Courtly Love
A code for what we could call "chivalric adultery" originating in the late 12th century, about the time of the Crusades (c.1095-1270). Beginning in France and Italy and spreading throughout Western Europe, its roots are in the Platonic Ideal, Ovid, Islamic romances and the emerging Cult of the Virgin.
Basically, it's Christianized adultery: instead of having your cake and eating it, too, you admit you really like cake but decide to just have fruit, instead. ...or maybe just staring longingly at the fruit plate and thinking "damn, I want some pie!"
Recall, as well, that marriages between the nobility were normally arranged
rather than "love marriages", so it was both likely and common that both noble
men and women would look for romantic gratification outside of
marriage: you married your spouse because you were told to and to solidify land
and power, not because you found him or her hot. Thus the medieval obsession
with adultery: of course these people looked for love outside of marriage!
How To Be A Courtly Lover
A lover, smitten from afar by a beautiful, often married, woman of equal or
higher status, must:
a) long agonize and weep in sleepless silence
b) gradually reveal his love, often in sappy poetry "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and temperate...."
c) then prove said in mighty exploits, often with Freudian symbolism, like, uh, jousting "Look, m'lady, how large erect I holdeth my lance...while charging at another man...hmmm...."
d) adhere to pledges of secrecy and faithfulness until death "For you alone, m'lady! Sigh. Heavy sigh. Whiny EMO sigh."
e) either achieve consummation or just symbolic heavy petting or just "hey, I
would if I could but I can't and it's the thought the counts, right? Air kisses."
This tradition lives on most clearly in our pop culture conceptions of “romantic love”, including most obviously the smutty, embossed-cover novels sold at the checkout isles of supermarkets, not to mention chick flix etc. which traditionally focus more on the romance of seduction rather than the bumpin' and grindin' of earthly realization.
The Platonic Ideal
Neo-Platonism
lived on through the Middle Ages (and into today) most clearly in Christianity,
but our European vision of romantic love is also highly based on
Platonic Idealism and
The Ladder of Eros.
Recall that Platonism always places the Good outside the sensible or sensual (those things understood or known via the senses) – so while the Ancient Greeks fulfilled their desires sensually – good food and lots of it, good sex and lots of it, bad sex when lacking access to good sex since sex is like pizza – Platonic cultures direct their desire away from sensuality toward an unearthly Ideal (such as virtue, philosophy, or God or heaven).
In short, the better Platonic or Romantic love is that which occurs in the head (or the heart/soul), not the genitals. Love should be founded in virtue, not the physical body or form; it should be expressed in art (like love poems) not sex. In Platonic terms, the more Ideal love consists of experiencing intelligible, not sensible knowledge; in Christian terms, the Ideal love is spiritual, not carnal. It courtly love terms, it is all of the above.
So, both the Grail and Green Knight stories center around heroes moving away from sensible knowledge (physical prowess as a warrior and/or romantic love and sexuality) and toward spiritual ideals. Both heroes ascend Plato's metaphorical Ladder of Eros. In each, the middle ground between the physical and the spiritual is the civic: the love of one’s society - or what the Classical Greeks called your polis; in this case, fealty to the king (Arthur) and court, and to chivalry: a code of ethics (“ethics” being a word referring mainly to one’s relationship to others in your community).
Islam: Recall that although banned in Roman Catholic Christendom, Greek philosophy survived in the Muslim Middle East during the Dark Ages -- Europeans did not read the great Greek epics and philosophical texts, but Muslims did (seems ironic these days, eh?) -- so the blending of the sexual and Platonic that we now call “Romantic” occurred in the Islamic world first (not a lot of "Romance" in the Anglo Saxon Beowulf, is there?).
Like Chivalry, then, Courtly Love represents an idealized compromise between the overt Pagan sexuality of the Greek and Roman heroes with the Judeo-Christian-Islamic chastity...a place in a very conservative, highly sexually repressed society to let off a little sexual steam without committing actual sin.
Courtly Love and The Crusades: Chivalric Independence And Split Allegiance
Warrior-Culture, The Jody Syndrome,
The Crusades:
For over 200 years nobility left their own lands to fight other kings and occupy the Middle
East. This left the queen alone, where she both represented the sovereign
(the distant king) and sovereignty herself. She could order a knight
to do as she pleased…and yet she was a married woman, and her husband was the
king. However, the odds were slim that the king would return in the next
few years. Or at all. Hmm….
Split Allegiance:
Although the king is clearly the lord of his domain, and thus holds ultimate
power over all those beneath him -- including serfs, minor nobility and his
wife, the queen -- clearly the queen is second in command. This creates a
problem for a knight, like Gawain, who must negotiate the competing loyalties of
the king and queen. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight hinges on Gawain's
split allegiances to Bercilak and Bercilak's lady (as well as to himself (his own life)
and to Arthur's honor).
Platonic Ideal: Further, because the king represents an earthly version of the Ideal, so too the queen is supposed to represent the feminine ideal. She is supposed to be the most beautiful woman in the kingdom and thus the object of all men's desires (not just the king's); she's what everyone wants -- but obviously cannot have, or "know", completely, in the biblical sense. Knights should desire her, as living proof that she is the most beautiful woman (which in turn affirms the king's status: only he can attain the best).
So courtly love represents this idealized, Christianized, largely repressed sexual desire -- a nexus of all you want and all you cannot have (sex with your lord's queen) -- the meeting place of a warrior's unrestricted physicality (violence and sex), Christian virtue, and Platonic Idealism.
Literary Origins
Ovid’s (20
March 43 BC – AD 17/18)
Amores (c.
20 AD) with their descriptions of illicit love and methods of
seduction, the Amores shocked Romans even in their day (we read his
less sexual and equally popular Metamorphosis) . Ovid was
exiled from Rome to the Black Sea in 8 AD by the first Roman Emperor, Augustus,
most likely because his popular writings flew in the face of Augustus's new
conservative vision; among other things, August punished senators who did not
marry and have children and rewarded those who did, while also tightening Rome's
laws against adultery.
Ovid's Amores remained popular throughout medieval Europe and are the most often cited source for the emerging "Courtly Love".
A sampling of the Amores:
Book I:
ELEGY V: HIS DELIGHT AT HAVING OBTAINED CORINNA'S FAVOURS
Book II:
ELEGY IV: HE CONFESSES HIS INCLINATION FOR LOVE AND HIS ADMIRATION FOR ALL MANNER OF WOMEN.
Arab and Persian Romances modeled after Ovid, were and still are popular in the Islamic era. These spread into Europe during the 700 year long Moorish "occupation" of Iberia (Spain and Portugal). You can read some of these in our anthology: look up The Thousand And One Nights.
1185 Andreas Capellanus writes
his three volume treatise on courtly love “De Amor” or “The Art of Courtly Love”[i],
in which he outlines the 31 rules for “courtly love”.
For a sampling of the treatise: Geoffrey
Chaucer Page Medieval
Sourcebook
1185 Chretien de Troyes (author of our Search For The Grail) writes a number of the central Arthurian Romances with courtly love themes. Both books are commissioned by Countess Maria, daughter of Louis the VII.
[i] Liber de arte honete amandi et reprobatione inhonesti amoris or Book of the Art of Loving Nobly and the Reprobation of Dishonorable Love