxymoronic views of love as both beneficial and distressing as the troubadours were to do;[3] while the broader European contact with the Islamic world must also be taken into consideration.[16] Given that practices similar to courtly love were already prevalent in Al-Andalus and elsewhere in the Islamic world, it is very likely that Islamic practices influenced the Christian Europeans - especially in southern Europe where classical forms of courtly love first emerged.

According to Gustave E. von Grunebaum, several relevant elements developed in Arabic literature - including such contrasts as sickness/medicine and delight/torment - to characterise the love experience.[3] The notions of "love for love's sake" and "exaltation of the beloved lady" have been traced back to Arabic literature of the 9th and 10th centuries. The Persian psychologist and philosopher Ibn Sina (c. 980 – 1037; known as "Avicenna" in Europe) developed the notion of the "ennobling power" of love in the early 11th century in his treatise Risala fi'l-Ishq ("Treatise on Love").[17] The final element of courtly love, the concept of "love as desire never to be fulfilled", sometimes occurred implicitly in Arabic poetry, but first developed into a doctrine in European literature, in which all four elements of courtly love were present.[18]

According to an argument outlined by Maria Rosa Menocal in The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History (1987), in 11th-century Spain, a group of wandering poets appeared who would go from court to court, and sometimes travel to Christian courts in southern France, a situation closely mirroring what would happen in southern France about a century later. Contacts between these Spanish poets and the French troubadours were frequent. The metrical forms used by the Spanish poets resembled those later used by the troubadours.[19]

Courtly love was born in the lyric, first appearing with Provençal poets in the 11th century, including itinerant and courtly minstrels such as the French troubadours and trouvères, as well as the writers of lays. Texts about courtly love, including lays, were often set to music by troubadours or minstrels. According to scholar Ardis Butterfield, courtly love is "the air which many genres of troubadour song breathe".[24] Not much is known about how, when, where, and for whom these pieces were performed, but we can infer that the pieces were performed at court by troubadours, trouvères, or the courtiers themselves. This can be inferred because people at court were encouraged or expected to be "courtly" and be proficient in many different areas, including music. Several troubadours became extremely wealthy playing the fiddle and singing their songs about courtly love for a courtly audience.

It is difficult to know how and when these songs were performed because most of the information on these topics is provided in the music itself. One lay, the "Lay of Lecheor", says that after a lay was composed, "Then the lay was preserved / Until it was known everywhere / For those who were skilled musicians / On viol, harp and rote / Carried it forth from that region…"[25] Scholars have to then decide whether to take this description as truth or fiction.

Period examples of performance practice, of which there are few, show a quiet scene with a household servant performing for the king or lord and a few other people, usually unaccompanied. According to scholar Christopher Page, whether or not a piece was accompanied depended on the availability of instruments and people to accompany—in a courtly setting.[26] For troubadours or minstrels, pieces were often accompanied by fiddle, also called a vielle, or a harp. Courtly musicians also played the vielle and the harp, as well as different types of viols and flutes.

This French tradition spread later to the German Minnesänger, such as Walther von der Vogelweide and Wolfram von Eschenbach.[5] It also influenced the Sicilian School of Italian vernacular poetry, as well as Petrarch and Dante.[27]

Lancelot and Guinevere in Howard Pyle's illustration for The Story of the Champions of the Round Table (1905)

The vernacular poetry of the romans courtois, or courtly romances, included many examples of courtly love. Some of them are set within the cycle of poems celebrating King Arthur's court. This was a literature of leisure, directed to a largely female audience for the first time in European history.[5]

Allegory is common in the romantic literature of the Middle Ages, and it was often used to interpret what was already written. There is a strong connection between religious imagery and human sexual love in medieval writings.

The tradition of medieval allegory began in part with the interpretation of the Song of Songs in the Bible. Some medieval writers thought that the book should be taken literally as an erotic text; others believed that the Song of Songs was a metaphor for the relationship between Christ and the church and that the book could not even exist without that as its metaphorical meaning. Still others claimed that the book was written literally about sex but that this meaning must be "superseded by meanings related to Christ, to the church and to the individual Christian soul".[28]

Marie de France's lai "Eliduc" toys with the idea that human romantic love is a symbol for God's love when two people love each other so fully and completely that they leave each other for God, separating and moving to different religious environments.[29] Furthermore, the main character's first wife leaves her husband and becomes a nun so that he can marry his new lover.[29]

Allegorical treatment of courtly love is also found in the Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun.[30] In it, a man becomes enamored with an individual rose on a rosebush, attempting to pick it and finally succeeding. The rose represents the female body, but the romance also contains lengthy digressive "discussions on free will versus determinism as well as on optics and the influence of heavenly bodies on human behavior".[30]

Through such routes as Capellanus's record of the Courts of Love[31] and the later works of Petrarchism (as well as the continuing influence of Ovid),[5] the themes of courtly love were not confined to the medieval, but appear both in serious and comic forms in early modern Europe. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, for example, shows Romeo attempting to love Rosaline in an almost contrived courtly fashion while Mercutio mocks him for it; and both in his plays and his sonnets the writer can be seen appropriating the conventions of courtly love for his own ends.[32]

Paul Gallico's 1939 novel The Adventures of Hiram Holliday depicts a Romantic modern American consciously seeking to model himself on the ideal medieval knight. Among other things, when finding himself in Austria in the aftermath of the Anschluss, he saves a Habsburg princess who is threatened by the Nazis, acts towards her in strict accordance with the maxims of courtly love and finally wins her after fighting a duel with her aristocratic betrothed.

A point of ongoing controversy about courtly love is to what extent it was sexual. All courtly love was erotic to some degree, and not purely platonic—the troubadours speak of the physical beauty of their ladies and the feelings and desires the ladies arouse in them. However, it is unclear what a poet should do: live a life of perpetual desire channeling his energies to higher ends, or physically consummate. Scholars have seen it both ways.

Denis de Rougemont said that the troubadours were influenced by Cathar doctrines which rejected the pleasures of the flesh and that they were metaphorically addressing the spirit and soul of their ladies. Rougemont also said that courtly love subscribed to the code of chivalry, and therefore a knight's loyalty was always to his King before his mistress.[23] Edmund Reiss claimed it was also a spiritual love, but a love that had more in common with Christian love, or caritas.[33] On the other hand, scholars such as Mosché Lazar claim it was adulterous sexual love with physical possession of the lady the desired end.[34]

Many scholars identify courtly love as the "pure love" described in 1184 by Capellanus in De amore libri tres:

It is the pure love which binds together the hearts of two lovers with every feeling of delight. This kind consists in the contemplation of the mind and the affection of the heart; it goes as far as the kiss and the embrace and the modest contact with the nude lover, omitting the final solace, for that is not permitted for those who wish to love purely.... That is called mixed love which gets its effect from every delight of the flesh and culminates in the final act of Venus.[35]

Within the corpus of troubadour poems there is a wide range of attitudes, even across the works of individual poets. Some poems are physically sensual, even bawdily imagining nude embraces, while others are highly spiritual and border on the platonic.[36]

The lyrical use of the word midons, borrowed from Guilhem de Poitou, allowed troubadours to address multiple listeners—the lords, men, and women of the court alike. A sort of hermaphroditic code word, or senhan, scholar Meg Bogin writes, the multiple meanings behind this term allowed a covert form of flattery: "By refusing to disclose his lady's name, the troubadour permitted every woman in the audience, notably the patron's wife, to think that it was she; then, besides making her the object of a secret passion—it was always covert romance—by making her his lord he flashed her an aggrandized image of herself: she was more than 'just' a woman; she was a man."[37] These points of multiple meaning and ambiguity facilitated a "coquetry of class", allowing the male troubadours to use the images of women as a means to gain social status with other men, but simultaneously, Bogin suggests, voiced deeper longings for the audience: "In this way, the sexual expressed the social and the social the sexual; and in the poetry of courtly love the static hierarchy of feudalism was uprooted and transformed to express a world of motion and transformation."[38]

A continued point of controversy is whether courtly love was purely literary or was actually practiced in real life. There are no historical records that offer evidence of its presence in reality. Historian John Benton found no documentary evidence in law codes, court cases, chronicles or other historical documents.[39] However, the existence of the non-fiction genre of courtesy books is perhaps evidence for its practice. For example, according to Christine de Pizan's courtesy book Book of the Three Virtues (c. 1405), which expresses disapproval of courtly love, the convention was being used to justify and cover up illicit love affairs. Courtly love probably found expression in the real world in customs such as the crowning of Queens of Love and Beauty at tournaments. Philip le Bon, in his 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, while well into the 15th century numerous actual political and social conventions were largely based on the formulas dictated by the "rules" of courtly love.

A point of controversy was the existence of "courts of love", first mentioned by Andreas Capellanus. These were supposed courts made up of tribunals staffed by 10 to 70 women who would hear a case of love and rule on it based on the rules of love. In the 19th century, historians took the existence of these courts as fact, but later historians such as Benton noted "none of the abundant letters, chronicles, songs and pious dedications" suggest they ever existed outside of the poetic literature.[39] Likewise, feminist historian Emily James Putnam wrote in 1910 that, secrecy being "among the lover's first duties" in the ideology of courtly love, it is "manifestly absurd to suppose that a sentiment which depended on concealment for its existence should be amenable to public inquiry".[40] According to Diane Bornstein, one way to reconcile the differences between the references to courts of love in the literature, and the lack of documentary evidence in real life, is that they were like literary salons or social gatherings, where people read poems, debated questions of love, and played word games of flirtation.[36]

Theologians of the time emphasized love as more of a spiritual rather than sexual connection.[41] There is a possibility that writings about courtly love were made as a response to the theological ideas about love. Many scholars believe that Andreas Capellanus' work De amore was a satire poking fun at the Church. In that work, Capellanus is supposedly writing to a young man named Walter, and he spends the first two books telling him how to achieve love and setting forth the rules of love. However, in the third book he tells Walter that the only way to live his life correctly is to shun love in favor of God. This sudden change is what has sparked the interest of many scholars,[42] leading some to regard the first two books as satirizing courtly love and only the third book as expressing Capellanus' actual beliefs.[43]