Courtly Love
Courtly love – from the French amour courtois, where courtois means “courteous” or “chivalric” and amour means “love” – is the term usually used to denote a new form of relations between men and women in feudal society, which contemporaries called fin’amor, that is, “refined love.”
Literary historians reconstructed the model of courtly love on the basis of surviving poetic texts of the period. This model is simple. At its center stands a married woman, the “lady.” An unmarried man, the “youth,” notices her and becomes inflamed with desire. From that moment on, struck by love – and at that time love meant exclusively bodily desire – he thinks only of possessing this woman.
In order to achieve his goal, the man pretends to submit to his chosen lady in everything. The lady is the wife of a lord, often of the very lord whom he serves; in any case, she is the mistress of the house in which he is received, and for that reason alone she is already his lady. The man, however, emphasizes his submission in every possible way. Like a vassal, he kneels; he gives himself and his freedom as a gift to the woman he has chosen.
The woman may accept or reject this gift. If, allowing herself to be carried away by his words, she accepts it, she is no longer free, because according to the laws of that society no gift may remain without recompense. The rules of courtly love, reproducing the conditions of the vassal contract, according to which the lord owes the vassal the same services he has received from him, require the chosen woman eventually to yield to the one who has offered himself to her.
However, the lady cannot dispose of her body at her own discretion: it belongs to her husband. Everyone in the household watches her, and if she is noticed violating the rules of conduct, she will be declared guilty and may, together with her accomplice, be subjected to the harshest punishment.
The danger of the game gave it a special piquancy. A knight who embarked on a love adventure had to be cautious and strictly observe secrecy. Under the cover of this secrecy, hidden from outside eyes, the lover awaited his reward. The ritual required the woman to yield, but not immediately; rather, step by step, she was to increase the permitted caresses in order to inflame the admirer’s desire even more.
One of the themes of courtly lyric poetry is the description of the lover’s dream of supreme bliss. Pleasure, therefore, lay not so much in the satisfaction of desire as in anticipation. Desire itself became the highest pleasure. This is the true nature of courtly love, which is realized in the sphere of the imaginary and in the realm of play (Duby, 1990, pp. 90–91).
Courtly customs erected a barrier between the male and female worlds, producing misunderstanding and distrust on both sides. At the age of seven, boys were taken away from their mothers, and their subsequent life unfolded almost exclusively among men. Such a practice not only contributed to the development of homosexual inclinations and produced the image of the inaccessible comforter, but also gave rise to frightening assumptions about what women might be doing in their own circle.
Men attributed to women a mysterious and dangerous power that attracted and repelled at the same time. The segregation of the sexes produced a certain anxiety in male consciousness, which knights tried to silence by demonstrating contempt, loudly asserting their physical superiority, and boasting of their sexual exploits.
Why, then, did the feudal aristocracy accept the rules of the game of courtly love? To answer this question, one must consider the matrimonial customs of the time. In order to limit the division of inheritances, it was necessary to reduce the number of marriages entered into by the sons of noble families. Usually the family sought to marry off one son, preferably the eldest. The others, left to themselves, mostly remained unmarried.
In the twelfth century, the noble knighthood consisted largely of “youths,” that is, adult unmarried men who felt deprived and envied husbands. They did not experience deprivation in their sexual life, but prostitutes, servant women, and illegitimate women, whose services they used, were too easy a prey. Worthy of admiration was the man who possessed a woman of his own social circle.
The symbolic feat, the limit of youthful dreams, consisted in daringly seducing the wife of a brother, uncle, or lord, thereby violating the strictest prohibitions and despising the greatest danger, since severe demands were placed on wives’ fidelity, along with their capacity for childbearing: the correctness of inheritance depended on it. The court was the place where the hunt for noble women especially flourished. This hunt had to be brought within the framework of definite rules.
The relations between the male and female worlds that arose as a result of aristocratic matrimonial policy contained danger within themselves. Courtly literature developed a specific code whose provisions were intended to limit the damage caused by sexual license (Duby, 1990, p. 93).
The influence of courtly love on society proved highly productive and led to the rapid spread of its traditions. The reading of courtly literature and the projection of its plots onto everyday behavior gradually drew unmarried girls into the sphere of the game. From the end of the twelfth century in France, courtly customs became part of the ritual preceding entry into marriage.
Married men were also included in the game. They, too, could now choose among women a “friend” whom they served, like young knights. The whole of chivalric society became courtly. Courtly customs turned into a norm, and what poets had once celebrated as a dangerous and almost unattainable feat now became an ordinary requirement of good manners (Duby, 1990, p. 95).
General progress, especially intensive in France at the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, freed the individual from the bonds of collective forms of life. The customs of courtly love considerably weakened violence and brutality in men’s sexual behavior and in the matrimonial policy of lineages. Men began to understand that a woman was not only a body, that it was first necessary to win her heart, to obtain her consent, and to recognize that women possessed special virtues.
The commandments of the code of love corresponded to what the Church preached in its effort to prove that women should have equal rights with men not only in the marital bed, but also in the matter of consent to marriage.
What at first was only a game intended for men helped women of feudal Europe emerge from their degraded position. During the centuries that followed the establishment of the new model of relations, the words and actions that entered ritual, and through them the corresponding views, spread to ever wider circles of society, as always happens with cultural models that take shape in aristocratic circles and then gradually penetrate down to the lowest layers of the social structure.
In this way, a type of relationship between the sexes was formed that became characteristic of Western society. Even today, despite enormous changes in this sphere, the traditions inherited from courtly love remain a distinctive feature of European civilization (Duby, 1990, p. 96).
Reference:
Duby, G. (1990). Kurtuaznaia liubov i peremeny v polozhenii zhenshchin vo Frantsii XII v. [Courtly love and changes in the position of women in twelfth-century France]. Odissei. Chelovek v istorii [Odysseus: Man in history] (pp. 90–96). Moscow: Nauka. [in Russian].
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