Courtly Love Revisited in the Age of Feminism

By Antonia Southern

Courtly love and feminism are strange bedfellows, the one a controversial literary concept, and the other a continuing crusade. Both can be taken seriously or ridiculed. In this incisive book, Antonia Southern tries to do both with both. Courtly Love focuses a feminist lens on fourteen authors, some well-known and some less so. They aimed variously to entertain, amuse, instruct, make money, or please themselves. Marie de France is the supreme example of the last category. Sir Thomas Malory wrote in prison and needed to pass the time. Christine de Pizan wrote to make a living for herself and her family. The Knight of La Tour-Landry wrote advice for his own daughters. Sir Philip Sidney wrote for his sister and her friends. Chrétien de Troyes and Andrew Capellanus had patrons to please, and so sometimes did Geoffrey Chaucer. A historian unrepentantly trespassing in the verdant fields of English literature, Southern rejects the concept of “the Death of the Author” and the divorce of authors from their writing and seeks to understand them on their own terms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Academica Press
• Release date: May 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781680537222

Book preview

Introduction

She [Eve] was formed not just from any part of his body [Adam’s] but from his side, so that it should be shown that she was created for the partnership of love … since she was made neither to dominate, nor to serve the man, but as his partner, she had to be produced neither from his head nor from his feet, but from his side, so that he would know that she was to be placed by himself.

Peter Lombard: Sentences 1155 – 1158.

If women were not good and their counsels good and profitable, our Lord God of Heaven would never have wrought [made] them, nor called them ‘help’ of man, but rather confusion of man.

Geoffrey Chaucer:

The Canterbury Tales: The Tale of Melibeus c.1386.

A reproduction of Titian’s work seems appropriate for this study of love in many different forms over a period of five centuries. Sacred and Profane Love was painted in celebration of a marriage in 1515. It was originally called The Two Venuses, a much better name for it than the title by which it has become known to-day, given to it more than one hundred and fifty years after it was commissioned.

‘Sacred and profane’ suggests a dichotomy, a separation into two contrasting parts which would have made little sense to contemporaries accustomed to strange and various images illustrating Holy works. The two Venuses are, in fact, twins, painted from the same model. Both are honourable and praiseworthy; the naked Venus represents celestial love, beyond reality, and the clothed, terrestrial love in the material world. Nudity in the Renaissance world signified unvarnished truth and the flaming vessel held by the naked Venus proclaims this. The clothed Venus is of the everyday world; she wears a crown of myrtle and a belt, symbols of marriage, her clothes are rich and gaudy and she is holding a golden vessel presumably full of money and jewels. Cupid, between the two Venuses, playing with water in the fountain confirms the essential peacefulness and harmony of the scene.¹

The relief on the front of the fountain provides a contrast, a different aspect of love, uncivilized and alarming, shown by an unbridled horse (popular symbol of unbridled passion), a man raping a woman (he has her by her hair) and a flagellation scene which may be punishment or perhaps purification.²

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It is odd to think of fashion in connection with the supposedly timeless emotion of love. The feeling, one imagines, cannot have changed much over the centuries although it has in literature and language as Chaucer recognised in the late fourteenth century.

And then, you know, the forms of language change

Within a thousand years, and long ago

Some words were valued that will now seem strange,

Affected, even; yet they spoke them so,

And fared as well in love, for all I know,

As we do now; in various lands and ages

Various are the ways to win love’s wages.³

It has been argued that there is nothing in literature that does not, in some degree, percolate into life.⁴

Romantic love is apparently out of fashion nowadays although human nature being what it is there must be sufferers out there. Suffering is a constant feature in the literature about love in the Middle Ages – as it is in the love stories of many centuries. In everyday life at all times as well as the sufferers there must also have been men and women who had no time for the affectations and rules of courtly love which influenced poetry and prose and maybe manners in England and Europe during that time.

Twenty-first century women do not wish to have doors opened for them or seats offered to them in crowded trains. Their luggage travels on wheels; they do not want men to stand up when they come in to a room and they are ready to carry the coals themselves. In exchange for these freedoms they have the right of equal access to all jobs and professions, equal pay (at least in theory), the right to speak their minds and freedom from domestic responsibility (again at least in theory). They are appalled by the supposed sufferings of their mothers, grandmothers and great grandmothers.

One of the reasons for this, of course, is education, available progressively over the last two hundred years or so, equally to both genders and theoretically to all classes, with a resultant change in attitudes. Progress in the condition of women in society in the western world has been one of the great achievements of the last hundred and fifty years. Sadly this is not the case to-day in places dominated by fundamentalist Islam.

Language has reflected this change. Frauendienst was the title of a thirteenth century work by the minnesinger,⁵ Ulrich von Liechtenstein, which has been translated as The Service of Ladies, appropriately for the amusing and charming story which it tells of the faithful, unrequited love of a young man for a married noblewoman considerably older than himself. The sympathies of the reader must all be with the man. The ending is sad but the author concludes: ‘I could not neglect my art nor leave off singing women’s praise. I sang of love and happy days.’

The German word was adopted in English and appears in the Oxford English Dictionary as used in 1879 with the meaning ‘exaggerated chivalry towards women, all that was fantastic and ridiculous in the age of chivalry.’ Much of the courtly love sentiment in Liechtenstein’s book is funny to present day readers but it would not have been seen as ridiculous or to be scorned in its own day. Women have come to want status rather than service and, in time, have achieved it.⁶

The Married Woman’s Property Act, passed in 1882, ensured the right of married women to their own property – incidentally husbands were no longer liable for their wives’ debts. The vote for women - and for propertyless men - was won in 1918 and 1928. The professions were officially confirmed as open to women in 1919; these included law, medicine and the civil service. Ordination in the Church of England followed belatedly in 1992 and episcopal ordination in 2014. In 1919 university degrees were open to them after some years of campaigning. Women’s colleges in Oxford and Cambridge had been established in the 1870s. The word ‘obey’* was made voluntary in the revised marriage service of 1928.⁷

Education was one thing; a less recognised, if not equally important, reason for the extension of women’s horizons in recent times has been technical inventiveness, the progress of machines and consequent decline in value and importance of physical strength, an advantage which men do have over women. Men fought battles when this involved wielding swords and axes, rolling out gun carriages, carrying equipment through the mud into the front line and flying heavy aircraft. Chrétien de Troyes in the twelfth century explained: ‘A woman does not know how to bear a shield or strike with a lance.’ He might have substituted ‘cannot’ for ‘does not know how.’ Press-button weapons, on the other hand, can be handled by anyone, guided missiles are set on their way by women as easily as by men. ‘A machinegun is a great equaliser,’ a recent Times obituary commented.⁸ A woman in the past would have had difficulty in controlling a coach and four or six or eight but is now as physically able as a man to drive any make of car or lorry.

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The term, courtly love, amour courtois, was coined in the nineteenth century to describe a novelty in the literature of the twelfth century which lasted as a subject for different writers for many hundreds of years afterwards. In its own day it was known as fin’ amor, an expression first used by the troubadour, Marcabrou, which may be defined as quintessential love or love as opposed to lust.⁹

It has been described as an inherently ambiguous subject, a complex and vexed question, and this is an understatement. It was frequently ironic and satirical; it is controversial and contradictory but recognisable in essentials in the literature of five centuries and haunting some as an idea in everyday life to-day. Among contemporary literary critics the subject is said to involve ‘realists’ who believe that it existed in literature if not in life as an institution between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries and ‘idealists,’ who regard it as a fiction, devised by literary commentators of a later age. I am a ‘realist’ and hope to prove my point in the ensuing pages.¹⁰

It was a novelty with origins in the third century BCE writing of the classical poet, Ovid; love as described by Ovid was not exactly courtly but the subject of love was engrossing to him and his readers. Plato in The Symposium, two and a half centuries before Ovid, had distinguished between Common Love and Heavenly Love but the Greek language and literature were not generally known among scholars in the Western world before the fifteenth century and there are no references to Plato or quotations from him in the courtly love literature of the successors of the troubadours. Hellenic culture came to Europe more generally via the Arabs who had preserved it especially in medicine and mathematics. Chrétien de Troyes was in advance of his time in recognising how the notion actually travelled in literature: ‘Our books have taught us that chivalry and learning first flourished in Greece; then to Rome came the sum of knowledge, which now has come to France.’¹¹

Fin’ amor is very different from the thinking of to-day and, as I have suggested, would be no more acceptable to twenty-first century feminists than the recent past they find so regrettable. It was also very different from the thinking of previous authors, Ovid, himself, or the author of Beowulf in the so-called Dark Ages. Chrétien de Troyes translated Ovid in the twelfth century but seems to have understood him in a different way from the way we do to-day or suppose that people did in his. Ovid wrote, as a twentieth century critic has said, of ‘merry sensuality,’¹² perhaps sympathetic to the twenty-first century, very different from gentillesse, the subject of the later writers, wherein the basic impulses of aggression and omnivorous sexuality in men were supposedly tamed by notions of chivalry and romance.¹³

It apparently dictated that women were to be looked up to, served and revered. Their word was law; their lightest whim to be obeyed. The man was the suppliant, the servant of his lady. It survived in literature for five centuries; Shakespeare’s thirteen year-old Juliet knew the rules. She told Romeo: ‘If thou thinkst I am too quickly won, I’ll frown and be perverse and say thee nay.’¹⁴

This attitude was not only new in the twelfth century; it was also revolutionary. The Church taught that the man was lord and master of his wife. Eve had sinned twice, not only in disobeying God’s commandment but also in giving the apple to Adam. (He had been quick to make his defence: ‘The woman … gave me of the tree and I did eat.’)* It was right that she should be doubly punished by the pain of childbirth and by subjection to male power. In this context the notion of the lover as servant to his lady was truly extraordinary.¹⁵

Misogyny had emerged from studying the Old Testament; Eve was followed by Delilah and Solomon did not find one upright woman after an extensive search but the prevalence of female martyrs and respect for them from the earliest Christian times was a contradiction to the bad reputation of women in the Old Testament. So was the Magnificat which had been part of the liturgy of the Christian church in the West since the fifth century. In the fourteenth century Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies has the Virgin, invited to reign over her imagined city, taking up her \position accompanied by Mary Magdalene and a host of martyrs. ‘He [man] gained more through Mary than he lost through Eve’ and the news of the resurrection was first entrusted to a woman, as the author said. The cult of Mary Magdalen grew steadily from the eleventh century onwards.¹⁶

Veneration of the Virgin with the feudal title of Our Lady had become usual towards the end of the eleventh century. St. Bernard of Clairvaux preached eighty-six sermons on the Song of Songs exalting the Mother of Christ and four great Cathedrals, built in France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, were dedicated to her. She was the subject of beautiful poetry at this time.¹⁷

Evidence of a change in attitudes to women may curiously also be found in the rules of the game of chess as it developed in the twelfth century. In its original form the game, coming from India, was dominated by four kings but now in ‘this excellent and enjoyable game’ the Queen came to take precedence over all the other pieces; she could move in any direction she liked although the King did remain the final stake. Chess was used by Chaucer to convey sorrow in The Book of the Duchess: ‘Fortune took my Queen.’¹⁸

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Practically the idea of looking up to women flourished in medieval society when the consorts of rulers were left in charge as regents in the absence of their husbands or sons campaigning or crusading and ladies in their castles might be addressed as midons, the title of a feudal lord, in the absence of their husbands. Chaucer’s knight, for example, father of a boy of twenty, cannot have been much at home while his son was growing up. He was fighting in three continents.¹⁹

In many castles there would have been young men and boys at home, training in the art of war. Primogeniture was increasingly adopted to prevent subdivision of fiefs and complications over military service and this produced a number of landless knights, younger sons, seeking their fortunes and opportunities of service perhaps to my lady. In twelfth century southern France noblemen’s daughters could inherit property and qualify, literally, as midons.²⁰

Courtly love and feudal society might be practically compatible but they clashed when adulterous love involved the ultimate crime of treachery to one’s liege lord. Dante put Tristram in the second circle of Hell among the lustful, after the unbaptized for whom there was probably some excuse but before the gluttonous. For the crime of reading about adulterous love, the love of Lancelot and Guinevere, Francesco and Paolo, found themselves in the same circle as Tristram which does seem rather hard.²¹

Love was seen as an art, a science and a virtue with its own strict rules similar to the rules of polite conduct or the rules which governed tournaments – similar but not the same. Secrecy was essential; the woman’s honour must be preserved and the man might expect to be treated disdainfully by the woman even if she loved him. He had to do great deeds in order to prove himself worthy of her. He had to be obedient to his lady and at all times to serve her; conversely she must be pure and noble. This was not always true of heroines in medieval literature. Adultery was forbidden by the church but in a society in which marriages were dictated by dynastic and property considerations love was frequently, though not always, adulterous, secret and jealous, classic examples being the affairs of Lancelot and Guinevere and Tristram and Isolde. These famous couples were apparently not alone. Malory tells of a magic horn from which faithful wives could drink without spilling the liquid; Queen Isolde and a hundred of her ladies were tested and only four drank successfully. The statistic of those who resisted the Squire of Dames in Spenser’s Faerie Queene is even more shocking; only three out of twelve hundred were apparently not to be seduced. He was said to be very handsome.²²

Before marriage was lawful the Church insisted on consent between the two parties including confirmation of child weddings at the age of twelve for girls and fourteen for boys. Of course parental pressure might be and probably often was applied. In real life arranged marriages could be loving and there were poets who defended the institution. Christine de Pizan, described her happy marriage at the age of fifteen and inconsolable widowhood at the age of twenty-five. She and her husband, as she said, had grown up together. Marriage was the goal of courtly love in Chaucer’s tales as told by the Knight and the Franklin.²³

In 1371, The Knight of La Tour Landry wrote a book of instruction for his daughters who were contemporaries of Christine de Pizan’s. There is no evidence that she ever read it but she would have approved of many of the Knight’s views. William Caxton thought the book worth translating into English and printing a century after it was written; his judgement proved sound when it became a best seller. Along with useful advice against plucking their eyebrows and messing about with their hair, the Knight advised his daughters against flirting. He believed in marriage and that women should not have paramours; a woman may not have two hearts, as he put it. Sadly the book of advice he wrote for his sons has not survived. It would have been interesting to compare the two.²⁴

Three versions of a contemporary work, Piers the Ploughman, exist: the first text in 1370, the second between 1377 and 1379 and the third sometime after 1390. The author, William Langland, was neither a court poet nor a father advising daughters. He was a married man himself, a clerk in minor orders with a wife called Kit and a daughter, Colette, writing, it seems, for religious houses or for devout middle class households rather than courts.* Marriage is briefly mentioned in the text, seen as necessary for Do-well, the personification of active virtue, a man who must work and keep the world going. Woman was created as an agent, to assist him in this enterprise. ‘Marriage was established, and God himself made it; the heaven of wedlock is here on earth, and He himself was its witness.’²⁵ There were various ways of looking at love and marriage in the Middle Ages.

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The title, courtly love, coined in the nineteenth century, is misleading in more ways than one. It is as much a mistake to see love in the writings of Chaucer, Malory, Spenser and their contemporaries as exclusively upper class as to see it as always adulterous. John Gower condemned adultery in his Latin poem, Vox Clamantis, The Crying Voice. He described it as a French sin, justifiable in the sense that the literary genre, fin’ amor, came originally from France but scarcely fair otherwise.²⁶

A twelfth century treatise on love, usually known as De Amore but sometimes entitled De Arte Amandi Honeste, accurately if clumsily translated as the art of loving decently or properly, considered lovers of different degree from each other, the nobility, the simple nobility and the middle classes variously united as well as those of equal rank. The civilized lover must eschew ‘villainy,’ low-born behaviour but as love, unlike marriage, is not a matter of lineage he need not be nobly born.

A trading community and middle class were increasingly accepted by society at the time and this was evident in contemporary literature. One of the supplicant men addressing a lady of higher rank than himself in De Amore defended the fact that he worked; he saw no disgrace in engaging in business. Chaucer’s Dame Alison, the Wife of Bath, was a cloth maker and nobody dared to take communion ahead of her. The fact of our common descent from Adam and Eve is constantly repeated in the centuries considered in this book. Christine de Pizan asked: ‘What is nobility except virtue? It never comes from flesh and blood.’ Chaucer and Malory recognised ‘gentilesse’ as something different from and more important than what might have been thought of in later days as ‘blue blood.’²⁷

Towards the end of the thirteenth century Jean de Meun in The Romance of the Rose spoke trenchantly on the subject of noble birth as opposed to working for one’s living: ‘no-one is noble whose mind is not set on virtue, nor is anyone base except on account of his vices, which make him seem shocking and stupid.’²⁸

Much of the literature dealing with the subject of courtly love was in the vernacular. Chaucer and his contemporaries, John Gower²⁹ and Thomas Usk, wrote in English. So did the anonymous authors of The Owl and the Nightingale and The Flower and the Leaf. Chrétien de Troyes wrote