M~
EeQ.
THE ALLEGORY
OF LOVE, /
A STUDY IN
MEDIEVAL TRADITION
BY
c. S. LEWIS
Multa renascenwr quae jam cec:idere, cadentque
Quae DUnc sunl in bono.....
I. _.
Knihovna FF MU Brno
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•A GALAXY BOOK
NEW YORK OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1958
':f,.~''''~' w:~
=­
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TO 

OWEN BARFIELD 

WISEST AND BEST 

OF MY 

UNOFFICIAL 

TEACHERS 

I. COURTLY LOVE
'When in the world I lim I ... the world'. commander.' SIlADII'tAU.
I
THE allegorical love poetry of the Middle Ages is apt
to repel the modem reader both by its form and by
its matter. The form, which is that of a strilgkl~ between
personified abstractions, can hardly be expected to appeal
to an age which holds that 'art means what it says' or even
that art is meaningless-for it is essential to this form that
the literal narrative and the significacio should be separable.
As for the matter, what have we to do with these
medievallovers--'servants' or 'prisoners' they called themselves-who
seem to be always weeping and always on their
knees before ladies of inflexible cruelty1 The popular
erotic literature of our own day tends rather to sheikhs
and 'Salvage Men' and marria~ by capture, while that
which is in favour with our mte11ectuals recommends
either frank animalism or the free companionship of the
"sexes. In every way, if we have not outgrown, we have "-'I
at least grown away from, the RtI1fI4'Me of the Rose. The
study of this whole tradition may seem, at first sight, to
be but one more example of that itch for 'revival', that
refusal to leave any corpse ungalvanized, which is among
the more distressing accidents of scholarship. But such
a view would be superficial. Humanity does not pass
through phases as a train passes through stations: being
alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never
leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some
sort we are still. Neither the form nor the sentiment of
this old poetry has passed ad;~ without leaving indelible
traces on our minda. We understand our present,
and perhaps even our future, the better ifwe can succeed,
by an effort ofthe historical imagination, in reconstructing
that long-lost state of mind for which the allegorical love
poem was a natural mode of expression. But we shall not
(.
(
" :& COURTLY LOVE
be able to do so unless we begin by carrying our attention
back to a period long before that poetry was born. In this
and the following chapter, I shall trace in turn the rise
both of the sentiment called 'Courtly Love' and of the
allegorical method. The discussion will seem, no doubt,
to carry us far from our main subject: but it cannot be
avoided.
Every one has heard of courtly love, and every one
knows that it appears quite suddenly at the end of the
eleventh century in Languedoc. The characteristics ofthe
Troubadour poetry have been repeatedly described.!
With the form, which is lyrical, and the style, which is
sophisticated and often 'aureate' or deliberately enigmatic,
we need not concern ourselves. The sentiment, of course,
is love, but love of a highly specialized sort, whose characteristics
may be enumerated as Humility, Courtesy, Adultery,
and the Religion ofLove. The lover is always abject.
Obedience to his lady's lightest wish, however whimsical,
and silent acquiescence in her rebukes, however unjust,
are the only virtues he dares to claim. There is a service
of love closely modelled on the service which a feudal
vassal owes to his lord. The lover is the lady's 'man'. He
addresses her as midons, which etymologically represents
not 'my lady' but 'my lord'.Z The whole attitude has been
righdy described as 'a feudalisation oflove'.3 This solemn
amatoryritual is felt to bepart and parcelofthe courtly life.
It is possible only to those who are, in the old sense ofthe
word, polite. It thus becomes, from one point of view the
flower, from another the seed, of all those noble usages
which distinguish the gentle from the vilein: only the
courteous can love, but it is love that makes them courteous.
Yet this love, though neither playful nor licentious
in its expression, is always what the runeteenth century
:alled 'dishonourable' love. The poet normally addresses
I 5« Fame!, Histllin Iii la PoJN P'~, 1846; E. Gorra, ongi";' ete.
Ulla Pt/Uill A__ tli Pr-_ (R#Jienti tIellslitu,. r-lIaru, &c.. II. xIiii.14,
m. 3), 1910-12; Jcanroy, lA Pohillyrigru Us TT~ 1934.
a J-y, op. cit., tDm. i, p. 91 II.
I Wtc:baler, lhu K.tI1_jIIWInI Us M'-gI, I~ Bad. I, p. [11.
COURTLY LOVE 3
another man's wife, and the situation is so carelessly
accepted that he seldom concerns himself much with her
husband: his real enemy is the rival.! But ifhe is ethically
careless, he is no light-hearted gallant: his love is represented
as a de!p»riJlg~J~nd tragical emotion-or almost
despairing, for he is saved from complete wanhope by
his faith in the God of Love who never betrays his faithful
worshippers and who can subjugate.-the cruellest y'"
beauties.z
The characteristics ofthis sentiment, and its systematic
coherence throughout the love poetry ofthe Troubadours
as a whole, are so stn'king that they easily lead to a fatal
misunderstanding. We are tempted to treat 'courtly love'
as a mere episode in literary history-an episode that we
have finished with as we have finished with the peculiarities
ofSkaldic verse or Euphuistic prose. In fact, however,
an unmistakable continuity connects the Proven~al love
. song with the love poetry of the later Middle Ages, and
thence, through Petrarch and many others, with that of
the pre,sent day'~ If the thing at first escapes our notice,
this IS because we are so familiar with the erotic tradition
of modern Europe that we mistake it for something
natural and universal and therefore do not inquire into its
origins. It seems to us natural that love should be the
commonest theme of serious imaginative literature: but
a glance at classical antiquity or at the Dark Ages at once
shows us that what we took for 'nature' is really a special
stateofaffairs, whichwill probably have an end, and which
certainly had a beginning in eleventh-century Provence.
It seems-or it seemed to us till lately-a natural thing
that love (under certain conditions) should be regarded..as_ r"//Q<ou<:!..l tS'..
a iloble and ennobling passion: it is only if we imagine
ourselves trying to explain this doctrine to Aristotle, Virgil,
St. Paul, or the author of Be()fl)fl}./, that we become
aware how far from natural it is. Even our code of etiquette,
with its rule that women always have precedence,
I ]e:&Dr01, op. cit., tom. ii, pp. 109'"13. 

a Ibid., p. 97. 

IIIII!""'""
...
C.
f
~
... COURTLY LOVE
is a legacy from courtly love, and is felt to be far from
natural in modern Japan or India. Many of the features
of this sentiment, as it walt known to the Troubadours,
have indeed disappeared; but this must not blind us to
the fact that the most momentous and the most revolutionary
elements in it have made the background of
European literature for eight hundred years. French
poets, in the eleventh century, discovered or invented, or
were the first to express, that romantic species of passion
which English poets were still writing about in the nineteenth.
They effected a change which has left no corner
ofour ethics, our imagination, or our daily life untouched,
md they erected im~assable barriers between us and the
classical past or the Oriental present. Compared with this
revolution the Renaissance is a mere ripple on the surface
of literature. IiI y, k .I OJ \.
There can be no mistake about the noveltfafromantic fa J?B\
love: our only difficulty is to imagine in all its bareness thf v~ ()
mental world that existed before its coming-to wipe oll?""
ofour minds, for a moment, nearly all that makes the food
both ofmodern sentimentality and modern cynicism. We
must conceive a world emptied ofthat ideal of,happiness'
--a happ'iness grounded on successful romantic lovewhich
still supplies the motive of our popular fiction. In
ancient literature love seldom rises above the levels of
merry sensuality or domestic comfort, except to be treated Z)
of,') as a tragic madness, an ctna which plunges otherwise sane
:/ people(usuallywomen)intocrimeand disgrace. Suchisthe
love ofMedea, ofPhaedra, ofDido; and such the love from
which maidens pray that the gods may protect them.I At
the other end of the scale we find the comfort and utility
of a good wife acknowledged: Odysseus loves Penelope as
he loves the rest ofhis home and possessions, and Aristotle
rather grudgingly admits that the conjugal relation may
now and then rise to the same level as the virtuous friendShip
between good men.a But this has plainly very little
I Euripida, MdM, 630; RiPJllllylall, S:l9­
2 Ariatotle, EtIm:r, 116:1A. dq ,.. ilY xalll' drpniav.
COURTLY LOVE S 

to do with 'love' in the modern or medieval sense; and if 

we turn to ancient love-poetry proper, we shall be even 

more disappointed. We shall find the poets loud in their 

praises of love, no doubt, 

Tis ~ ~Ios. Ti :M ~ c'hEp :xpvoi'\s •AtppOAfTr!s;
'What is life without love, tra-Ia-la l' as the later song has
it. But this is no more to be taken seriously than the
countless panegyrics both ancient and modern on the allconsoling
virtues ofthe bottle. IfCatullus and Propertius
vary the strain with cries of rage and misery, this is not
so much because they are romantics as because they are
exhibitionists. In their anger or their suffering they care
not who knows the pass to which love has brought them.
They are in the grip ofthe 6:Tri. They do not expect their
obsession to be regarded as a noble sorrow-they have no
'silks and ~ne array'. . I rIr'f~ 1Plato will not be reckoned an exceptton by those who r-t'C-tc,lr. )V1
have read him with care. In the Symposium, no doubt, we . _
find the conception of a ladder whereby the soul may r/;~ol!V\. t ~ ~G.
ascend from human love to divine. But this is a ladder
in the strictest sense; you reach the higher rungs by leaving
the lower ones behind. The original object ofhuman love
-who, incidentally, is not a woman-has simply fallen out
ofsight before the soul arrives at the spiritual object. The
'1~' lA (!}i(vvery first step upwards would have made a courtly lover
\""	blush, since It consists in passing on from the worship of UC 

the beloved's beauty to that of the same beauty in others. 

Those who call themselves Platonists at the Renaissance 

mayimagine a lovewhich reaches the divine without aban­

doning the human and becomes spiritual while remaining 

also carnal; but they do not find this in Plato. If they 

read it into him, this is because they are living, like our­

selves, in the tradition which began in the eleventh 

century. 

Perhaps the most characteristic ofthe ancient writers on 

love, and certainly the most influential in the Middle 

Ages, is Ovid. In the piping times of the early empire­
6 COURTLY LOVE
when Julia was still unbanished and the dark figure of
Tiberius had not yet crossed the stage-Ovid sat down to
compose for the amusement ofa society which well understood
him an ironically didactic poem on the art ofseduction.
The very design of his Art oj Lwe presupposes an
audience to whom love is one ofthe minor peccadilloes of
life, and the joke consists in treating it seriously-in writing
a treatise, with rules and examples en rigle for the nice'\ ("<),~,.,,
conduct ofillicit loves. It is funny, as the ritual solemnity
of old gentlemen over their wine is funny. Food, dri~
and sex are the oldest jokes in the world; and one familiar
form of the joke is to be very serious about them. From
this attitude the whole tone of the Ars Amatoria flows.
In the first place Ovid naturally introduces the god Amor
with an affectation ofreligious awe-just as he would have
introduced Bacchus if he had written an ironic Art of
Getting Drunk. Love thus becomes a great and jealous
god, his service an arduous militia: offend him who dares,
Ovid is his trembling captive. In the second place, being
thus mockingly serious about the appetite, he is of necessity
mockingly serious about the woman. The real objects
of Ovid's 'love', no doubt, he would have ordered out of
the room before the serious conversation about boob, or
politics, or family affairs began. The moralist may treat
them seriously, but the man of the world (such as Ovid)
certainly does not. But inside the convention of the poem
they are the 'demnition charmers', the mistresses of his
fancy and the arbitresses of his fate. They rule him with
a rod of iron, lead him a slave's life. As a result we find
this sort of advice addressed to the 'prentice lover:
Go early ere th' appointed hour to meet 

The fair, and long await her in the street. 

Through Ihouldering crowds on all her errands run, 

Though graver business wait the while undone. 

Ifshe commands your presence on her way 

Home from the ball to lackey her, obey! 

Or j[from mral scenes she bids yon, 'Come', 

Drive ifyou can, ifDot, then walk, to Rome, 

COURTLY LOVE 7
And let nor Dog-star heats nor drifted load
Ofwhitening mows deter you from the road.
Cowards, fly hence! Our general, Love, disdains
Your lukewarm service in his long campaigns.!
No one who has caught the spirit ofthe author will misunderstand
this. The conduct which Ovid recommends
is felt to be shameful and absurd, and that is precisely why
he recommends it-partly as a comic confession of the
depths to which this ridiculous appetite may bring a man,
and partly as a lesson in the art offooling to the top ofher
bent the last baggage who has caught your fancy. The
whole passage should be taken in conjunction with his
other piece of advice-'Don't visit her on her birthday:
it costs too much.'J But it will also be noticed-and this
is a pretty instance of the vast change which occurred
during the Middle Ages-that the very same conduct L ~o\.dt,(,
which Ovid ironically recommends could be recommended
seriously by the courtly tradition. To leap up on errands,
to go through heat or cold, at the bidding of one's lady,
or even of any lady, would seem but honourable and
natural to a gentleman of the thirteenth or even of the
seventeenth century; and most of us have gone shopping
in the twentieth with dies who showed no sign ofregarding
the tradition as dead letter.) The contrast inevitably
raises in our minds a questIon asto how far the whole tone
of medieval love poetry can be explained by the formula,
'Ovid misunderstood'; and though we see at once that
I .4n .4_1Iri4, ii. 22]: """ C'- t, 

IUllUI adeae foro. iuaa maturiua bora 

Fac: aemper vema., nee tUsi serua abi. 

Oc:curral aliquo, tibi diserit; IIIDIlia differ, 

Curre, nee mceptum turba moretut iter. 

Noc:te domum n:petenl epulil perfuDcta rcdibit­

Tunc: quoque pro IlerVO, iii vocat iDa, ymi. 

Run: en. et dicet, Venial: Amtor odit inertel\ 

Si rota dfl'uerit, tu pede carpe viam, 

Nee grave te tempus litieuve Canicula tardet, 

Nee via per iaem candida faeta niyel. 

Milltiae ~ Arnor elt: dUcedite tegJm\ 

Non IUDt haec: timidiJ lip tuenda virU. 

II drl "_I.";" i. .fO], et seq.; d. 417 et seq. 

1, 

8 -G COURTLY LOVE )/.?f
this is no ~ut~n-for if it were gr~;}t~, ~e should still
have to ask why the Middle Ages misunderstood him so
consistently-yet the thought is a good one to keep in
mind as we proceed.. 0\ c' E!'\ "w~" \<£'"
The fall ofthe old civilization and the comingofChristianity
did not result in any deep/ning or idealizing of the
conception of love. The fact is important, because it re\
futes two theories which trace the great change in our
iVsentiments respectively to the Germanic temperament and
to the Christian re1igion-especially to the cult of the
1:- Blessed Virgin. The latter view touches on a real and very
complex relationship; but as its true nature will become
7apparent in what follows, I will here content myselfwith
a brief and dogmatic statement. That Chris3i.anity in a
very general sense, by its insistence on cOnfpas~lon and on
. the sanctity ofthe human body, had a tendency to soften
-orllbash the more extreme brutalities and flippancies of
the ancient world in all departments of human life, and ,
therefore also in sexual matters, may be taken as obvious)~
But there is no evidence that the quasi-religious tone of
medieval love poetry has been transferred from the wor/l)
ship of the Blessed Virgin: it is just as likely-it is even
v\ more likely-that the colouring of certain hymns to the
Virgin has been borrow~4 from the love poetry.2 Nor is
it true in any uneqnrvc-6dJ1 sense that the medieval church
encouraged reverence for women at all: while it is a ludicrous
error (as we shall presently see) to suppose that she
regarded sexual passion, under any conditions or after any
possible process of refinement, as a noble emotion. The
other theory turns on a supposedly innate characteristic
JL) in the Germanic races, noted by Tacitus.3 But what Taci­

. tus describes is a primitive awe ofwomen as uncanny and 

'/ probably prophetic beings, which is as remote from our 

comprehension as the rrimitive reverence for lunacy or 

the primitive horror 0 twins; and because it is thus re-

I See p. 43. 

II See leanroy in the Nu",;,. u la latll.W ., u la nttirtltllnfr-ftliu, 18g6, 

tom. i,p. 3:n n.; abo WechuJer. 0,. cit., Brtd. I, cap. nili. , c..."u"'rii.i. It.
COURTLY LOVE 9
mote, we cannot judge how probably it might have developed
into the medieval FraunuJinut, the service of
ladies. What is certain is that where a Germanic race
reached its maturity untouched by the Latin spirit, as in
Iceland, we find nothing at all like courtly love. The
position ofwomen in the Sagas is, indeed, higher than that
which they enjoy in classical literature; but it is based on
a purely commonsensible and unemphasized respect for
the courage or prudence which some women, like some
men, happen to possess. The Norsemen, in fact, treat
their women not primarily as women but as people. It is
an attitude which may lead in the fullness of time to an
equal franchise or a Married Women's Property Act, but
it has very little to do with romantic love. The final
answer to both theories, however, lies in the fact that the
Christian and Germanic period had existed for se"eral
centuries before the new feeling appeared. 'Love', in
our sense of the word, is as absent from the literature of
the Dark Ages as from that of classical antiquity. Their
favourite stories were not, like ours, stories of how a man
married, or failed to marry, a woman. They preferred to
hear how a holy man went to heaven or how a brave man
went to battle. We are mistaken ifwe think that the poet
in the Song of Roland shows restraint in disposing so
7 "o<"-\."-.. briefly of Aide, Roland's betrothed.1 Rather by bringing Iher in at all, he is doing the opposite: he is expatiating,
fillin:D~ chinks, dragging in for our delectation the most
mar' interests after those of primary importance have •
had their due. Roland does not think about AIde on the
battle-field: he thinks of his praise in pleasant France.a
The figure of the betrothed IS shadowy compared with
that of the friend, Oliver. The deepest of worldly emotions
in this period is the love ofman for man, the mutual
love of warriors who die together fighting against odds,
and the affection between vassal and lord. We shall
never understand this last, ifwe think of it in the light of
our own moderated and impersonal loyalties. We must
I Chfuuqa tU RIIlIUUl, 3705 et 1eIl. II Ibid. 10S+
~.-
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10
COURTLY LOVE
not think of officers drinking the king's health: we must
think rather of a small boy's feeling for some hero in the
sixth form. There is no harm in the analogy, for the good
vassal is to the good citizen very much as a boy is to a man.
He cannot rise to the great abstraction of a res publica.
He loves and reverences only what he can touch and see;
but he loves it with an intensity which our tradition is
\-r.;y..'1oath to allow except to sexual love. Hence to the old
vassal in the English poem, parted from his lord,
Pynce):> him on mode ):>zt he his monndryhten
Clyppe and Cj'Sse and on cneo lecge
Honda ond heafod, SWa he hwilum zr
On geardagum giefstoles breac •••
The feeling is more passionate and less ideal than our patriotism.
It rises more easily to heroic prodigality ofservice, .t
and it also breaks more easily and turns into hatre4: hence N.l<\i\t\5
feudal history is full ofgreat loyalties and great treacheries. .I.
Germanic and Celtic legend, no doubt, had bequeathed C.(X2..:)~""
to the barbarians some stories of tragic love between man 

and woman-love 'star-crossed' and closely analogous to 

that of Dido or Phaedra. But the theme claims no pre­

eminence, and when it is treated the interest turns at least 

as much on the resulting male tragedy, the disturbance of 

vassalage or sworn brotherhood, as on the female inlluence 

which produced it. Ovid, too, was known to the learned; 

and there was a plentiful literature on sexual irregularities 

for the use of confessors. Of romance, of reverence for 

women, of the idealizing imagination exercised about sex, 

there is hardly a hint. The centre ofgravity is elsewhere-

in the hopes and fears ofreligion, or in the clean""d~ 

fidelities of the feudal haIl. But, as we have seen, 

male affections-though wholly free from the taint that 

hangs about 'friendShip' in the ancient world-were them­

selves lover-like; in their intensity, their wilful exclusion 

of other values, and their unCert:~ they provided an 

exercise of the spirit not wholly e that which later 

ages have found in 'love'. The fact is, ofcourse,significant.
IICOURTLY LOVE
Like the formula 'Ovid misunderstood', it is inadequate 

to explain the appearance of the new sentiment; but it 

goes far to explaIn why that sentiment, having appeared, 

should makehasteto becomea'feudalization' oflove. What 

is new usually wins its way by disguising itselfas the old. 

The new thing itself, 1 do not pretend to explain. Real
changes in human sentiment are very rare--there are perhaps
three or four on r~cord-but I believe that they
occur, and that this is one of them. I am not sure that
they have 'causes', ifby a cause we mean something which
would wholly account for the new state of affairs, and so
explain away what seemed its novelty. It is, at any rate,
certain that the efforts ofscholars have so far failed to find
an origin for the content ofProven~allove poetry. Celtic,
Byzantine, and even Arabic influence have been suspected;
but it has not been made clear that these, ifgranted, could
account for the results we see. A more promising theory
attempts to trace the whole thing to Ovid;I but this view
-ap~t from the inadequacy which I suggested abovefinds
itselffaced with the fatal difficulty that the evidence
points to a much stronger Ovidian influence in the north
of France than in the south. Something can be extracted
from a study of the social conditions in which the new
poetry arose, but not so much as we might hope. We know
that the crusading armies thought the Proven~als milksops,~
but this will seem relevant only to a very hardened
enemy of FrafUfldienst. We know that this period in the
south of France had witnessed what seemed to contemporaries
a signal degeneracy from the simplicity of ancient
manners and an alarming increase of luxury.3 But what
age, what land, br the same testimony, has not? Much ,--. 1.:,A
more important 15 the fact that landless knighthood- .7« (J '"'t1
knighthood without a place in the territorial hierarchy of
1 By W. Sc:hr6tter. 0f1il flU li, 'I1O,","II1l,." 1908: teverely reviewed in
~nsviii.
a Raduffiu Cadomena. e,sUl 'Ia.aNi, 61, fU W1lI1II tlUHIII IIIi"., 1HIlit:oIi;
aIao the proftl'b F,ad " beIJa, Prl1f1irwialu ~ flietrllZlill. (R.mIeilla Hirrmnu
US CrIlistlUr, Acad. dn IJUCl'iptiont, tom. m,\t. 6SI.)
, Jeanroy, up. cit., tom. ~ pp. 83 et teq.
I
13
~.
I% COURTLY LOVE
feudalism-seems to have been possible in Provence.1
The
unattached knight, as we meet him in the romances, respectable
only by his own valour, amiable only by his own
courtesy, predestined lover of other mens' wives, was
therefore a reality; but this does not explain why he loved
in such a new way. If courtly love necessitates adultery,
adultery hardly necessitates courtly love. We come much
nearer to the secret if we can accept the picture of a
typical Proven~al court drawn many years ago by an
English writer,7. and since approved by the greatest living
authority on the subject. We must picture a castle which
is a little island of comparative leisure and luxury, and
therefore at least of possible refinement, in a barbarous
country-side. There are many men in it, and very few
women-the lady, and her damsels. Around these throng
the whole male mnny, the inferior nobles, the landless
knights, the squires, and the pages-haughty creatures
enough in relation to the peasantry beyond the walls, but
feudally inferior to the lady as to her lord-her 'men' as
feudal language had it. Whatever 'courtesy' is in the place
ft.ows from her: all female charm from her and her damsels.
There is no question of marriage for most of the court.
All these circumstances together come very near to being
a 'cause'; but they do not explain why very similar conditions
elsewhere had to wait for Proven~al example before
,they produced 1ik.e results. Some part of the mystery remains
inviolate.
~ut if we abandon the attempt to explain the new
feeling, we can at least explain-indeed we have partly
explained already-the peculiar form which it first took;
the four marks of Humility, Courtesy, Adultery, and the
Religion ofLove. To account for the humilitywe need no
more than has already been said. Before the coming of
courtly love the relation of vassal and lord, in all its intensity
and warmth, already existed; it was a mould into
which romantic passion would almost certainly be poured.
• Faurie), op. cit., tom. i, pp. SIS et seq.
Z 'Vernon Lee', E..,wu.", voL ji, pp. 136 et seq.
COURTLY LOVE
And if the beloved were also the feudal superior the thing
becomes entirely natural and inevitable. The emphasis on
courtesy results from the same conditions. It is m courts
that the new feeling arises: the lady, by her social and
feudal position, is already the arbitress ofmanners and the
scourge of ,villany' even before she is loved. The association
oflove with adultery-an association which has lasted
in continental literature down to our own times-has
deeper causes. In part, it can be explained by the picture
we have already drawn; but there is much more to be said
about it than this. Two things prevented the men ofthat Z ,1 i
\
G\r<St5\0
.
age from connecting their ideal ofromantic and passionate
love with marriage.
The first is, of course, the actual practice of feudal ;1 )
society. Marriages had nothing to do with love, and no .
'nonsense' about marriage was tolerated.I All matches
were matches of interest, and, worse still, of an interest
that was continually changing. When the alliance which
had answered would answer no longer, the husband's
object was to get rid of the lady as quickly as possible.
Marriages were frequently dissolved. The same woman
who was the lady and 'the dearest dread' ofher vassals was
often little better than a piece ofproperty to her husband.
He was master in his own house. So far from being a
natural channel for the new kind of love, marriage was
rather the drab background against which that love stood
out in all the contrast of its new tenderness and delicacy.
The situation is indeed a very simple one, and not peculiar
to the Middle Ages. Any idealization of sexual love, in a
society where marriage is purely utilitarian, must begin
by being an idealization of adultery. )
The second factor is the medieval theory of marriage- 2...
what may be called, by a convenient modern barbarism,
the 'sexology' of the medieval church. A nineteenthcentury
Englishman felt that the same passion-romantic
love-could be either virtuous or vicious according as it
I Sec Faurie~ op. cit., tom. i, pp. 497 et seq. ct. the wooing lCeIle in Cbrilien',
E," quoted below.
COURTLY LOVE
was directed towards marriage or not. But according to
the medieval view passionate love itself was wicked, and
did not cease to be wicked if the object of it were your
wife. If a man had once yielded to this emotion he had
no choice between 'guilty' and 'innocent' love before him:
he had only the choice, either of repentance, or else of
different forms of guilt.
This subject will delay us for a little, partly because
it introduces us to the true relations between courtly love
and Christianity, and partly because it has been much
misrepresented In the past. From some accountsweshould
conclude that medieval Christianity was a kind of Manicheeism
seasoned with prurience; from others, that it was
a sort of carnival in which all the happier aspects of
Paganism took part, after being baptized and yet losing
none oftheir jollity. Neither picture is very faithful. The
views of medieval churchmen on the sexual act within
marriage (there is no question, of course, about the act
outside marriage) are all limited by two complementary
agreements. On the one hand, nobody ever asserted that
the act was intrinsically sinful. On the other hand, all
were agreed that some evil element was present in every
concrete instance of this act since the Fall. It was in the
effort to determine the precise nature of this concomitant
evil that learning and ingenuity were expended. Gregory,
at the end of the sixth century, was perfectly clear on this
question: for him the act is innocent but the desire is
morally evil Ifwe object to the conception ofan intrinsically
wicked Ql'm~e towards an intrinsicall~ innocent J.; 14­
'4
. h (1) j. h I f ' h~ "'-"V(JI\I- buk: v,act10n, e rep y t e examp e 0 a ng t us re e
delivered in anger. What we say may be exactly what we
ought to have said; but the emotion which is the efficient
cause of our saying it, is morally bad.J But the concrete
sexual act, that is, the act plus its unavoidable efficient
cause, remains guilty. When we come down to the later
I Orqory to Ausunme "1114 Bede, Ecdu. Hi". J.:avii (p. S7 in Plumer', ed.).
The authenticity of chi.l1etter Iw beea quatioDed; but my argument doa DOt
depend OD it.
COURTLY LOVE IS
Middle Ages this view is modified. Hugo of St. Victor
agrees with Gregory in thinking the carnal desire an evil.
But he does not think that this makes the concrete act
guilty, provided it is 'excused' by the good ends of marriage.
such as offspring.I He goes out o{his way to combat
the rigorous view that a marriage caused by beauty-iSiiO
marriage: Jacob, as he reminds us, married Rachel for her
beauty.z On the other hand, he is clear that if w~ had
remained in the state of innocence we should have generated
sine camis incenti'llo. He differs from Gregory by
considering not only the desire but the pleasure. The
latter he thinks evil, but not.morally evil: it is, he says,
not a sin ~!Ur the puD.fs1tIn~b.l' of a sin, and thus arrives at
the batHing conception of a punishment which consists in
a morally innocent pleasure.3 Peter Lombard was much
more coherent. He located the evil in the desire and said
that it was not a moral evil, but a punishment for the Fall."
Thus the act, though not free from evil, may be free from
moral evil or sin, but only if it is 'excused by the good
ends of marriage'. He quotes with approval from a
supposedly Pythagorean source a sentence which is allimportant
for the historian of courtly love---omnis arJ,entior
a11l4tor propriae uxoris aJulter est, passionate love of
a man's own wife is adultery.5 Albertus Magnus takes a
much more genial view. He sweeps away the idea that
the pleasure is evil or a result of the Fall: on the contrary,
pleasure would have been greater if we had remained tn
Paradise. The real trouble about fallen man is not the
strenRth of his pleasures but the weamess of his reason:
unfillen man could have enjoyed any degree of pleasure
without losing sight, for a moment, of the First Good,6
I Hugo of St. Victor, SmttmtUn-n. S__, Tract. VII, cap. %. (The tradi.~
bonal attributiOl1 of tbit work Deed DOt, for our PUl'JlORt be 41uatiODed.)
:& Ibid. cap. 1. 

, Ibid. cap. 3. 

4 Pet Lomb. &.ttm,u"."." .'1', DiJt s:ui, {1wJ _--u. 

s Iltid., Ih _iItWU uinu. For the real Llmtity of Satat (or X)"tU) 

Pithaaorieua, _ Uebenreg, HiI,. t{ p~. 'fOL 1, p. au: CIIII10Ik E~
pM;" "'I'. Sistut II, ac.
, Alb. MapUlI. Pn. lMJI. s.."".. i'l', DUt. :uri, Art 7.
16 COURTLY LOVE
The desire, as we now know it, is an evil, a punishment for
the Fall, but not a sin.1 The conjugal act may therefore
be not only innocent but meritorious, if it has the right
causes-desire ofofFspring, payment ofthe marriage debt,
and the like. But ifdesire comes first ('first' in what sense
I am not quite sure) it remains a mortal sin.z Thomas
Aquinas, whose thought is always so firm and clear in itself,
is a baftling figure for our present purpose. He seems
always to take away with one hand what he holds out to
us with the other. Thus he has learned from Aristotle
that marriage is a species ofamicitia.3 On the other hand,
he proves that sexual life would have existed without the
Fall bythe argument thatGodwould not have givenAdam
a woman as a 'help' except for this purpose; for any other,
a man would obviously have been so much more satisfactory.4
He is aware that afFection between the parties
concerned increases sexual pleasure, and that union even
among the beasts implies a certain kindlinesr--suavem amicitiam-and
thus seems to come to the v~'rgJ! ofthe modern
conception oflove. But the very passage in which he does
SO is his explanation ofthe la~m!nst incest: he is arguing
that unions between close ~tisrork are bad precisely because
kinsfolk have mutual afFection, and such afFection
would increase pleasure.5 His general view deepens and
subtilizes that of Albertus. The evil in the sexual act is
neither the desire nor the pleasure, but the submergence
of the rational faculty which accompanies them: and this
submergence, again, is not a sin, though it is an evil, a
result of the Fall.6
It will be seen that the medieval theory finds room for
innocent sexuality: what it does not find room for is
J AJ.b. Mapua/. Pet. r.-lI. $nlnt. iVa Dilt. :xrri, Art " Rapcmno. 

Z lhid., Art II. 

I C__ C",Iiks, iii. 1:1], 124­
4 Sur. 'IIIM. Pn_ Pllr& {!Iuuft. xcviii, Art z.
• CMlTII C",tik., iii. lZS. (The beutJ come in 1:13.)
• 8_. 'I'-l. Pn_ 8mm4Iu, :.a:dv, Art. I. The foreping account con6nea
itlelf to medieval authoridet: a fuB up_lion of the Kholaauc Yiew wouid of
COWIe bqi.n with ita DcnDiDiw, Pauline, A~ ad Ariatotelian lOums.
COURTLY LOVE 17
passion, whether romantic or otherwise. It might almost 

be said that it denies to passion the indulgence which it 

reluctantly accords to appetite. In its Thomist form the 

theory acquits the carnal desire and the carnal pleasure, 

and finds the evil in the ligammtum rationis, the suspension 

of intellectual activity. This is almost the opposite of the 

view, implicit in so much romantic love poetry, that it is 

PI' ~"l..precisely passion which purifies; and the scholastic picture 

of unfallen sexuality-a picture ofphysical pleasure at the 

maximum and emotional disturbance at the minimum­

may suggest to us something much less like the purity of 

Adam in Paradise than the cold sensuality ofTiberius in 

Capri. It must be stated at once that this is entirely un­

just to the scholastics. They are not talking about the 

same kind of passion as the romantics. The one party 

means merely an animal intoxication; the other believes, 

whether rightly or wrongly, in a 'passion' which works a 

chemical change upon appetite and affection and turns 

them into a thing difFerent from either. About 'passion' 

in this sense Thomas Aquinas has naturally nothing to say 

-as he has nothing to say about the steam-enFe. He 

had not heard of it. It was only coIning into existence in 

his time, and finding its first expression in the poetry of 

courtly love. 

The distinction I have just made is a fine one, even as 

we make it centuries after the event With all the later 

expressions of romantic passion in mind. Naturally it 

could not be made at the time. The general impression 1 

left on the medieval mind by its official teachers was that 

all love-at least all such passionate and exalted devotion 

~ as a courtly poet thought worthy of the name-was more
f" At-kess wiclc.ed. And this impression, combining with the
nature of feudal marriage as I have already described it, 1/£ ~ (rA ~r;p tproduced in the poets a certa~ wilfulness, a readiness to
eMf"em:phasize rather than to con~al the antagonism between
z. h, their am'at6rY 'and their religious ideals. Thus if the
Church tells them that the ardent lover even of his own
wife is in mortal sin, they presently r~/HB~Ath:6,W:r •
ang/istiky 0 (lfT,eri, onls' i
Filosofick4!! fo,~u!,.Y UOive;;ity
J. E. Purkyne
eRNC'>, Arna N;;yjko 1
(
18 COURTLY LOVE
that true love is impossible in marriage. If the Church
says that the sexual act can be 'excused' only by the desire
for offspring, then it becomes the marl: of a true lover,
like Chiuntecleer, that he served Venus
More for delyt than world to multiplye.J
This cleavage between Church and court, or, in Professor
Vinaver's fine phrase, between :~r~.ll_ek: )and Camelot,
which will become more apparent as we proceed, is the
most striking feature of medieval sentiment.
Finally we come to the fourth mark of courtly loveits
love religion of the god Amor. This is partly, as we
have seen, an inheritance from Ovid. In part it is due to
that same law of transference which determined that all
the emotion stored in the vassal's relation to his seigneur
should lUa~1tself to the new kind of love: the ~,of
religious emotion would naturally t~ to get intb the.~
poetry, for the same reaon~ Butm part (and this IS,
perhaps, the most important reason. of the three) this
erotic religion. arises as a rival or a parody of the real religionandemphasizestheantagonismo€
the two ideals. The
quasi-religious tone is not necessarily strongest in the most
serious love poetry. A twelfth-century jeu-tl'esprit called
the Conciliu1/l in Monte Romarici is here illuminating. It
~!.Q., 	 purports to describe a chapter ofthe nu~at Remiremont'~/~
held in spring time, at which the.ai were ofa curious
nature-De solo neA'~ Amms tf'actatum est-and whence ....DLa.
all men save a s~Hi Iig of honesti clerici were excluded.
The proceedings began like this:
When the virgin senate all
Had filled the benches of the hall,
Doctor Ovid's Rule instead
Of the evangelist. was read.
The reader of that gospel gay
Was Sister Eva, who (they say)
Understands the practid:: part
Of the Amatory ArtI
Cot. 'It1ks, B .H3S.
COURTLy' LOVE
<; j,;:r ", 	
19
She it was conVOked them all,
Little sisters, sisters tall.
Sweetly they began to raise
Songs in Love's melodious praise... ,I
The service being.ended, a Cardinali! domina arose in
their midst and thus announced her business:
Love, the god of every lover,
Sent me hither to discover
All yonr life and conversation
And conduct a Visitation.a
In obedience to the she-cardinal, a number of the sisters
(two ofwhom are named) made public confession of their
principles and practice in the matter of love. It soon became
apparent that the convent was divided into two
distinct parties, whereof the one had been scrupulous to
admit to theirfavours noloverwhowas not a clerk{clericru),
while the other, with equal pedantry, had'reserved their
kindness exclusively f~r ~jghts (militares). The reader,
who has doubdess graspen 'What kind of author we are
dealing with, will not be surprised to learn that the Cardinalis
domina pronounces .emphatically in favour of the
clerk as the only pro~r l~yer for a nun, and urges the
heretical party to repen'Hnte, The curses denounced upon
them in case of obstinacv or relapse are very exhilarating:
I vAd-" 1;:..\'" rIn
reward of their impiety,
Terror, Travail, Grief, Anxiety,
I Ztiucbrijtfir i/etJ,udIII .41urtbll,., vii, pp. J SO et RCb line, 24-31
: 

InuomiAia ommbus Virginum agminibut 

Lecta mnt in medium Quai en.ngelium 

Preceptl Oridii Doctoria egregii.
Lecuix tam propitii Fuit -ge!ii
Eft de Danubrio PoteDI in oflicio
Arti, amatoriae (Ut affirmant aliae)
Conv_vit tingulas Magna atque parvulu.
Cantua modulamina Et amen. carmina
Cantavenmt parita'.
a Ibid., lines SI et Rq.:
Amor della omniom Quotquot SUDt amantium
Me miRt VOl vieere Et vitam inquirerc! .
L-...-.._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __
)<-"J-
~~~
L
21
.-­
20
COUR.TLY LOVE
Fear and Discord, Strife and Gloom, 

Still attend them as their doom! 

Let all those who in their blindnCS$ 

Upon laymen Wlste their kindness 

Be a Scom and execration 

To the derb of every nation, 

And let c1erb at every meeting
Pass them by wi~out a greeting! ..•
To which malediction we
Say AMEN, 80 may it be!1
The whole poem illustrates the influence of Ovid, and
the religion oflove, very well; but it is lULno means an
instance of'Ovid misunderstood'. The woisliip ofthe god
Amor had been a mock-religion in Ovid's .Art ofLO'lIe. The
French poet has taken over this conception of ~ er~1J~ ~
religion with a full understanding of Its fiippancf,c ~nd
proceeded to elaborate the joke in terms of the only religion
he know~medieval Christianity. The result is a
close and impudent parody ofthe practices ofthe Church,
in which Ovid becomes a doctor egregius and the .A.,s .Amatoria
a gospel, erotic heterodoxy and orthodoxy are distinguished,
and the god ofLove is equipped with cardinals
and exercises the power of excommunication. The Ovidian
tradition, operated upon by the medieval taste for
humorous blasphemy, is apparently quite sufficient to produce
a love religion, and even in a sense a Christianized
love religion, without any aid from the new seriousness
of romantic passion. As against any theory which would
derive medieval F.,auenJimst from Christianity and the
worship ofthe Blessed Virgin, we must insist that the love
religion often begins as a parody ofthe real religion.z This
I Ibid., 'fii, pp. 160, 166, fUm 216 et seq.:
Maneat Conflllio, Tmw et Conltricio,
Labor, lnfelicitu, Dolor ct Anmtu,
Timor et TrDtitia, Bellum et DiKOrc!ia, •••
OmnibUl horribila Et abhominabiIeI
Semper aitit dcricia Que faftti. lucis.
Nemo vow ttiam, Ave dicat obviam
(Ad eonfirmacionem Omna dicimua Amen!)
a For a diKutaion of itt pouibIe amnuiona with the myatkaJ theology of
COURTLY LOVE
does not mean that it may not soon become something
more serious than a parody, nor even that it may not, as
in Dante, find a modus fJifJm4i with Christianity and produce
a noble fusion of sexual and religious experience.
But it does mean that we must be prepared for a certain
ambiguity in all those poems where the attitude of
the lover to his lady or to Love looks at first sight most
like the attitude of the worshipper to the Blessed Virgin
or to God. The distance between the 'lord of terrible
aspect' in the rita NUOfJa and the god of lovers in the
Council ojRemi.,emont is a measure of the tradition's width
and complexity. Dante is as serious as a man can be; the
French poet is not serious at all. We must be prepared to
find odier authors dotted about in every sort of intermediate
position between these two extremes. And this
is not all. The variations are not only between j~t and
earnest; for the lov~ r~gion can become more serious
without becoming rtcC;ficlled to the real religion. Where uJSll' ,I
it is not a parody of the Churclt i~JJl~y be, in a sense, ~ ~ '-'.
rival-a temporary escape, a truancy from the ardours of
a religion that was believed into the delights of a religion tV
that was merely imagined. To describe it as the revenge ~ f....,
of Paganism on her conqueror would be to exaggerate; 

.but to think of it as a direct colouring of human passions 

by religious emotion would be a far graver error. It is as 

ifsome lover's metaphor when he said 'Here is my lleaven' 

in a moment of passionate abandonment were taken up 

and expanded into a system. Even while he speaks he 

knows that 'here' is not his real heaven; and yet it is a de­

lightful audacity to develop the idea a little further. If 

you go on to add to that lover's 'heaven' its natural acces­

sories, a god and saints and a list of commandments, and 

if you picture the I~Y~.J>raying, sinning, repenting, and .~ N...j
finally adInitted to bliSs, you will find yourself in the pre- I /
carious dream-world of medieval love poetry. An extension
of religion, an escape from religion, a rival religionSt.
Bernard, ate E. GjlllOD, U '£bhltIgil MystilJlllu St. BtrlllJrJ (Paris 1934),
Appendix IV.
u COURTLY LOVE
FrafU.1ldims, may be any of these, or any combination of
them. It maT even be the open enemy of religion-as
when Aucawn roundly declares that he would rather
follow all the sweet ladies and goodly knights to hell than
go without them to heaven. The ideal lady of the old
love poems is not what the earliest scholars took her to be.
The more religiously she is addressed, the more irreligious
the poem usually is.
I'm no the Queen 0' Heavn, Thomas;
I never carried my head sac hee,
For I am but a lady gay
Come out to hunt in my follce.
Before we proceed to examine two important expressions
of courtly love, I must put the reader on his guard
against a necessary abstraction in my treatment of the
subject. I have spoken hitherto as if men first became
conscious of a new emotion and then invented a new kind
of poetry to express it: as if the Troubadour ~try were
necessarily 'sincere' in the crudely biographical sense of
tite word: as if convention played no part in literary history.
My excuse for this procedure must be that a full
consideration of such problems belongs rather to the
theory of literature in general than to the history of one
kind of poem: if we admit them, our narrative will be
interrupted in every chapter by abnost meta?hysical digressions.
For our purpose it is enough to pOint out that
life and letters are inextricably intermixed. Ifthe feeling
came first a literary convention would soon arise to express
it: ifthe convention came first it would soon teach those
who practised it a new feeling. It does not much matter
what view we hold provided we avoid that fatal dichotomy
which makes every poem either an autobiographical docUment
or a 'literary exercise'-as ifany poem worth writing
were either the one or theother. We maybequitesurethat
the poetrywhichinitiated alloverEurope so great a change
of heart was not a 'mere' convention: we can be quite as
sure that it was not a transcript of fact. It was poetry.
Before the close of the riveum century we find. the
("'\.(J<COURTLY
LOVE :3
Provenlj;al conception of love spreading out in two directions
from the land of its birth. One stream flows down ~)
into Italy and, through the poets of the Dolce Stil
Nuovo, goes to swell the great sea ofthe Divine Comedy;
and there, at least, the q,uarrel between Christianity and
the love religion was ~gel9f'. Another stream found its l)
way northward to muig1e with the Ovidian tradition '/
whi9t already existed there, and so to produce the French
poetry of the twelfth century. To that poetry we must
now tum.
II
Chretien de Troyes is its greatest representative. His
Lancelot is the flower of the courtly tradition in France,
as it was in its early maturity. And yet this poet is not
wholly the product of ~ ~ conceptions: when he
began to write he seems scar'teIYto have accepted them.I
We must conceive him as a poet of the same type with
Dryden: one of those rare men of genius who can trim
their sails to every breeze of novelty without forfeiting~..s.t f2
their poetic rank. He was among the first to welcome the
Arthurlan stories; and to him, as much as to any single
writer, we owe the colouring with which the 'matter of
Britain' has come down to us. He was among the first (in
northern France) to choose love as the central theme of a
serious poem: such a poem he wrote in his ErIC, even
before he had undergone the influence of the fully developed
Proven~al formula. And when that influence
reached him, he was not only the first, but perhaps the
greatest, exponent of it to his fellow countrymen; and,
combining this element. wi~ the ~urian legend, he
stamped upon men's mmds lka~ly the conception of
Arthur's court as the home 'Par excelUnceoftrue and noble
love-"-. What was theory for his own age had been pnctice
forthe knights of Britain. For it is interesting to notice
I G. pam, l.I eMf" 41 III e_It" (~, :a:ii.). Oa the degree to wbicb.;be
Dew aentiment appan in the ItIlmaDeeJ of Eutu and 'I~, IUd the inBua.:e
which these worb may have bad OIl ChrftieD, _ Guitaft CoheD. CbrJIUII "
'Ir"YU"" _It 1931, pp. 38-73 et purim..
,-,.~
t-,().. id-~
24 COURTLY LOVE
that he places his ideal in the past. For him already 'the
age of chivalry is dead'.I It always was: let no one think
the worse of it on that account. These phantom periods
for which the historian searches in vain-the Rome and
Greece that the Middle Ages believed in, the British past
of Malory and Spenser, the Middle Age itself as it was
conceived by the romantic revival-all these have their
place in a history more momentous than that which commonly
bears the name.
An appreciation of Chretien's work as a whole would
here be out ofplace. That he has claims on our attention,
far beyond the restricted purpose for which I cite him
now, must surely be admitted. It is his fate to appear
constantly in literary history as the specimen of a tendency.
He has deserved better. And the tragedy of the
thing is that he himself was never really subdued to that .l\:;.
tendency. It is very doubtful whether he was ever dazzlecf
by the tradition of romantic adultery. There are protests
in Cligls which seem to come from the heart.2 He tells us
in the opening lines of Lancelot that he wrote it at the
command of the Countess of Champagne,3 and that she
furnished him with both the story and the treatment.
What does this mean? I am probably not the first reader
who has seen in the fantastic labours which Lancelot
undergoes at ~i~IJ&,.QLthe Queen, a symbol of the
poet's own ge' en 0 tasks unworthy ofit by the whinf6~~
of a fashionable woman. However this may be, there is
assuredly something in Chretien beyond the reach of all
1 Twill, 17 and S394. The unrivalled pOlition of Arthur', eourt at the home of
eourteay be<:omea 10 fixed in later romantic: tradition that it i, acknowledged to
have lurpassed that of ~harlemagne even by the partUaDi of the 'matter of
Franc:e'. Cf. Boiardo, O;ZaNllllllllalflaraID, II. xviii, ltaaza, 1 and :&: 'Fu gloriOll
Bretapa Ia grande Una atagion' . •• 'Re Carlo in Franza poi tenue gran eorte,
Ma a quella prima non fu IOmigliante ..• Perc:he tenne ad amor chiuae Ie porte
E 101 Ii dette a Ie battaglie ante, Non fu di quel valore 0 quella atima Qual fu
quell'altra.'
a Cligis, 3IH-1S4t S:&sg-6z. (But Foenter treau the Ie<:ond panage II an
interpolation.)
l Laru:e"",:&6: Manere et SIZII rail -ltme et IiflTe U mit,,". V. O. Pari., op. cit.,
p. 5:&3: allO, the admirable tenth chapter of Vinaver', TrutlZlI " Isft81 JaIlS
r .""', Je MlZklry, 19:&S.
COURTLY LOVE 2S
changes of taste. Mter so many centuries, it needs no
historical incantation to bring to life such lines as
A! wher was 10 grct beautee maked l
-God wroughte hir with His hond al naked,1
nor to appreciate the superb narrative power in the opening
of the Lancelot. How irresistible is that crypti~ght
v0: ~ho comes and goes we know not whence or whitner, and
lures the reader to follow as certainly as he lured the Queen
and Kay. How nobly the poem of rfJain approaches to
the romantic ideal of a labyrinthine tale in which the
1r1' ~thread is never lost, and multiplicity does no more than
illustrate an underlying singleness. For our present purpose,
however, we must give Chr~tien short shrift. What
is of interest to us is that versatility which enables us to
trace, in the distance between E1'ec and Lancelot, the extent
ofthe emotional revolution which was taking place in
his audience.
In E1'ec-almost certainly an ~y work'-the later
rules of love and courtesy are 6utraged at every turn. It
is indeed a love story; but it is a story ofmarried love. The
hero has married the heroine before the main action of
.. ~he poem begins. This, in itself, is an irregularity; but the
./..:'l11ethod of his wooing is worse. E1'ec sees Enw in her
father'S house, and falls in love with her. There are no
passages of love between them: no humility on his part,
no crudty on hers. Indeed it is not clear that they converse
at all. When he comes to the house, the maiden, at
her father's command, leads his horse to stable and grooms
it with her own hands. Later, when they are seated, the
father and the guest talk of her in her presence as if she
were a child or an animal. E1'ec asks her in marriage, and
the father consents.3 It does not seem to occur to the
lover that the lady's will could be a rdevant factor in this
j<J""':"'!arrangement. We are given to understand that she is
pleased, but only a passive role is expected ofher, or indeed
I TNia, 1497: 'DonfUit Ii granz biautCJ: Tenue? Ja Ia &.t DeUi de - main nu~:
a For the probable chronology, tee Cohen, up. cit., p. 87·
l Eret:, 450-665'
27
"'"

26 COURTLY LOVE
allowed to her. The whole scene, however true it may be
to the marriage practices of the time, is strangely archaic
compared with the new ideals oflove. We are back in a
world where women are merely the mute objects of gift
or barter, not only in the eyes of their fathers, but even
in the eyes of their lovers. When we pass on to the main
story, this lack of 'courtesy' is even more striking. The
tale of Erels behaviour to his wife will be familiar to
every one from Tennyson's Geraint and Enid. Chretien
renders it more credible by following a version in which
the plot does not turn wholly on the absurd device of a
soliloquy overheard,I and in which the husband has subtler
and truer motives for his anger than Tennyson can give
him. But this does not alter the inherent brutality of the
I theme. The story belongs to the same general type as that
G\ \''f~v'" 	 of Griselda-the story ofwifely patience triumphing over
ordeals imposed by the irresponsible crljl_e~f a husband
-and, as such, it capnot possibly reCon~iIe itselfwith even
the most moderate ideal of courtesy. But Erec does not ~,l-C"
confine his discourtesy within the litni~,1J. of the ordeal.U
lust as he had allowed Enide to grooirl'his horse for him
before their marriage, so, in their journeyings, he lets her
watch and hold the horse all night, while he himselfsleeps
at ease beneath the cloak wlUch she has taken from her own
back to cover him.2 p 1",- '
When we turn to the Lancelot all this is changed.. The
Chretien ofLancelot is first and foremost the Chr~tien who
has translated Ovid's Art (Jf LtJrJe,3 and who lives at the
court of my lady of Champagne-herself an ultimate
authority on all questions of courtly love. As against the
married life of Erec and Enide we have the secret love of
Lancelot and Guinevere. The story turns mainly on the
Queen's captivity in the mysterious land of Gorre, where
those that are native can go both in and out but strangers
can only go in,. and on her rescue thence by Lancelot. It
I A IOliloq:uy is tWerhard in chritien, but itis the raultin,c:onTeratioll. which
mattel') (E,.e", %5J5-83).
:J Erll(;,3095-1Q2.. J Cli,es. 2., 3. .. ~t, 1919 et.eq.
COURTLY LOVE
is one ofChretien's misfortunes that the dark and tremendous
suggestions of the Celtic myth that lurks in the
background ofhis story should so far (for a modern reader)
overshadow the love and adventure of the foreground.
He has, however, no conception of this. We think of the
Middle Ages playing with the sca·_tered fragments of
classical antiquity, and failing to understand them, as
when, by an intolerable degradation, they make Virgil a
magician. But indeed they have dealt as roughly with the
fragments of the barbarian past, and understood them as
little: they have destroyed more magic than they ever
invented. Lancelot sets out to find the Queen and almost
at once loses his ~~ In this predicament he is met by
a dwarf driving a tumbril. To his questions, the dwarfsurly
like all his race-replies, 'Get in, and I will bring
you where you shall have news ofthe Queen'. The knight
hesitates for a moment before mounting the cart ofshame
and thus appearing as a common criminal; a moment
later he obeys.r He is driven through streets where the
rabble cry out upon him and ask what he has done and
whether he is to be flayed or hanged. He is brought to
a castle where he is shown a bed that he must not lie in
because he is a knight disgraced. He comes to the bridge
that crosses into the land of Gorre-the sword-bridge,
made of a single blade of steel-and is warned that the
high enterprise ofcrossing it is not for one so dishonoured
as he. 'Remember your ride on the cart', says the keeper
of the bridge. Even his friends acknowledge that he will
.. 4+ never be rid of the disgrace.Z When he has crossed the
1)~J..!i" bridge, wounded in hands, knees, and feet, he comes at
last into thelresence of the Queen. She will not speak to
him. An 01 king, moved with pity, presses on her the
merits ofhis service. Her reply, and the scene that follows,
deserve to be quoted in full:
'Sire, aIle his tyme is spilt for noght,
For 800th to seyn he hath at me
No thankes wonnen ne no gree'.
I lbi.d. 36.t- et .eq. 	 a lbi.d. 16::10 et seq.
d 	 COUR.TLY LOVE
La.ncelot lOry chen: maketh 

Yet 11k a lovere al he taketh 

In memease and seyth humblel1t 

'Dame, I am greved certein11; 

Yet, for the cause ofyour chiding, 

I dar nat asken for no thing' 

Greet pleynte tho to make him liste 

If that the Quene wolde hit liste, 

But to encrese hi. were and wo, 

She yeveth him no wordes mo. 

Into a bour she paceth nouthe, 

And even: as ferforth as he couthe 

This Lancelot with eyen two 

Hir folwcd and with hcrte also.1 

It is only later that he learns the cause of all this cruelty.
The Queen has heard of his momentary hesitation int-,k.2Jt.,o-1
stepping on to the tumbril, and this lukewarmness in the
servJ.ce oflove has been held by her sufficient to annih.ilate
L	all the merit of his subsequent labours and humiliations.
Even when he is forgiven, his trials are not yet at an end.
The tournament at the close ofthe poem gives Guinevere
another opportunity of exercising her power. When he
has already entered the lis~s, in disguise, and all, as usual,\r r~ v \a..v
is going down before him, she sends him a message ordering
him to do his poorest. Lancelot obediently lets himselfbe
unhorsed by the next knight that comes against him, and
I 	 urrettlllt, 3975-19:
'Sire, voir, mal I'. Ulllloiie­

Ja par moi De fera IIOiU 

Que je DC ran Iii poiDt de gre.' 

Ea yot LanccIot ~, 

Si Ii rcspout mout humblemaat 

A mmicrc de fia ....t: 

'Dame, ccrtct, ce poiM moi, 

Ne je D'ot dcmaDdcr par quoi.' 

Lancdoa moat lie dem:mtut 

Se Ja riiae 1'_taR; 

Met par lui greYCl' et eonf'ondre 

Ne Ji Nut UD IICu.I mot reapondre, 

AiDa CIt m UDe ehanbre antree; 

E Lanceloz jurq\l'. raatree

Det iau et del alcr II COIlvoic'. 

I\ ;, 17J;' . ,. ' ,,~
P ~10 	V
COUR.TLY LOVE 29
then takes to his heels, feigning terror 9fevery combatant
that passes near him. The herald mocks him for a coward
and the whole field takes up the laugh against him: the
Queen looks on delighted. Next morning the same command
is repeated, and he answers, 'My thanks to her, if
G £.
she will so'. This time, however, the restriction is with-

stel"'~ drawn before the fighting actually begins.I 

The submission which Lancelot shows in his actions is 

accompanied, on tht:.t;tubjective side, by a feeling that 

s.)..vC.~	deliberately apes ~eli:gto6s devotion. Although his love is 

by no means supersensua1 and is indeed carnally rewarded 

in this very poem, he is represented as treating Guinevere 

with saindy, ifnot divine, honours. When he comes before 

the bed where she lies he kneels and adores her: as Chr~­

tien explicitly tells us, there is no corseynt in whom he has 

greater faith. When he leaves her chamber he makes a 

genuflexion as if he were before a shrine.2 The irreligion 

of the religion of love could hardly go further. Yet 

Chretien-whether he is completely unconscious of the 

paradox, or whether he wishes, clumsily enough, to make 

some amends for these revolting passages--represents his 

Lancelot as a pious man and goes out ofhis way to show 

__lUm-dismountmg when he passes a church, and entering
....- to make his prayer; by which, according to Chretien, he
proves both his courtesy and wisdom.l
Chr~tien de Troyes, Judged by modern standards, is on
the whole an objective poet. The adventures still occupy
the greater part of his stories. By the s:tandard ofbia own
times, on the other hand, he must have appeared strikingly
subjective. The space devoted to action that goes forwardv r~
only in the souls ofhis characters waslrobab1y beyond all \
medieval precedent.4 He was one 0 the first explorers
of the human heart, and is therefore righdy to be numbered
among the fathers of the novel of sentiment. But
I lbld. 5641 et 1ICq. 

II Ibid. 4670-1 ('Car an nul c:orI aaint De croit taat') and 4734 et 1ICq. 

• Ibid. 1852 et 1ICq.
" But d. the admirable cony_bon 'between Amata and La'finia Ij,1IOted fnII1l
the E_ by Cohea, 0,. cit., pp. 44 et 1ICq.
A
30 COUR.TLY LOVE
these psychologica1,rassages have usually one characteristic
which throws speClal light on the subject of this book.
Chretien can hardly turn to the inner world without, at
the same time, turning to allegory. No doubt the Proven~als
here served him as a model; no doubt both the
poet and his audience loved the method for its own sake,
and found it clever and refined. Yet it would nQl sU$llrUe
us if Chretien found some difficulty in concc!ifJlg 'the _
inner world on any other terms. It is as if the insensible ~'v
could not yet knock at the doors of the poetic consciousness
without transforming itself into the likeness of the G4(1
sensible: as if men could not easily grasp the reality of <.moods
and emotions without turning them into shadowy
"PI'S()ftS. Allegory, besides being many other things, is the
subjectivism ofan objective age. When Lancelot hesitates
before mounting the cart, Chretien represents his indecision
as a debate between R'IIStm which forbids, and LWI
which urges him on.l A later poet would have t61au8
directly-though not, after all, without metaphor-what
Lancelot was feeling: an earlier poet would not have
attempted such a scene at all. In another place Lancelot
is asked by a lady for the head of a knight whom he has
just disabled. The knight begs for mercy, and two duties
within the chivalrous code are thus brought into collision.
The resulting state of Lancelot's mind becomes for Chretien
a debate between Largesse and Pite. Each fears defeat
and between them they hold him a prisoner.Z Again, in
r '/Jain, where Gawain and the hero, who are fast friends,
meet without recognition and fight, the contrast between
their amicable intentions and their hostile acts is worked
up into a very elaborate allegory of Love and Hate--Hate
looking from the windows, Hate mounting into the saddle,
while Love (here used in its larger sense), who shares the
same house, is upbraided for skulking in an inner room and
not coming to the rescue.3 This certainly seems frigid to
a modem reader, and does not rise as naturally from the
1 lAlfUItI" 369-lh. 

a Ibid. aiu-6r. J T'/HIi"l 6001 et teq. 

>"
r COUR.TLY LOVE ,_l,"~c.~"; 31
~ntext as those which I have quoted from the La,"itot.
Yet we should bbvare ofsupposing too hastily that the poet
is merely being clever. It is quite possible that the house
with many rooms where Love can be lost in the background,
while Hate holds the hall and the courtyard,
may have come to Chretien as a real revelation of the (workings of circumstance to produce such various actions
from the emotions ofa single heart. We have to worm our
way very cautiously into the minds of these old writers:
an a priori assumption as to what can, and what can not,
be the exr.ression of real imaginative experience is the 1worst posSIble guide. The allegory of the Body and the
HeartI-also from r '/Jain-isaninteresting example. That
Chretien has borrowed it from Provence does not·in the _
least alter the fact that it is for him an e:q>ression-perhaps
the only possible expression-of something well and truly
imagined. But he has not yet learned the art of dropping
such tools when they have done their wQr~. J'he glitter
of the weapon takes his fa~when the tIirh'it'has already h ~ ck. <fAJ/~·/
been given, and here we may feel almost confident that
what begins as live allegory dies into mere virtuosity in
the course (}Jthe next ten lines. The more commonplace,
and rt!t&ated, allegory of Death in Cligls will recur to
the memory of any of its readers.~ .
The figure of Love personified himselfis almost equally
connected with the subject of the 'love-religion' and with
that of allegory. The references to his archery in Cliglsl J ~)I.'
belong to a familiar type, and might come out of any____ cJ ~ P
classica1love-poet. The idea of Love as an avenging god,
f~v(t coming to trouble the peace of those who have hithertoh-c.c.(r-
scorned his power, belongs also to the Latin tradition, but
it is more serious for Chretien than for Ovid. The repen- £..; /r:o,.. I::R. C ~lc7? ..,
~~~~~W~~~~~~ ~
hri....- surrender to a newdeity, aretouch 'With a <Juasi-religious 

emotion. Alexander, in Cligls, after a bnef resistance, 

1 Ibid., 2639 et seq. The ProTen~ parallela are mentioned by J. MoraWlki, 

~ liii, P. .17 D. 

2 Clips, SISS et paAim. J Ibid. 460, no­
..,
JU).-kh..
COURTLY LOVE3:2 'f0URTLY LOVE 33
confesses that love Chastens him thus in order to instruct in the art oflove-making given by the Chaplain to acertain
rum. 'Let him do with me as he will, for I am rus.' Sore­ Walter; but after a very few definitions and preliminary
damors, in the same poem, acknowledges that Love has < considerations the author proceeds to illustrate his subject
humbled her pride by force, and doubts whether such by a series of ideal dialogues, adapted for the use oflovers
extorted service will find favour.l In the same spirit Yvain in various social positions. We are shown by specimen
determines to offer no resistance to rus passion: not only conversations how a man who is nohilis ought to approach
to resist love, but even to yield unwillingly, is an act of a woman who is nobilior, or how a -plebeiw should woo a
treason against the god. Those who have thus sinned -pkbeia; even how a plebeiw ought to woo a nobilisor a nobiI?,L-..against
rum deserve no happiness.% In Lancelot the same li()'f. It thus comes about that during the greater part of 

~ 'Z"'-Ie d~r~ed further. tM+is only the noblest hea,:u . ".\ 
 his work Andreas is not speaking in rus own person, and
o l -which Love aelgns to ens1ave, and a man should pnze <;{ :\"" 1.j that he uses, through these imaginary mouthpieces, the
rumselfthe more ifhe is selected for such service. We find most different kinds of argument. This would present us
also the conception of lovers as the members of an ()'fder with a serious difficulty if it were our object to give an
of Love, modelled upon the orders of religion: of an art account of the author's mind; but it is less serious if we
of Love, as in Ovid; and of a (ourt of Love, with solemn ' wish to study (what is very much more interesting) the
customs and usages, modelled upon the feudal courts of characteristics of the theory of love as it existed in the
the period.3 It will be seen that no final distinction is i general mind of the period. The occurrence of a given
possible between the erotic religion, the erotic allegory, ~
i
opinion in these imagmary dialogues does not tell us what
and the erotic mythology. Andreas thought; but it is tolerably good evidence that
such an opinion was part of the body of floating ideas on
III the subject. We can hardly suppose that he would hold
up, for the imitation of his pupil, speeches containingIn Chretien de Troyes we see the developed theory of ,,4.',"\ ~ arguments and ideas wruch were not 'correct' by thelove put into action in the course ofstories. His teaching /{ v r£j fJ;'.".. standard of the best courdy tradition. I cannot promisetakes the form ofexample rather than precept, and, to do fVi'lfzl
that I shall not fall into such convenient expressions asrum justice, the purely narrative interest is never for long
'Andreas says'; but all these are to be understood undersubordinated to the didactic. Having thu~tudied the new
ideal in the OATJ, embodied and parJILcincea:ted in story, the caveat given above. f I~The
definition oflove on the first page ofthls wor~) .../2we naturally look next for a professedly theoretical work
out at once the kind oflove that is called 'Platonic'.! The ,on the same subject, wherewith to finish off our sketch.
aim"""of love, for Andreas, is actual fruition, and its source )Such a work is ready for us in the De Aru Honesu Amanti
is visible beauty: so much so, that the blind are declaredofAndreas Capel1anus4 (Andre the chaplain). Itwas probincapable
of love, or, at least, of entering upon love afterably written early in the thirtJ!enth century, and ~_ in
they have become blind.Z On the other hand, love is notLatin prose. The style is agfee1ble and easy, thougIi the
authors favourite (1I"S1IS often makes his sentences end sensuality. The sensual man-the man who suffers from
like hexameters in a way strange to classical ears.
I The distinction made in Ih A,,,, H_", A._i, i. ~ (Trojer. editioll, p.
The De Aru takes the form of methodical instruction 18%) between pttns ii_and .iXIIII, Jea't'et pttns iI_ &r from PlatoDie. Betidet,
I CligJ" 682, 94-1. ~iIr, 14# ' Clitn, 3865; r..,16­ tbe Lady rejecu it u absurd (ibid., p. 1114).

" Ed. Troja (HaUDiae, ~For chronology'll. O. PaN, op. dt. 
 II Ibid. i. S (p. u in Trojer. edition).
rr
COURTLY LOVE
/ abunJantia flolu-ptatis-is disqualified from participating in
~,it.1 It may even be claimed that love is a 'kind ofchastity',
in virtue ofits severe standard offidelity to a singleobject.2
The lover must not hope to succeed, except with a foolish
lady, by his formae flmuJtas, but by his eloquence, and,
above all, by his morum probitas. The latter implies no
mean or one-sided conception of clu:tracter. The lover
must be truthful and modest, a good Catholic, clean in his
speech, hospitable, and ready to return good for evil. He
must be courageous in war (unless he is a clerk) and gener- ous
ofhis gifts. He must at alltimes be courteous. Though
devoted in a special sense to one lady, he must be ready to
perform minismia et oIJsequia for all.' With such a conception
ofthe lover's qualifications, it is not surprising that
Andreas should return again and again to the power of
love for good. 'It is agreed among all men that there is
no good thing in the world, and no courtesy, which is not
derived from love as from its fountain.'4 It is 'the fountain
and origin of all good things'; without it 'all usages of
courtesy would be unkqpwn to man'.5 The lady is allowed ,
free choice in her acceptance or rejection of a lover in
order that she may reward the merit ofthe best: she must
not abuse this power in order to gratify her own fancies.
By admitting a worthy lover to her favours she does well.
Only women who are 'enlisted in the soldiery of love' are
praised among men. Even a young unmarried woman
should have a IQ,:V:~. It is true that her husband, when she
marries, is 1;o'i\'ii~o discover it, but if he is a wise man
he win know that a'woman who had not followed the
'commands of love' would necessarily have less probitas.6
In fine, all that is in saet:"l/J() bonum, all that is good in thia
present world, depends solely upon love. And yet, ifthe ..
author's ideal ofthe proDitasdemanded in a lover goes far to
Lexplain this praise o(love, we must yet remember that that
3f
I lH.4ru H_u 4_ffIl;, i. 5(p. 13).
a Ibid. i. 4 'amor !eddit hollli.nem caetitatil quai Tirtute dec.watum' (p. (0).
S Ibid. ii. I (p. :&41). • Ibid. i. 6 A (p. zS).
• Ibid. i. (in (p. 81). 6 Ibid. i. 6 G(p. 181).
COURTLY LOVE 35
ideal has its clearly defined limits. Courtesy demands that
the lover should serve all ladies, not all women. Nothing
could mark more plainly the negative side of this courtly
tradition than the short chapter in which Andreas explains
that ifyou are so unfortunate as to fall in love with
a peasant woman, you may, si locum inflennis.opportunum,
make use of modi(a (oa&lio. It is hardly possible otherwise,
he adds, to overcome the rigor of these creatures.1
As the source of all worldly goodness, love must be
thought ofas a state ofmind; but the rules which Andreas
lays down for its conduct remind us that it is also an art.
The elaboration of the art has now become so subtle
as to lead to hard cases which demand an expert solution;
and he bases his judgements on the decisions
given by certain noble ladies to whom such problems
have been referred. The whole of his curious chapter
De flariis iuti.iciis amoris is filled with them. Some of
these problems arise concerning the limits of obedience.
A lover has been commanded by his lady to cease to serve
her. Later, hearing her defamed, he speaks in her defence.
Is he then guilty ofdisobedience? The Countess ofChampagne
ruled that he was not: the lady's command, being
wrong in the first instance, has no binding force.% What
is the courtly law in the case of two lovers who find out
that they are related within the degrees which would have ' .f
forbidden their union by marriage? They must p~rt U\.QJc.,h.\at
once. The table of kindred and affinity which applies /"'-'
marriage applies also to loving p~3 Rulin are '
given as to the presents which a lady may recetve without
being condemned as mercenary. The duty of secrecy in
love-one of the legacies of this code to modern societyis
strongly enforced, and the vice ofdetraction is blamed."
But perhaps no rule is made clearer than that which excludes
love from the marriage relation. 'Dicimus et stabiI
Ibid. i. II (p. :36). CE. the vcry dote parallel. in Malory, iii. 3; 'she told the
King and Merlin that wben me was a maid and went to milk kine, there met
with ber a Item knight, and WjIIyjm" etc.'
a Ibid. ii. 1 (pp. :11-3).
J Ibid. ii. 1 (p. :79). 4 Ibid.. i. 6 c (po 6S).
r'"~f" 

COURTLY LOVE
lito tenore firmamus amorem non posse suas inter duos
iugales extendere vires.'1 The disabling influence of marriage
extends even after marriage has been dissolved: love
between those who were formerly married to each other
and are now divorced is pronounced by the lady ofChampagne
to be MjaMus. And yet there are passages which
suggest that the chivalrous code, however anti-matrimonial
in principle, has already done something to soften
the old harshness of the relations between husband and
wife. Andreas finds it necessary to recognize the possibility
ofmaritalis affectio and to prove at some length that it 1S
different from Amor.1. The proof is very illuminating.
Conjugal affection cannot be 'love' because there is in it
an element ofduty or necessity: a wife, in loving her husband,
is not exercising her free choice in the reward of
merit, and her love therefore cannot increase his probitas.
There are minor reasons too--conjuga1love is not furtive,
and jealousy, which is ofthe essence oftrue love, is merely
a pe:'t in marriage. But it is the first reason which puts
this 'theory ofadultery' before us in its most sympathetic,
and therefore in its truest, light. The love which is to be
the source ofall that is beautiful in life and manners must
be the reward freely given by the lady, and only our
superiors can reward. But a wife is not a superior.3 As
the wife of another, above all as the wife of Ii great lord,
she may be queen of beauty and of love, the distributor
of favours, the inspiration of all knighdy virtues, and the
bridle of 'villany';+ but as your own wife, for whom you
have bargained with her father, she sinks at once from lady
36
/";'p, A,u 8_11 4-.4i. i. 6F (p. 153). a Ibid.. pp. 1+[ et ICq.
\,~' E'ftIl where • Icrfe afI'Iir. CODdueud hitherto on the courtly model. eadI in
marriase, later meclienl feeliD.g rcprck thi... completely rennbIa' the pfnioua
relatioaa of the 10_; do 4 ... qf Gal (Southey'. ~tion 18r.a, yo!. iii,
pp. asS, aS9> ilk. iy. C.19). CO lady. with what tenicea CI.II. I requite you, that by
your CODJent our IoYS are DOW made known' 0riaDa ~ It it DOW, Sir,
IlO 1oD&U time that you Ibould proffer IUCb eourtelies, Of that I lIhouJd reeeiYe
them. (1m DOW to follow and oblCne your will with that obedience which wife
own to huabuld.'
• C£ Chaucer, C_~I qfMlln. +1: '$he brydeleth him in her manereW'1th
IIOthiDa but with IConl'IiDI of her chere'.
37
into mere woman. How can a woman, whose duty is to
obey you, be the miJons whose grace is the goal of all
striving and whose displeasure is the restraining influence
upon all uncourtly vices? You may love her in a sense;
but that is not love, says Andreas, any more than the love
of father and son is amicitia.1
We must not suppose
that the rules of love are most frivolous when they are
most opposed to marriage. The more serious they are,
the more they are opposed. As I have said before, where
marriage does not depend upon the free will of the married,
any theory which takes love for a noble form of ex­

perience must be a theory of adultery. 

To the love religion, or rather to the love mythology, 

Andreas makes interesting contributions. In the Council 

ojRemi1'emont we have seen the god Amor already provided 

with a gospel, cardinals, visitations, and the power to curse 

his heretical subjects. Andreas goes far to complete his 

parallelism with the God of real religion. In one of the 

iInaginary conversations a lady pleads to be excused on the 

ground that she does not reciprocate her lover's feelings, 

and there's an end of the matter. 'At that rate', retorts 

the lover, 'a sinner might plead to be excused on the 

ground that God had not given him grace.' 'On the other 

hand', says the lady, 'just as all our works without charity 

cannot merit eternal bliss, so it will be unavailing to serve 

Love non ex (01'ais aflectimu.'1. All that was left was to 

attribute to Love the divine power ofreward and punish­

ment after death, and this 19 actually done. The story 

which Andreas tells on this' subject is one of the freshest 

passages of his work.3 Looking forward from it, we can 

foresee awell-knowntalein Boccacdo,Gower, andDryden: 

looking backward, we perhaps come into touch again with 

the buried stratum of barbarian mythology. It begins, as 

a good story should, with a young man lost in a forest. 

COURTLY LOVE
t IN 4m H_II 4.unNi, p. [42­
2 Ibid. i. 6 It (p. 11.3). 

3 Ibid. i. 6 oS. pp. ,1-108. The paraI1ela are eollec:ted by W. NdlIon in 

Rmtwtill, xxix: be regards that found in the l.Ili J. 'Trot .. tig'htly earlier than 

AruJreai. veniou. <,? <: ' , ~,~
~--
, 38 COURTLY LOVE
r·
His horse had wandered while he slept, and as he searches
for it he sees three companies go by. In the first, led by
a lovelyknight, rode ladies, richlyhorsed and eachattended
by a lover on foot. In the second, there were ladies surrounded
by such a crowd and tumult ofcontending servitOrs
that they wished for nothing but to be out of the
noise. But the third company rode bareback on wretched
nags mafiJentos fJa/J.e It gt'tllfJitl1' trottanus, unattended,
clothed in rags, and covered with the dust of those that
went before. As might be expected, the first party consists
ofladies who in their life on earth served love wisely;
the second, of those who gave their kindness to all that
asked it; and the third omnium muiilrum misernmae, of
those implacable beauties who were deaf to every lover's
prayer. The mortal follows this procession through the
woods, until he is brought into a strange country. There
stood the thrones of the king and queen of Love beneath
the shadow ofa tree that bears all kinds offruit; and beside
them rose a fountain as sweet as nectar, from which innumerable
rivulets overflowed and watered the surrounding
glades, winding their way in every direction among
the couches which were there prepared for the true lovers
who rode in the first company. But beyond and around
this pleasant place, which is called Amomitas, lay the realm
ofH"miJittU. The streams from the central fountain had
turned icy cold before they reached this second country,
and there, collecting in the low ground, formed a great
swamp, cold beneath, and treeless, but glaring under a
fierce sun. Here was the appointed place for the ladies of
the second company. ThoSe ofthe third were confined in
the outermost circle ofall, the burning desert of Sictiw,
and seated upon bundles of sharp thorn which the tormentors
kept in continual agitation beneath them. Lest
anything should be lacking to this extraordinary parody
or reflection of the Christian afterworld, the story ends
with a remarkable scene in which the mortal visitor is
brought before the throne,jresented with a list of the
commandments of Love, an told to report on earth this
COURTLY LOVE ~9
vision which has been allowed him in order that it may
lead to the 'salvation' of many ladies (sit ,.flitanlim tlomina1'1lm
sai"tis occano).' The second story which he tells is
less theological; and though it also ends with the commandments
oflove, they are won, together with the Hawk
of Victory, from Arthur's court and not from the next
Lworld.: Elsewhere, as usual, there are things that lie on
the borderland between allegory and mythology. Such
passages, however audacious they may appear, are clearly
flights of fancy, far removed, indeed, from the comedy of
the COfIncil, but equally far removed from anything that
could be regarded as a serious 'religion of love'. Andreas
is at his gravest not here but in those places, which I referred
to above, where he dwells upon the pc>wer of love
to call forth all knightly and courtly excellences: love
which makes beautiful the horriJ.w and incu1tf1S,3 which
advances the most lowly born to true nobility, and
humbles the proud. If this is not a religion, it is, at any
rate, a S]'Stem of ethics. Of its relation with the other,
the Chnstian, system, Andreas tells us a good deal. As
against the author of the COfIncil, he states plainly that
nuns ought not to be the servants of Love--md ends the
passage with a comic account ofms own experiences which
IS not one of his most chivalrous r=ssages... With CInici,
on the other hand, the case is different. They are only
men, .after all, conceived in sin like the rest, and indeed
more exposed than others to temptation Min' otio. mflita
It abuntlantiam cibonI.,.. Indeed, it is very doubtful
whether God seriously meant them to be more chaste
than the laity. It is teaching, not p'ractice, that counts. (
Did not Christ say 'SeCUM"m opera iJlonI.,. 1UJlitlflU'" l" \
l 1M Aru H_II ~ i. 6 as, p. 105: 'N0Itra tibi IIU'It ~ 'fi.~
mapaJia at per te -m meat ipormtibua revelari et at tua praaeu 'fiIio
lit multarum domiaarum Alutia occaaio.'
2 Ibid. ii. 8 (pp. 295-]1:&).
J Ibid. i. 4- (p. 9). 4 Ibid. i. 8 (p. ua).
5 Ibid.i. 7(P. 2.l.lh i. 6G(pp. 186-8). He interpret. the ~from tbeao.pel
u meaniD& 'Credmdum. est dictia dericorum q- leptorum Dei, eel quia
c:amia teru:atiODi. acut homina ceteri mppoDWltUr. eorum nan impiciatia opera
iii eoa coatiprit Iliquo dem.re'.
r~L<b-i ~oJrAaSiC 

414D ~gUR.TLY LOVE
He is anxious to ~i:tout that the code oflove agrees with
'natural moralitY'. 'Incestuous' and 'damnable' unions are
equally forbidden by both.I He includes ord.inatt...l2iety
and a reverence for the saints among the virtues WithOUt
which no man is qualified to be a lover. Heresy in the
knight justifies a lady in withdrawing her favour from him.
'And yet', he says, in a very significant passage, 'some
people are so extremely foolish as to imagine that theJOFUV
recommend themselves to women by showing contempt ::i.~
for the Church.'a We have a sudden glimpse of a party
who had grasped the fundamentalincompatibilitybetween
F1'afU1'Ulienst and religion, who delighted. to emphasize it
by a freedom (probably crude enough) ofthe tongue; and
of another party, to which Andreas belongs; who want
nothing less than emphasis. That mar. be the meaning,
too, of the piety which Chretien ascnbes to Lance1otan
object:"lesson for the ribald left wing of the courtlr
world. Yet while Andreas thus wishes to christianize his
love theory as far as possible, he has no real reconciliation.
His ~earest approach to one is a te~!ative suggestion on
the lines of Pope; 'Can that offend great Nature's God
which Nature's self inspires i'-on which we can have no
better comment than the words of the lady, in the same
conversation, a few lines later, sed diflinarum 1'erum IIIl
1"aBsens dispu.tat.ione omissa . •• 'Leaving the religious side
of the question out for a moment'-and then she turns to
the real point.3 ~l.rtAZ--
For the truth is that the rift between the two worlds
is irremediable. Andreas repeatedly recognizes this.
'Amoremexhibere estgraviteroiienderedeum.'4 Marriage
offen no compromise. It is a mistake to su.ppoaethat the
fJchemens amauw can escape sine crimine by the imiropriety
(from the courtly point of view) oflOving his own
I De Arte HOfUste Atflilruli i. 2 (p. 7) 'Quidquid natura nept Imor aubaci.t
amplecti.' Also ii. 7. Jud. 7 (p. %79)· 

:& Ibid. i. 6 c (p. 68). 

J Ibid. i. 6 G(p.I62): 'Credo tameninlmote Deum panteroffendi DOD p!*el 

nam quod. natura cogenteperficitu.tfac:ili potalapiatione mUDdari'. And p. 164­
4 Ibid., p. 159­
I
COURTLY LOVE
wife. Such a man is is 1"qpri4 fl:tIW,lIIlfllur. His sin it
heavier thaD. that ofthe unm.arried.loTer, for he has abused
the sacrament ofDWriage.~.An~that ia-pr~~, ~
whole world of court~emts only by 'leavmgthe'rdigious
side ofthe question out for a D1Oinen~.:<>m:e briDg
'H'in, as the lOvUargues in the wne'passage, and you
moat give up, not only' loving. fNW ""'s; but, the wkoltf
world as we:ll.% 'As if this were not mfliciently clear,
Andreas has a surprisefor the modern reader at the beginning
of the last book. 'Having written two boob on the
art oflove,. he s:oddenJ.y'breab off and begins anew: ~ou
must read all this, my dear Walter, not as' tboup you
sought thence to embrace the lifeofloven, but that'Deio,
refreaheclby. its doctrine and having·weJlleaJ!ned ho¥r to
provoke the minds ofWOmen to love,. you may yet abstain
from such provocation, and thus merit a greater reward.1I
All that haS gone before, we are giver1 to undentand, hla
been written in order that Walter, like Guyon, may 'see;
and mow, and yet abstain. 'No manthroup any ,good.
deeds can please God so long as he serves in t1i.e service of
Love."Quum igitur oJDIlia aequantur ex amore nefanda'
..• and the rest ofthe book is. palinode.l . ,
What are we to make oftliia "olte-faeel That the
Chaplain's love-lore is pure joking, or that his religion is
rank hypocrisy l Neither the one nor the other. It is more
probable that he meant what he said when he told us that
love was the source ofeverything iSSfUC1d4 btm.m, and it is
, our fault ifwe are apt to forget the limitation-is sfUcul8.
It is significant that we cannot even translate it 'worldly'
.eood. 'Worldliness' in modern, or at least in Victorian,
fanguage docs not really refer to the values of.this world
(hoc sfUctd.m) as cOntrasted with the values of eternity:
I Ibid. i. 6 J' (p. 147).
* Ibid.i. 6 G (p. 161 et teq.): 'Neeobttue potat quod D«ua in &more IIII'ntd
oftencll, quia CllDc:tU llquido CODItIre Yidetv.r quod [)eo lenin lWImlum bona
ItC pecuIiare c:e:aaetur; eed qui Domino COftteDduat pezfecte lenin au pronUI
clebeat obtequio -ap.ri et iutaPauH IeIlteDtiam nullo -ecuJari debeat adimpieri
aegotio. Eqo" Ii tenire Deo tmtum ma. eIigen; mlDldaa __ oportet
amcta reJinqllcre.! I Ibid. iii.. 1 (pp. 314 et teq.).
-----
, COURTLY LOVE
~ ere1y contrasts, inside a single world, what is conIt
m. . 1 b" d th ,!1...
sidered baser-4S avance, persona am Itlon,an e .llI.ewith
what is considered nobler, as conjugal love, learning,
public service. But when Andreas talks of the Donum in
saeNl/o he means what he says. He means the really good
thin~ in a human sense, as contrasted with the really bad
things: courage and courtesy and generosity, as against
baseness. But, rising like a sheer cliff above a,nd behind
this humaneor secular scale of values, he has another which
is not to be reconciled with it, another by whose standard
there is very little to choose between the 'worldly' good
and the 'worldly' bad. That very element of parodied or,
at least, of imitated religion which we find in the courtly
code, and which looks so blasphemous, is rather an expression
of the divorce between the two.1 They are so completely
two that analogies naturally arise between them:
hence comes a strange reduplication of experience. It is
a kind of proportion sum. Love is, in saeculo, as God is,
in eternity. Corais affectio is to the acts of love as charity
is to good works. But of course there is for Andreas, in a
cool hour, no doubt as to which of the two worlds is the
real one, and in this he is typical of the Middle Ages.
When F,auenJ.ienst succeeds in fusing with religion, as in
Dante, unity is restored to the mind, and love can be
treated with a solemnity that is whole-hearted. But where
it is not so fused, it can never, under the shadow of its
tremendous rival, be more than a temporary truancy. It
may be solemn, but its solemnity is only for the moment.
It may be touching, but it never forgets that there are
sorrows and dangers before which those of love must be
~'--~<..
I The double Itmdard ofvalue., with a worldlyp!lequaUy dirtinc:t from mllte
'woridlioetl' on the one hand,andfrom beaveolygood on tbeother, whiebuindeed
the on,mof the idea ofthegmtlnruut, .urvived,ofeowu,aJmOlt to our own tWeI.
In Wyatt', Dl!jnrce ('I pnt I do not profell ch:utity, but yet I lilt not abomination')
it bat almOIt the air of tbe cli.tioetion between IIll H0110urI School and a
P.. Sebool. It il cigni1icant that the final abIUldonment of the double ttandard
in Victorian. timel (witb the contequent attempt to include the whole of morality
in the eharac:ter ofthe,p!lSlntIlIll)Wat the prelude to tbegmtkmllli. ditappearanee
.. IIll ideal; the very lWIIe being 11OW, I WldentllJld, itself ungentee1 and given
over to ironical u-. 811tJS ptltirtn' 1II111U1.
COURTLY LOVE +3
ready, when the moment comes, to give way. Even Ovid
had furnished them with a model by writing a Renuaium
Amo,.is to set against the A,s AmatMia:1
they had added
reasons of their own £or~ fo~owing the precedent. The
authors are all going to~epe';it when the book is over. The
Chaplain's palinode does not stand alone. In the last
stanzas of the book of Troi1u8,~in the harsher recantation
that closes the life and W6i£0fChaucer as a whole, in the
noble close of Malory, it is the 8a~"t JYe hear ~bc;ll~ ~",-'
dang; and the children, suddenly hushed and grave, anda
little frightened, trr>)>J3ack to their master.
lIt i. perhaPI worth 110tiqg that in one manuscript the rubrie of Andrea'"
Third Book rUDI ItJC'pitlilnrrl1lUllii _tU"d~i amor,.(Trojel,p. 31
3n ••).
ADD.TlONAL Non to I. 8
In all queation. ofliteruy orilin and inftuenee the principle p~ ,,";piliii'
r t4 flIl __ recipi"tU mUlt be eonttantly remembered. I have en~
l1Ci tIIT
deavoured to point out above that -Ovid mitundentood' expIaina nothing till we
have aceounted for a coruriltent mituodentanding in a particular direction. For
the tame reatOD I have said 110tbing of .4nf1n4 I', aad otber plaeel in ancient
poetry, wbith are tnmetimetmentioned in ditc:uuionl of Courtly Love. The Itory
of Dido providet much material that CUI. be wed; lind wa' uted, in eourtlylove
poetry, afl6 Courtly Love bat come into enltl!Dc:e: but till tl.:m, it will be read
for what it i...... tragie and exemplary Itory oCu.cient love. To tbink otherwite ia
a. ifwe tbould c:aIl cLuaica1 t:fllIed.Y the eaute ofthe Romantie Movement beca_
Browning aad Swinburne, alter R01IW1tic: poetry bat ariIoen, can lilt daAical
tragedy for romantic: purpOtel.