Start with adultery. Start, at least, with the idea of adultery. Breaking the rules, doing something you are not supposed to do. Doing someone you are not supposed to do. This is the key idea that allows us to understand a literary tradition that stretches from the troubadours through Petrarch to Shakespeare, Milton, and beyond. Illicit desire—
whether celebrated in the passionate poems of medieval Occitania, or sublimated in the poetic tradition of idealized females worshiped by abject males in Dante, Petrarch and Sidney—is central to the energy of Shakespeare and the poetic tradition that follows in his wake. Love,
1 “[f]ür die Provenzalen und die Dichter des Neuen Stils war die hohe Minne das einzige große Thema” (Erich Auerbach. Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur. 2nd ed. [Bern: Francke, 1959], 180).
© 2017 Michael Bryson and Arpi Movsesian, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0117.04
will, desire, and the willingness (even determination) to risk everything, up to and including death—these are the passions that draw readers and audiences back again and again.
Centuries of transformation have left many of us ill-equipped to recognize the frankness and passion of troubadour verse. Some of this change was wrought merely by time and changing customs, but some of it was brought about by the best efforts of historians and literary critics to understand and interpret the past through the expectations, reverences, and distastes of later eras. Perversely, we often approach these poems through the lens of late nineteenth-century notions of propriety and decency that are alien to our own time, and to the time of the troubadours. The dangerous, even life-risking, desires expressed in these poems have been carefully tamed, hidden behind the ill-fitting phrase “courtly love”. This term, invented by Gaston Paris in 1881,2 has become commonplace in critical analyses of troubadour poetry.3 Paris argues that
love is an art, a science, a virtue, which has its rules as chivalry and courtesy […]. In no French work, as it seems to me, does this courtly love appear before the Knight of the Cart. The love of Tristran and Isolde is a different thing: it is a simple passion, ardent, natural, which does not know the subtleties and refinements of that between Lancelot and Guinevere. In the poems of Benoit de Sainte-Maure, we find gallantry, but not this exalted, almost mystical, yet still sensual, love.4
2 Appearing as amour courtois in his article “Études sur les romans de la Table Ronde”
in Romania, 10: 40 (October 1881), 465–96, and in “Études sur les romans de la Table Ronde. Lancelot du Lac, I. Le Lanzelet d’Ulrich de Zatzikhoven; Lancelot du Lac, II.
Le Conte de la charrette”, Romania, 12: 48 (October 1883), 459–534.
3 Even so recent an analysis as that of William M. Reddy relies on this term. Reddy defines the troubadour conception of fin’amor in terms of “an opposition between love and desire” (The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900–1200 CE [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012], 2), even aligning the troubadour concept with what he calls the “‘courtly love’ phenomenon [that] is well known to medievalists” (2). Reddy, does, however, note that the literature of so-called “courtly love”, can “represent a kind of resistance”, and an
“escaping [from the mid twelfth-century Church’s] blanket condemnation of all sexual partnerships as sinful and polluting” (26).
4 l’amour est un art, une science, une vertu, qui a ses règles tout comme la chevalerie ou la courtoisie […] Dans aucun ouvrage français, autant qu’il me semble, cet amour courtois n’apparaît avant le Chevalier de la Charrette. L’amour de Tristran et d’Iseut est autre chose: c’est une passion simple, ardente, naturelle, qui ne connaît pas les subtilités et les raffinements de celui de Lancelot et de Guenièvre. Dans les poèmes de Benoit de Sainte-More, nous trouvons la galanterie, mais non cet amour exalté et presque mystique, sans cesser pourtant d’être sensual.
Tellingly, Paris bases his notion of amour courtois on the only tale by the northern trouvére Chrétien de Troyes that differs from his normal pattern: the Knight of the Cart, a story about the adulterous relationship between Lancelot and Guinevere. Ordinarily, Chrétien opposes the
“new mode of love and the central theme of the Provençal Troubadours poetry”, by “refusing the adulterous relationship […] and the idolatrous passion which binds the lovers”.5 This refusal is “exemplified in all of Chrétien’s romances except Lancelot”,6 and in all of his other work, Chrétien “proclaims a mode of love which, dominated by the rules of reason and the code of courtliness, should lead to marriage and exist only inside of marriage”.7 This bears repeating, for there is something odd and contradictory at work in the way Paris comes to define his most famous term: the critical definition of “courtly love” as a chaste and rule-bound mode of relationship is based on the only one of Chrétien’s romances that breaks those rules, illustrating a love that “fell outside Christian teaching and was the exact opposite of the traditional view on marriage”,8 while at the same time, the critic comes to his definition by underplaying these transgressive features of the poem.
The effect of Paris’ misbegotten definition can be seen by looking at Andreas Capellanus’ twelfth-century treatise, De amore (Of Love), which is now (mis)leadingly translated as The Art of Courtly Love. Capellanus’
text begins by addressing itself to a young man named Walter, and by defining what love is:
Love is some kind of an inborn passion that proceeds from looking and thinking immoderately on the form of the opposite sex, a passion that makes one wish more than anything to embrace the other, and by mutual desire accomplish all of love’s precepts in the other’s embrace.9
Gaston Paris, “Études sur les romans de la Table Ronde” (1883), 519, http://www.
persee.fr/ doc/roma_0035–8029_1883_num_12_48_6277
5 Moshe Lazar. “Cupid, the Lady, and the Poet: Modes of Love at Eleanor of Aquitaine’s Court”. In Eleanor of Aquitaine: Patron and Politician, ed. by William W.
Kibler (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976), 42.
6 A common shorthand term for The Knight of the Cart.
7 Lazar, 43.
8 Ibid.
9 “Amor est passio quedam innata procedens ex vision et immoderate cogitatione formae alterius sexus, ob quam aliquis super Omnia cupit alterius potiri amplexibus et Omnia de ultriusque voluntate in ipsius amplexu amoris praecepta compleri”
(Andreas Capellanus. De amore libri tres: Von der Liebe. Drei Bücher [Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2006], 6).
Paris’ idea of amour courtois has affected the way Capellanus’ text is understood by rewriting it after the fact. The widely-used English translation by John Jay Parry reads as a courtly love treatise that often incorporates the main characteristic of this ethos—suffering.
By translating the text in a way that supports this pre-existing interpretation, Parry has created a kind of circular argument. The word passio is translated as “suffering”, although it can also be translated as
“passion”. If passio stood by itself, then either translation might suffice;
however, an “inborn passion” makes more sense with what follows, even as Parry renders it: “[love] causes each one to wish above all things the embraces of the other”.10 In the following lines, Parry continues his translation in the same circular manner: “That love is suffering is easy to see, for before the love becomes equally balanced on both sides there is no torment greater”.11 The word “torment” is meant to stand in for the Latin angustia, which means narrowness, want, or perplexity. By far the better choice for translation is want (in the sense of desire and lack).
The lover wants, more than anything else in the world, to gain the object of his desire. Capellanus makes this clear in a later protion of his work when he refers to the passion he is discussing as pure love:
Pure love is that which joins and unites the hearts of the two lovers with the affection of love. This, however, consists in the contemplation of the mind and the affection of the heart; it proceeds as far as a kiss, the arms’
embrace, and modestly touching the nude lover.12
The “pure love” spoken of is both of the body and of the mind, only
“the final consolation is omitted”,13 though that, too, is allowed in what Capellanus calls amor mixtus, mixed, or compounded love. The flesh in De amore is not marginalized as it is in the later spiritualized poetry of the Dantean and Petrarchan traditions. The man in De amore
10 Andreas Capellanus. The Art of Courtly Love. Trans. by John Jay Perry (New York: W.
W. Norton & Co., 1941), 28.
11 Ibid. The original is as follows: “Quod amor sit passio facile est videre. Nam antequam amor sit ex utraque parte libratus, nulla est angustia maior” (Capellanus, De amore libri tres: Von der Liebe, 6).
12 “Et purus quidem amor est, qui omnimoda directonis affection duorum amantium corda coniungit. Hic autem in mentis contemplation cordisque consistit affect;
procedit autem usque ad oris osculum lacertique amplexum et verecundum amantis nudae contactum” (Andreas Capellanus. De amore libri tres: Von der Liebe, 282).
13 “extremo praetermisso solatio” (ibid.).
prays to God, not for wisdom, not for piety, but for the opportunity to see his lover again. The manner in which he makes this supplication resembles the open passions of troubadour poetry: “For not an hour of the day or night could pass that I did not beg God to allow me the bounty of seeing you close to me in the flesh”.14 Amor purus is both emotional and physical. It is not the stylized “courtly love” of the later scholarly tradition.
Perhaps C. S. Lewis did the most to popularize this term, as he traced
“courtly love” in twelfth-century poetry from the southern troubadours to the northern trouvére Chrétien de Troyes. In so doing, Lewis identifies four marks—Humility, Courtesy, Adultery, and the Religion of Love15—that he claims characterize the “new feeling” that arose in the poets and the time and place in which they lived. However, though Lewis acknowledges that “courtly love necessitates adultery”, he also insists that “adultery hardly necessitates courtly love”.16 This revealing turn of phrase captures the ambiguity, the division in feelings between excitement and disapproval that characterizes the long poetic tradition that springs from troubadour roots. Poems of desire that would be fulfilled, no matter the cost—if only the opportunity manifested itself—
gave rise to later poems of decorous and often tormented sublimations of desire, using such Neoplatonic metaphors as the ladder of love.17 Desire became worship, as flesh became once again an object of shame.
Lewis’s ambivalent refusal to credit fully the significance of the troubadours and their poetry is exceedingly odd, given that he describes their work as “momentous” and “revolutionary” and “the background of European literature for eight hundred years”.18 For Lewis, “French poets, in the eleventh century, discovered or invented, or were the first to express, that romantic species of passion which English poets were
14 “Non enim poterat diei vel noctis hora pertransire continua, qua Deum non exorarem attentius, ut corporaliter vos ex propinquo videndi mihi concederet largitatem” (ibid., 192).
15 C. S. Lewis. The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), 2.
16 Ibid., 14.
17 The idea that a lover’s admiration for a beloved serves the lover as the first step on a ladder, in which each successive rung represents an increasingly refined notion of love, until by the top, the lover has left earthly love behind in favor of divine love.
18 Ibid., 4.
still writing about in the nineteenth”.19 But his use of French rather than Provençal or Occitan is telling—Lewis spends as little time with the troubadours as possible, referencing none of their poetry specifically, preferring to spend his time with Ovid, the anonymous author of the twelfth-century Concilium Romarici Montis (a mock-council on love which references the classical poet as Ovidii Doctoris egregii20), Chrétien de Troyes, and Andreas Capellanus. As Lewis reads them, each of these sources are fixated on rules, codes, official judgments, and elaborate enactments of dominance and submission that parody the rituals of Catholicism. In his reading of Chrétien’s Lancelot, for example, the issue is not “love [as] a noble form of experience [and] a theory of adultery”,21 but obedience given too slowly: “The Queen has heard of his [Lancelot’s] momentary hesitation in stepping on to the tumbril, and this lukewarmness in the service of love has been held by her sufficient to annihilate all the merit of his subsequent labours and humiliations”.22
Lancelot is momentarily ashamed to ride a cart whose driver promises to take him to the kidnapped Queen Guenivere, because the cart is used to carry prisoners, and any knight seen on such a transport will be shamed, and his reputation for honor destroyed. But though he hesitates, he climbs aboard, and willingly suffers the resulting shame (described in several following scenes), in order to be led to the Queen:
Et li chevaliers dit au nain:
«Nains, fet il, por Deu, car me di Se tu as veü par ici
Passer ma dame la reïne».
Li nains cuiverz de pute orine Ne l’an vost noveles conter, Einz li dist: «Se tu viax monter Sor la charrete que je main, Savoir porras jusqu’a demain Que la reïne est devenue».
Tantost a sa voie tenue,
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid., 19. The name translates as Ovid the Peerless [or Excellent] Doctor.
21 Ibid., 37.
22 Ibid., 28.
Qu’il ne l’atant ne pas ne ore.
Tant solemant deus pas demore Li chevaliers que il n’i monte.
Mar le fist et mar en ot honte Que maintenant sus ne sailli, Qu’il s’an tendra por mal bailli!23
And the Knight told the dwarf:
Dwarf, for God’s sake, tell me right away If you have seen here
Pass by my lady the queen.
The perfidious low-born dwarf Would not tell him the news, But merely said: If you want to ride On the cart that I drive,
By tomorrow you’ll be able to know What happened to the queen.
With that, he maintained his way forward Without waiting for the other for a moment.
For only the time of two steps The Knight hesitated to get in.
What a pity he hesitated, ashamed to go, And he failed to jump without delay, For this will cause him great suffering!
The momentary delay earns him the displeasure of the Queen, who berates him for failing to immediately obey Love’s promptings:
Et la reïne li reconte:
«Comant? Don n’eüstes vos honte De la charrete et si dotastes?
Molt a grant enviz i montastes Quant vos demorastes deus pas.
Por ce, voir, ne vos vos je pas Ne aresnier ne esgarder.24
23 Chrétien de Troyes. Le Chevalier de la Charrette, ed. by Alfred Foulet and Karl D. Uitti (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1989), ll. 352–68.
24 Ibid., ll. 4501–07.
And the Queen replied:
What? Were you not ashamed
Of the cart and its lowly endowments?
With much hesitation you mounted, Since you delayed two steps.
For this, I did not want to see you, Nor speak to you, nor look at you.
And though Chrétien eventually brings the knight and the queen together physically, he remains somewhat coy (though not as purely
“courtly” as Gaston Paris might suggest):
Or a Lanceloz quanqu’il vialt Qant la reïne an gré requialt Sa conpaignie et son solaz, Qant il la tient antre ses braz Et ele lui antre les suens.
Tant li est ses jeus dolz et buens Et del beisier et del santir Que il lor avint sanz mantir Une joie et une mervoille Tel c’onques encore sa paroille Ne fu oïe ne seüe;
Mes toz jorz iert par moi teüe, Qu’an conte ne doit estre dite.25
Lancelot now has everything he wants, Because the Queen accepts with joy His company and solace,
Since he holds her in his arms And she holds him between hers.
Their pleasure is so sweet and good, And the kisses and the caresses, What happened to them, without lying, Was a joy and a marvel
As has never before been spoken Nor heard of, nor known;
25 Ibid., ll. 4687–99.
But still, I maintain the most perfect silence About what not to say in a story.
Despite this scene, however, there remains throughout the poem an ever-present sense that the issue is one of knightly obedience rather than human passion, that the knight and the queen of the tale are less individual than archetypal, less fully human than artfully allegorical.
As Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner notes, the figure of Lancelot in Chrétien and the later prose romancers serves primarily as an object lesson in the relative inferiority and impurity of human desire, when compared to the purity of a love directed toward the heavens: “Across the large canvas of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, the Cart episode remains at the center of Lancelot’s story, even as it marks an important shift in Lancelot as hero, still the best of Arthurian chivalry, but not ‘the good knight’ who will achieve the Grail”.26
Despite the note of desire in their story, Chrétien’s knight and the queen he “serves” are ultimately, as Lewis highlights, more allegorical than human—high examples of what Lewis calls the “allegorical love poetry of the Middle Ages”27 He is correct to call it so, but he is in a hurry to move past the troubadours for such authors as Chrétien precisely because the latter is writing allegory and the former are not.
There is nothing allegorical about the passionate poems of Bernart de Ventadorn,28 Guilhem IX, or the Comtessa de Dia, nor is there an emphasis on rules, ceremonies, mock judgments in high-church style, or demands for obedience—whether instantly or otherwise delivered.
What Lewis finds discomfiting in the troubadour poetry is precisely that element of adultery that he repeatedly mentions, but consistently refuses to illustrate with quotation. He is much happier to tell us the
26 Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner. “‘Redefining the Center’ Verse and Prose Charrette”.
In A Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, ed. by Carol Dover (Cambridge, UK:
Brewer, 2003), 95.
27 C. S. Lewis, 1.
28 “Bernart de Ventadorn provides one context in which to read the Lancelot—and with it, modern discussions of courtly love—since he and Chrétien appear to have known one another: they exchanged lyric poems in which they debate the passionate versus the rational aspects of love” (Sarah Kay. “Courts, Clerks, and Courtly Love”. In The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. by Roberta L.
Krueger [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000], 86.
opinions of Peter Lombard, Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas on love and passion29 than he is to give the Occitan poets their voice.
Of course, Lewis is not the only figure at whose feet can be laid the blame for the oddly misbegotten notion of “courtly love”, a notion all too often applied to the troubadours without actually being derived from their poetry or from an analysis of their poetry. This latter trend can also be seen in twentieth-century French psychoanalysis, in Jacques
Of course, Lewis is not the only figure at whose feet can be laid the blame for the oddly misbegotten notion of “courtly love”, a notion all too often applied to the troubadours without actually being derived from their poetry or from an analysis of their poetry. This latter trend can also be seen in twentieth-century French psychoanalysis, in Jacques