Courtly literature

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Courtly Love: An Idealized and Unattainable Love
The literature of courtly love (Amour Courtois) refers to an innovative literary genre
of poetry of the High Middle Ages (1000-1300 CE) which elevated the position of
women in society and established the motifs of the romance genre recognizable in the
present day.
Courtly love poetry featured a lady, usually married but always in some way
inaccessible, who became the object of a noble knight's devotion, service, and self-
sacrifice. Prior to the development of this genre, women appear in medieval literature
as secondary characters and their husbands' or fathers' possessions; afterward, women
feature prominently in literary works.
Scholars continue to debate whether the literature reflected actual romantic
relationships of the upper class of the time or was only a literary conceit. Some
scholars have also suggested that the poetry was religious allegory relating to the
heresy of the Catharism, which, persecuted by the Church, spread its beliefs through
popular poetry while others claim it represents superficial games of the medieval
French courts. No consensus has been reached on which of these theories is correct,
but scholars do agree that this kind of poetry was unprecedented in medieval Europe
and coincided with an idealization of women. The poetry was quite popular in its
time, contributed to the development of the Arthurian Legend, and standardized the
central concepts of the western ideal of romantic love.

Origin & Name

Courtly Love was originated in France, around the time of the First Crusade, in 1099.
From there, Eleanor of Aquitaine (famous for first being Queen of France, and then,
via a second marriage, Queen of England) was responsible for bringing the idea to
England, where it was practised in English courts from the 1300s to the 1500s.
Scholar Leigh Smith discusses the origin of the name:
“The term itself dates back only to 1883 CE when Gaston Paris coined the phrase
Amour Courtois to describe Lancelot's love for Guinevere in the romance Lancelot
(c. 1177 CE) by Chretien de Troyes. Medieval literature employs a variety of terms
for this kind of love. In Provencal the word is cortezia (courtliness), French texts use
fin amour (refined love), in Latin the term is amor honestus (honorable, reputable
love).”
This love praised by the troubadours had nothing to do with marriage as recognized
and sanctified by the Church but was extramarital or premarital, freely chosen – as
opposed to a marriage which was arranged by one's social superiors – and
passionately pursued. An upper-class medieval marriage was a social contract in
which a woman was given to a man to further some agenda of the couple's parents
and involved the conveyance of land. Land equaled power, political prestige, and
wealth. The woman, therefore, was little more than a bargaining chip in financial and
political transactions.
In the world of courtly love, on the other hand, women were free to choose their own
partner and exercised complete control over him. Whether this world reflected a
social reality or was simply a romantic literary construct continues to be debated in
the present day and central to that question is the figure of Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Chretien de Troyes & Andreas Capellanus

Andreas Capellanus set down the four rules of courtly love as, allegedly, derived
from Eleanor court:
 Marriage is no excuse for not loving
 One who is not jealous, cannot love
 No one can be bound by a double love
 Love is always increasing or decreasing
According to these rules, just because one was married did not mean one could not
find love outside of that contract; love was expressed most clearly through jealousy
which proved one's devotion; there was only one true love for every individual and
no one could honestly claim to love two people the same way; true love was never
static but always dynamic, unpredictable, and ultimately unknowable even by those
experiencing it because it was initiated and directed by a God of Love (Cupid), not by
the lovers themselves.
Chretien de Troyes is the poet responsible for some of the best-known aspects of the
Arthurian Legend including Lancelot's affair with Guinevere and the Grail Quest.
Chretien established the central motifs of the genre of courtly love poetry which
include:
 A beautiful woman who is inaccessible (either because she is married or
imprisoned)
 A noble knight who has sworn to serve her
 A forbidden, passionate love shared by both
 The impossibility or danger of consummating that love
The best-known example of this is Lancelot's love for Guinevere, the wife of his best
friend and king, Arthur of Britain. Lancelot cannot deny his feelings but cannot act
on them without betraying Arthur and exposing Guinevere as the unfaithful wife of a
noble king. Another example is the famous story of Tristan and Iseult by Thomas of
Britain (c. 1173 CE) in which young Tristan is asked by his uncle Mark to escort
Mark's fiancé Iseult to his castle. Tristan and Iseult fall in love (in some versions
because of a love potion accidentally taken) and their betrayal of Mark is the plot
point that drives the rest of the story.
Woman and love in medieval courtly literature: the real and the fictional
One of the main tenets of Catharism was recognition of the female principle in the
divine which they recognized as the goddess Sophia (wisdom). Courtly love poetry
was an allegory in which the damsel-in-distress was Sophia, held captive by the
Catholic Church, and the brave knight was the Cathar whose duty was to liberate her.
The lady symbolized good as spirit – and so the knight could never consummate his
love for her – while the marriage she was trapped in, sanctified by the Church,
symbolized the evil of the world.
Thus in medieval Christian societies “woman” was seen either as Eve, the temptress
to be avoided by men or as Virgin Mary, the unreal, unattainable noble and virgin
lady who could not be a wife and a beloved but a divinity to be adored.

Now, you may wonder, what made courtly love so extraordinary?

Courtly love was a medieval social game played by the upper-class in their courts.
Duby writes:
“Courtly love was a game, an educational game. It was the exact counterpart of the
tournament. As at the tournament, whose great popularity coincided with the
flourishing of courtly eroticism, in this game the man of noble birth was risking his
life and endangering his body in the hope of improving himself, of enhancing his
worth, his price, and also of taking his pleasure, capturing his adversary after
breaking down her defenses, unseating her, knocking her down and toppling her.
Courtly love was a joust.”
According to this theory, the lady in the tales serves "to stimulate the ardour of young
men and to assess the qualities of each wisely and judiciously. The best man was the
man who had served her best". This theory accounts for the misogynistic elements of
courtly love poetry in that the woman is an object to be conquered sexually, not an
individual, or is an arbiter of a man's worth based solely on her status as noble and,
again, not because of who she is as a person.