On crusade, William and his fellow knights discovered harem women, beautiful but remote and unknowable, hushed behind walls, their chastity an inaccessible garden. Arab men gazed at their shy eyes and spun luxurious fantasies. With their emotions hidden, faceless as psychoanalysts, these women were blank slates for the men’s imaginings. In the Mideast, knights enjoyed exotic games that sparked their senses and challenged their intellect, board games such as chess, war games with peculiar weaponry, and also games of the flesh—new sexual techniques, new varieties of desire.
William wrote his songs in the street language of Provence, and this gave them an immediacy and a certain vulgar reality that appealed to his contemporaries at court. Sassy, ribald, audacious, and a bit of a rogue, he thought nothing of snatching someone’s wife when her husband was out of sight, or painting a portrait of his mistress’s body on his shield. When eyebrows raised at this, he saucily replied that she had carried him often enough on the shield of her hips. He once bragged that he had bedded the wives of two well-known lords 188 times in one week. Whether or not we believe his bravado, or libido, he betrayed the rules of courtly love by boasting. It must have been tempting to rattle the abacus of one’s self-regard, but secrecy was the code in courtly love, not just because it heightened the excitement, but because there was hell to pay if a wife was caught being unfaithful. For her, in the early Middle Ages, infidelity was a capital offense; and, in later years, it usually meant being banished to a convent. The husband was even within his rights to murder her and her lover, if he wished. With so much at stake, it’s small wonder women put men through exhausting tests to make sure of their sincerity.
Most of the troubadours were commoners, the medieval equivalent of traveling folksingers who played other people’s songs along with some of their own. If they were talented and lucky, and could find a hospitable lord or lady with money, they performed regularly at a castle. That small world could get smaller by the hour in idle moments. There were no novels of romance, no gossip magazines, no thrillers to watch at the cinema. A clever singer, full of soap-operalike stories and bloodcurdling adventures, was a welcome guest. Thanks to the troubadours, affairs of the heart became a favorite theme of poetic sagas, and so the love story first entered European literature. The compass of heroism widened, and the idea of “the couple”—two people served by a single verb—began to tantalize society.
THE HEART’S REBELLION
One of the great changes of the Middle Ages was a shift from unilateral love to mutual love. That love could be shared, that two people could feel passionate concern and desire for each other, was at first an avant-garde and dangerous idea. Because the Church taught that love was appropriate only for God, it found the idea of mutual love simply impossible. After all, one was to love God without ransom, expecting nothing in return. To the churchman’s mind, love was not a collaboration of hearts, not a pas de deux, not a two-way street, not an exchange of goods and services, but a solitary state.
I don’t think the troubadours believed they were being subversive by saying that the lightning of love could flow between two people, not just toward heaven. Nonetheless, by making love available on earth, between mortals, they could be charged with encouraging the worship of false idols. They introduced the image of the lovers, a society of two, as something noble and valuable. They honored pairs who felt passionate love for each other. Until then, love between men and women was thought to be sinful and vulgar. As often as not, it led to madness. And it was always degrading. To portray love as majestic, an ideal to be searched for, was truly shocking. To accept that sexual desire might be a natural part of love, but that the total feeling was more spiritual, an intense oneness, didn’t jibe with classical teachings. After all, in Greek tragedy, love was an affliction, a horror that led to cruelty and death. For theologians, human love was a poor reflection of the real thing, which could be found only in spiritual rapture. Insisting that women were equal participants in love, even ennobled by it, seemed outlandish because it tampered with the natural order of feudal life, where men served their lords, and women were faithful to their men. If one’s lover deserved one’s total dedication, where did one’s feudal master fit into the equation?
As courtly love bewitched society, the grip of the Church weakened and power began to sift from the hands of the nobles. This new concept of love radically altered how people defined themselves and sought fulfillment. Most revolutionary of all, perhaps, it introduced the idea of personal choice. In a world where hierarchy ruled, one owed one’s fealty first to God and next to the lord of the manor. Choosing whom to love—expressing a preference—was an act of outright rebellion, a revolt against the morality of the age, which denied the individual. Yet this coup d’état found its leaders in the highest ranks of government.
It was in the court of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine (William’s granddaughter), and her daughter, Marie, that the tournament of love really flourished. There, troubadours wrote some of their most daring and exquisite songs, often combining love stories with tales of adventure, such as the Celtic myth of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. The ladies of the songs bore such names as “Beautiful Glance,” “Pure Joy,” and “Beautiful Hope.” And the troubadours tossed them bouquets of praise and adoration. They crafted an art form from music, poetry, and pure desire. “Courtly love” it came to be called,* a phrase intentionally ambiguous. A courtship developed at court, but it was also very much a game played on a court. Just as sports are played in the confines of an arena, courtly love was played inside the small world of a castle. Its strict rules were known by all, often rehearsed in public, and viewed by many. One game that became popular was the Court of Love, which was as much a debate as a litigation. Everyone would gather in a central hall, and some love problem would be offered for consideration. Each player chose a position and had to defend it. The question might be: “Who is easier to win over, the wife of an impotent man or the wife of a jealous man?;” or “What do you prefer, warm clothing in winter or a courtly mistress in summer?;” or “If your lady gives herself to you on the condition of her spending a night with a toothless old man, would you prefer she fulfill this condition before or afterward?” Clearly no one expected solutions to these predicaments, only witty banter and the chance to enjoy love talk in public. In one such game, Queen Eleanor was asked to decide which she would rather have as a lover—a young man of no virtue or an old man of much virtue. She picked the old man, because in courtly love virtue was paramount. In the revolving worlds of court, the players knew one another, if only in passing, or by reputation. But beyond their magic circle, courtly love followed a purer path.
Castles were islands of civility and culture, where a wandering knight could pause to refresh his spirit, much as a sailor might visit a bustling port after some time at sea. It must have seemed a dazzling mirage: the lady and her damsels, the children and other relatives, and all the servingmen and -women. Encountering such an island, a knight would choose a beautiful, remote, married “lady,” whom he greatly idealized. At first he would hide in the bushes and worship his lady from afar, a voyeur excited by his invisible intimacy. The sweep of her skirt would make him flush. The revelation of her wrist would send gooseflesh down his neck. In time, he would present himself to her as a humble servant, pledging his heart and soul, his faithfulness and his valor. This is when cushions first appeared in the western world; a swain falling to his knees before a lady needed a soft place to land, and a lady expecting a swain always had a cushion handy. No doubt there was an enchanting coquetry in how far away she kept the cushion. Whatever trials she set him he swore to meet. Loving her would be a pilgrimage of her own devising. In a feudal world, where serfs bowed down to a lord, he would be her serfdom, she his master. With each test, she granted him an added familiarity. The stages might include her condescending to speak his name, then his being allowed to sit worshipfully beside her for a short spell, then perhaps their strolling together in the garden. Ultimately,
she would grant him a kiss, and later allow him to see (but not touch) her naked body. In time, he might even be allowed to make love to her. But consummation was not part of the game. That would spoil the romance and end his quest. A plucky knight proved his worth by slaying the mightiest dragons of all—his independence, sexual hunger, and pride. Striving for self-possession, he was supposed to love without possessing the beloved. This was important in practical terms, because she belonged to her husband, and also because the whole point of the adventure was the knight’s attempt to perfect himself apropos of the beloved. So the essence of courtly love was protracted excitement, a delirium of gorgeously unbearable longing. Only by staying wholly infatuated, damp with sublimated erotic passion, could one mine one’s emotions inexhaustibly, and strive higher, risk more, achieve nobler ends. This game of perpetual arousal required a sensuous discipline, a voluptuous rigor that took patience and skill, and it weeded out anyone who just wanted quick sex.
The lady loved the knight only if he merited her love. This notion—of the female putting the male through tests before she accepts him as a lover—is not a supercivilized human conceit; it is a ritual played throughout the animal kingdom, from insects to bowerbirds to elks. The knight, on the other hand, loved his lady because of her innate beauty. This was not a Platonic love of beauty, which would have been familiar to the ancient. The idea of first worshiping the beloved’s beauty only to learn from it how to worship the beauty of others would be anathema to a courtly lover. Nothing could pull him away from the celestial mechanics of his devotion, spinning around his beloved like a captured moon, held in check by gravity. Knights were warriors; how thrilling for a lady to force them to be gentle and refined in her name, knowing what violence was being reined in. “Service” was everything. The Romans and Greeks despised men who served anyone, especially a woman. Now we find service raised to an art form, and knights longing to be humiliated by love. If so ordered, a knight would even be willing to lose a joust intentionally, telling no one that he had thrown the fight, slinking away like a fool:
Courtly love service by its very nature was meant to mortify male pride. In this voluntary submission of the friend to the loved one, there was a profound verity: since it was the deeply ingrained misogyny of the male which, until then, had reined in the impulse toward mutual love, it was important that such love now have as its point of departure the symbolic humiliation of male power.
What fascinated the troubadours were the first stages of love, whose flickering emotions they chronicled, the trembling moments at the beginning of an affair when two lovers were transfixed by one another, absorbed into each other’s version of reality, but quivering with uncertainty. Sexual intercourse put an end to such a story, and conjugal love didn’t interest them at all. It was too dull. They preferred the lying awake at night, the devoured glances, the secret codes, the fetishes and tokens, the steamy fantasizing, the moaning to one’s pillow, the fear of discovery, the agony of separation, the torrents of bliss followed by desperate hours.
What a contrast there was between the values of courtly love and the world in which it thrived. Life in medieval France was brutal, violent, mercurial, vulgar, filled with the arrogant theatrics of war. Lovers, on the other hand, wished to be humble, faithful* refined, gentle, and discreet. They began to speak of “true love,” not as a madness but as something wonderful, something morally good. The Church ruled with an iron will, yet courtly love was a briskly irreligious enterprise, an almost Marxist revolt against the Church. Condoning adultery, and even claiming that good could result from it (a man became nobler, humbler, more refined), elevated adultery above marriage. Celebrating passion, and defining love in natural terms, were equally sacrilegious. Yet, because France was the center of artistic, intellectual, and political life, this radical new idea of mutual love became the fashion and spread throughout Europe. From Provence, it drifted south to Italy—where Dante adapted and refined it so that it didn’t quarrel with his belief in Christianity—and then north, where Chrétien de Troyes and others wrote stories of a curiously new sort, concerned with how people thought and felt.
THE ORIGINS OF COURTLY LOVE
Why did such stylized love evolve at this point in history? There are many theories. Some argue that courtly love simply mirrored the economics of the time—knights served their lady the way vassals served their lord or humans served their God. As C. S. Lewis reminds us, “What is new usually wins its way by disguising itself as the old.” Feudal relationships between men might have provided a basis for romantic love between men and women. “These male affections,” Lewis writes,
—though wholly free from the taint that hangs about “friendship” in the ancient world—were themselves lover-like; in their intensity, their willful exclusion of other values, and their uncertainty, they provided an exercise of the spirit not wholly unlike that which later ages have found in “love.”
One thing is certain: during the Crusades, knights discovered a more elastic sense of society, and savored cultures that had a greater respect for women. Widening their horizons made them more receptive to the social changes already taking place in France while they were away. In Byzantium, they encountered the cult of worshiping the Virgin Mary. This stood in stark contrast to the age-old teaching of the Church, which held that Eve’s wickedness doomed all of us. Out of Oedipal feelings, perhaps, the profane idea of “the noble Lady” and the sacred idea of the Virgin Mary eventually became interchangeable to the point where, at one time, the worship or love of Mary surpassed the love or worship of Jesus. Churches were christened “Our Lady” (as in Notre Dame de Paris). Knights didn’t serve women, they served “ladies,” the elite form of the female.
However, the momentous change was the notion that women could be the objects of love. This was by no means an attitude that all of society shared. Medieval thinkers habitually depicted women as inferior beings unfit for education. They were still a land to be tilled, as they had been to the Greeks and Romans. Thomas Aquinas’s explanation for such a state of affairs is that by nature
woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex, while the production of woman comes from a defect in the active force or from some external change, such as that of a south wind, which is moist, as the Philosopher observes. On the other hand, in relation to the universal nature, woman is not misbegotten, but is included in nature’s intention as ordered to the work of generation.
After three thousand years of subjugation, women certainly didn’t mind being elevated above valiant knights. They enjoyed their higher status, and knights enjoyed the purification and nobility courtly love bestowed. In a coarse, crude society, where it was difficult to advance oneself, knights liked being part of a moral aristocracy, an elite that could be achieved by men of any class.
The seeds of courtly love were imported in part from the Arab countries, the style and sentiment of whose poetry delighted troubadours in southern France. However, there was one important way in which Frenchwomen differed from the idealized and longed-for women of the harem—Frenchwomen were available. One could bump into them in the marketplace, castles, at tournaments, or at court. This took away some of the challenge, and much of the mystery. In converting Islamic love to the freer European world, obstacles somehow had to be replaced. According to Tannahill, “Virtue was the attribute that, by elevating woman to some immaculate plane, cleansed their love of all taint of carnality and left it free to soar into the realm of the spirit. Virtue became the European harem.” Notice that it’s the woman’s virtue, not her personality, that is so winning. Her reality as a down-to-earth, full-bodied woman, one with talents and troubles, allergies and brains, doesn’t figure in the quest. What the knight seeks is the conquest of virtue by virtue. His lady is only a memory aid so that, on the battlefield, when weakening, he can remember what virtue is, can spell it with his pulse, embody it in his mind. She makes possible his spiritual
awakening, and her reward is an improved image of herself. Later in the Middle Ages, the engagement between knight and lady became more abstract, and though knights rode to battle with talismans from their ladies, they might equally well have been fighting for colors or country.
But in the early days of courtly love, knights found ample scope in creative adultery, although adultery didn’t have to be part of the game. Some men enjoyed a courtier’s relationship with their wives, admiring them lavishly and being perfect swains. But they were the rare exceptions. Neither pagan nor Christian writers had discussed love in marriage, nor erotic love between a man and a woman. Such notions were thought absurd, anarchistic, and immoral. Medieval marriages had little to do with love or mutual attraction. Marriage was a business contract. Men have always exchanged their women according to carefully mapped kinship lines. This was especially true of royal marriages, which made alliances, pooled wealth, fixed status and power. A woman could refuse a marriage with someone she loathed, or secretly arrange a so-called abduction by her beau, but mainly she consented, having no real choice in the matter.
With many men away at war much of the time, women dominated court life. So there were many influential married women, thirsty for intrigue and starved for love, whose favor could be won through flirtation and flattery. This would not have been a circumstance shared by their husbands, who could bed women wherever they wished. It didn’t matter if the husband fooled around, but if the wife did the husband might end up supporting a child he hadn’t sired. So, naturally, husbands didn’t approve of erotic love, nor troubadours think highly of husbands. Their songs often refer to a husband showing up at an inopportune moment to spoil things for the lovers, and they endorse a blatant double standard—jealousy is depicted as noble when felt by lovers, despicable when felt by husbands.