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    Medieval View of Love - Courtly Love

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    Andre Medeiros
    Courtly love developed in the late 11th century and involved the worship of an idealized woman by a knightly lover. It emphasized obedience, loyalty, and service by the lover to his lady. While physical consummation was not required, courtly love poems often featured married women and secrecy was important to preserve the lady's honor. In practice, courtly love had little impact on women's legal status but it established women as arbiters of love and refined passion, and provided a language for describing the phenomenology of love that influenced society. By the 14th century, the distinction between spiritual and earthly love became blurred in works integrating courtly imagery with religious devotion.

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    Medieval View of Love - Courtly Love

    Uploaded by

    Andre Medeiros
    73 views5 pages
    Courtly love developed in the late 11th century and involved the worship of an idealized woman by a knightly lover. It emphasized obedience, loyalty, and service by the lover to his lady. While physical consummation was not required, courtly love poems often featured married women and secrecy was important to preserve the lady's honor. In practice, courtly love had little impact on women's legal status but it established women as arbiters of love and refined passion, and provided a language for describing the phenomenology of love that influenced society. By the 14th century, the distinction between spiritual and earthly love became blurred in works integrating courtly imagery with religious devotion.

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    Amor na era medieval

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    Courtly love developed in the late 11th century and involved the worship of an idealized woman by a knightly lover. It emphasized obedience, loyalty, and service by the lover to his lady. While physical consummation was not required, courtly love poems often featured married women and secrecy was important to preserve the lady's honor. In practice, courtly love had little impact on women's legal status but it established women as arbiters of love and refined passion, and provided a language for describing the phenomenology of love that influenced society. By the 14th century, the distinction between spiritual and earthly love became blurred in works integrating courtly imagery with religious devotion.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    73 views5 pages

    Medieval View of Love - Courtly Love

    Uploaded by

    Andre Medeiros
    Courtly love developed in the late 11th century and involved the worship of an idealized woman by a knightly lover. It emphasized obedience, loyalty, and service by the lover to his lady. While physical consummation was not required, courtly love poems often featured married women and secrecy was important to preserve the lady's honor. In practice, courtly love had little impact on women's legal status but it established women as arbiters of love and refined passion, and provided a language for describing the phenomenology of love that influenced society. By the 14th century, the distinction between spiritual and earthly love became blurred in works integrating courtly imagery with religious devotion.

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    Medieval View of Love: General

    The Chain of Being and Caritas


    At the start of one of the most influential philosophical works in the Middle Ages,
    Boethius's On the Consolation of Philosophy (ca. 524 A.D.), the poet seems abandoned
    by God, situated at the bottom of the wheel of fortune. Once a highly placed counselor
    to Emperor Theodoric, Boethius had been suddenly toppled from his position, accused
    of treason, and thrown into prison. His consolation, written in prison before his
    execution, consists of learning to ignore the vagaries of fortune ("look unmoved on
    fortune good or bad," he is advised) and learning instead to keep his sight on the source
    of all Goodness and Love, that is, on God ("to see Thee is our end, / Who art our source
    and maker, lord and path and goal"). It was this force, called God, or love in its spiritual
    sense, which governed the movements of the planets, the tides, the changes of seasons,
    the treaties between nations, and the human bonds of fealty, marriage, and friendship.
    Boethius sums up the notion:
    And all this chain of things
    In earth and sea and sky
    One ruler holds in hand:
    If Love relaxed the reins
    All things that now keep peace
    Would wage continual war
    The fabric to destroy
    Which unity has formed
    With motions beautiful. . . .
    O happy race of men
    If Love who rules the sky
    Could rule your hearts as well!
    (Trans. V. E. Watts, Baltimore: Penguin, 1969, II)

    The medieval world was therefore part of a multifaceted and hierarchical universe in
    which all elements were bound together in a "great chain of being." The force which
    bound all these elements together was love, also called caritas or charity, what St.
    Augustine (354-430 A.D.) called the whole motion of the soul towards God for His sake
    and towards one's self and one's fellow man for the sake of God. All of scripture, indeed
    all of Christian doctrine, taught the essential importance of charity in this spiritualized
    sense.

    Caritas Versus Amor


    Distinguished from the spiritualized sense of love as caritas, was the more worldly
    sense of love which was referred to as amor. The men and women of the Middle Ages,
    like people everywhere from the beginning of recorded history, were caught up by love
    in its many earthly forms and variations. Amor signified the love of things of this
    world--money, power, possessions, other men and women--things which, however
    attractive and compelling, were by their own natures fragile and short-lived. Despite
    these drawbacks, money and possessions were ardently pursued during the Middle
    Ages, and so, of course, was romantic love. When the pursuit of human love expressed
    itself in literature, it often appeared in the form we now call courtly love, a term coined

    in the late nineteenth century to describe a loose set of literary conventions associated
    almost exclusively with the aristocracy and their imitators.

    Courtly Love
    Courtly love as a literary phenomenon reflects one of the most far-reaching
    revolutions in social sensibility in Western culture--the dramatic change in attitude
    towards women that began in the late eleventh century, spread throughout western and
    northern Europe during the twelfth century, and lingered through the Renaissance and
    on into the modern world where traces can still be found. In its essential nature, courtly
    love, or fin' amors, as the Provencal poets called it, was the expression of the knightly
    worship of a refining ideal embodied in the person of the beloved. Only a truly noble
    nature could generate and nurture such a love; only a woman of magnanimity of spirit
    was a worthy object. The act of loving was in itself ennobling and refining, the means to
    the fullest expression of what was potentially fine and elevated in human nature.
    More often than not, such a love expressed itself in terms that were feudal and
    religious. Thus, just as a vassal was expected to honor and serve his lord, so a lover was
    expected to serve his lady, to obey her commands, and to gratify her merest whims.
    Absolute obedience and unswerving loyalty were critical. To incur the displeasure of
    one's lady was to be cast into the void, beyond all light, warmth, and possibility of life.
    And just as the feudal lord stood above and beyond his vassal, so the lady occupied a
    more celestial sphere than that of her lover. Customarily she seemed remote and
    haughty, imperious and difficult to please. She expected to be served and wooed,
    minutely and at great length. If gratified by the ardors of her lover-servant, she might at
    length grant him her special notice; in exceptional circumstances, she might even grant
    him that last, longed-for favor. Physical consummation of love, however, was not
    obligatory. What was important was the prolonged and exalting experience of being in
    love.
    It was usually one of the assumptions of courtly love that the lady in question was
    married, thus establishing the triangular pattern of lover-lady-jealous husband. This
    meant that the affair was at least potentially adulterous, and had to be conducted in an
    atmosphere of secrecy and danger. The absolute discretion of the lover was therefore
    indispensable if the honor of the lady were to be preserved. Though the convention did
    not stipulate adultery as a sine qua non, it is nevertheless true that the two great patterns
    of courtly love in the Middle Ages--Tristan and Isolt and Lancelot and Guenevere--both
    involved women who deceived their husbands.

    Implications of Courtly Love


    What practical effect did the convention of courtly love have on the situation of
    women in the Middle Ages? Very little, if we are to believe social historians, who point
    out that there is no evidence to show that the legal and economic position of women was
    materially enhanced in any way that can be attributed to the influence of fin' amors. In a
    broader cultural context, however, it is possible to discern two long range effects of
    courtly love on western civilization. For one thing, it provided Europe with a refined
    and elevated language with which to describe the phenomenology of love. For another,
    it was a significant factor in the augmented social role of women. Life sometimes has a
    way of imitating art, and there is little doubt that the aristocratic men and women of the

    Middle Ages began to act out in their own loves the pattern of courtly behavior they
    read about in the fictional romances and love lyrics of the period. The social effect was
    to accord women preeminence in the great, central, human activity of courtship and
    marriage. Thus women became more than just beloved objects--haughty, demanding,
    mysterious; they became, in a very real sense, what they have remained ever since, the
    chief arbiters of the game of love and the impresarios of refined passion.
    Toward the end of the Middle Ages, in the work of Dante and other poets of the
    fourteenth century, the distinction between amor and caritas became blurred. Chaucer's
    Prioress ironically wears a brooch on which is inscribed, "Amor Vincit Omnia" ("Love
    Conquers All"). The secular imagery of courtly love was used in religious poems in
    praise of the Virgin Mary. The lover with "a gentle heart," as in a poem by Guido
    Guinizelli, could be led through a vision of feminine beauty to a vision of heavenly
    grace. One of Dante's greatest achievements was to turn his beloved, seen primarily in
    physical, worldly, courtly love terms in his early work, La Vita Nuova, into the abstract,
    spiritualized, religious figure of Beatrice in The Divine Comedy.
    Adapted from A Guide to the Study of Literature: A Companion Text for Core Studies 6, Landmarks of
    Literature, English Department, Brooklyn College.

    http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/love.html

    Courtly Love

    "The god of love, a benedicite!


    How myghty and how greet a lord
    is he!
    Ayeyns his myght ther gayneth
    none obstacles.
    He may be cleped a god for his
    myracles."
    (Knight's Tale, I.1795-88)

    C. S. Lewis famously defined courtly love as "Humility, Courtesy,


    Adultery, and the Religion of Love." [C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in
    Medieval Tradition. London, 1936 (rpt. 1958) [PN688.L4 1958x]. [Widener Lit 596.8.20].
    (Charming, but use with caution; some ideas are a bit dated).
    This fits well with courtly love as it was defined by Andreas Capellanus in the twelfth
    century. On the manners appropriate to a courtly lover in the fourteenth century, see

    Romaunt vv. 2175-2716, pp. 710-715, in the Riverside Chaucer. Note that in the Romaunt
    adultery is not in question, and the anti-social trait of Jealousy (which Andreas thought
    essential to love) is barred from the Garden of Love (See Romaunt, Fragment A, in the
    Riverside Chaucer). For a rather charming treatment of intended (but thwarted) adultery,
    with the lover finally rewarded for his devotion (fifteen children), see the brief romance
    The Earl of Toulouse . On the whole question see "Courtly Love and Chivalry in the Later
    Middle Ages."

    The Knight of Latour Landry describes his love for his deceased wife in the prologue to
    his book of instruction for his daughters. He is something of a prude, and he is shocked
    at the flirtatious talk of a young lady.
    For another example of a courtly lover perhaps slightly ironic, see John Gower in love.
    Gower is too old for the game of love and Venus dismisses him with his love still
    unrequited.
    The religion of love is apparent in the language of lovers (see Chaucer's "Complaint to
    His Lady," pp. 642-43 in Riverside Chaucer) and in the lightly humorous "The Lover's
    Mass."
    For a set of rules of love for women (15th cent.) see: The Ten Commandments of Love.
    For a defense of women and an illustration of how closely intertwined are courtly love
    and anti-female satire and thought, see Christine de Pisan's Epistle of Cupid, adapted
    into Middle English by Thomas Hoccleve.
    For a number of examples of Middle English poems employing the conventions of courtly
    love, see:
    Love Visions.
    The main difference between courtly love as Andreas defined it and courtly love as
    Chaucer knew it was the idea that love ennobled the lover -- made him a better knight.
    This is one of the topics debated by the Knight of La Tour Landry and his wife -- he
    arguing that his daughters should observe some of the conventions of courtly love, she
    stoutly maintaining that they should pay little attention to what clever men might say
    about such matters.
    Medieval ideas of secular love were greatly influenced by Ovid; see his Ars Amatoria, tr.
    J. H. Mozely, Loeb, Cambridge, 1947 [Widener Lo 10.201.23] and his Remedia Amoris [P
    A6522.A8 G7 1977]. These works are available on line, translated by A.S. Kline on the
    Great Books and Classics site. The idea of the ennobling power of love owes something

    to Cicero's De amicitia, On Friendship Or see the Loeb edition, tr. William A. Falconer,
    1923 [PA 296.C2 1923x]
    Love was could also be a sickness -- the "loveris maladye of Heroes" (KnT 1373-74). See:
    Mary Frances Wack, The Liber de heros morbo of Johannes Afflacius and Its Implications
    for Medieval Love Conventions, Speculum, Vol. 62, No. 2. (Apr., 1987), pp. 324-344
    (available in Jstor).
    For further reading see the brief bibliography in the Riverside Chaucer, p. 777; to this
    may be added (for those interested in the early history of courtly love):

    C. Stephen Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness:


    Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly
    Ideals, 939-1210. Philadelphia, 1985 (GT350.J34 1985).

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