Courtly love

Courtly love was a medieval European literary conception of love that emphasized nobility and chivalry. Medieval literature is filled with examples of knights setting out on adventures and performing various deeds or services for ladies because of their "courtly love". This kind of love was originally a literary fiction created for the entertainment of the nobility, but as time passed, these ideas about love spread to popular culture and attracted a larger literate audience. In the High Middle Ages, a "game of love" developed around these ideas as a set of social practices. "Loving nobly" was considered to be an enriching and improving practice.
Courtly love began in the ducal and princely courts of Aquitaine, Provence, Champagne, ducal Burgundy and the Norman Kingdom of Sicily at the end of the eleventh century. In essence, courtly love was an experience between erotic desire and spiritual attainment, "a love at once illicit and morally elevating, passionate and disciplined, humiliating and exalting, human and transcendent". The topic was prominent with both musicians and poets, being frequently used by troubadours, trouvères and Minnesänger. The topic was also popular with major writers, including Dante, Petrarch and Geoffrey Chaucer.

Origin of term

Contemporary usage

The term "courtly love" appears in only one extant source: Provençal cortez amors in a late 12th-century poem by Peire d'Alvernhe.
It is associated with the Provençal term fin'amor which appears frequently in poetry, as well as its German translation hohe Minne. Provençal also uses the terms verai'amors, bon'amors.

Modern usage

The modern use of the term "courtly love" comes from Gaston Paris. He used the term amour courtois in a 1883 article discussing the relationship between Lancelot and Guinevere in Chrétien de Troyes's Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart. In his article, Paris outlined four principal characteristics of amour courtois:

The love is illegitimate, furtive.
The male lover is in an inferior position and the woman in an elevated one.
The man does quests, tests, or trials in the woman's name.
There is an art to it, it has rules, in the same vein as chivalry or courtesy.

Paris used it as a descriptive phrase, not a technical term, and used it interchangeably with the phrase amour chevaleresque. Nonetheless, other scholars began using it as a technical term after him.
In 1896, Lewis Freeman Mott applied the term "courtly love" to Dante Alighieri's love for Beatrice in La Vita Nuova. The two relationships are very different — Lancelot and Guinevere are secret adulterous lovers, while Dante and Beatrice had no actual romantic relationship and only met twice in their whole lives. Nonetheless, the manner in which the two men describe their devotion to and quasi-religious adoration of their ladies is similar.
In 1936, C. S. Lewis wrote The Allegory of Love which popularized the term "courtly love". He defined it as a "love of a highly specialized sort, whose characteristics may be enumerated as Humility, Courtesy, Adultery, and the Religion of Love".
In 1964, Moshe Lazar differentiated three separate categories within "courtly love".

Criticism

Scholars debate whether "courtly love" constitutes a coherent idea.
D. W. Robertson Jr. said, "the connotations of the term courtly love are so vague and flexible that its utility for purposes of definition has become questionable." John C. Moore called it "a term used for a number of different, in some cases contradictory, conceptions" and called it "a mischievous term which should be abandoned". Roger Boase admitted the term "has been subjected to a bewildering variety of uses and definitions", but nonetheless defended the concept of courtly love as real and useful.
E. Talbot Donaldson criticized its usage as a technical term as an anachronism or neologism.
Richard Trachsler says that "the concept of courtly literature is linked to the idea of the existence of courtly texts, texts produced and read by men and women sharing some kind of elaborate culture they all have in common". He argues that many of the texts that scholars claim to be courtly also include "uncourtly" texts, and argues that there is no clear way to determine "where courtliness ends and uncourtliness starts" because readers would enjoy texts which were supposed to be entirely courtly without realizing they were also enjoying texts which were uncourtly. This presents a clear problem in the understanding of courtliness.
Irving Singer comments on whether the concept is tenable, stating "I am convinced that the definition of courtly love formulated by Paris and Lewis is very misleading. But rather than eliminate the term from scholarly discourse, I think it is wiser merely to redefine the concept in a way that will accommodate the great diversity of attitudes toward love in the Middle Ages."
Singer summarizes a revised version of the concept as the following cluster of ideas—which often appear together, but are not necessarily present in any given author of the period:

History

The practice of courtly love developed in the castle life of four regions: Aquitaine, Provence, Champagne and ducal Burgundy, from around the time of the First Crusade. Eleanor of Aquitaine brought ideals of courtly love from Aquitaine first to the court of France, then to England. Her daughter Marie, Countess of Champagne brought courtly behavior to the Count of Champagne's court. Courtly love found expression in the lyric poems written by troubadours, such as William IX, Duke of Aquitaine, one of the first troubadour poets.
Poets adopted the terminology of feudalism, declaring themselves the vassal of the lady. The troubadour's model of the ideal lady was the wife of his employer or lord, a lady of higher status, usually the rich and powerful female head of the castle. When her husband was away on Crusade or elsewhere she dominated the household and cultural affairs; sometimes this was the case even when the husband was at home. The poet gave voice to the aspirations of the courtier class, for only those who were noble could engage in courtly love. This new kind of love saw nobility not based on wealth and family history, but on character and actions; such as devotion, piety, gallantry, thus appealing to poorer knights who saw an avenue for advancement.
By the late 12th century Andreas Capellanus' highly influential work De amore had codified the rules of courtly love. De amore lists such rules as:

"Marriage is no real excuse for not loving."
"He who is not jealous cannot love."
"No one can be bound by a double love."
"When made public love rarely endures."

Much of its structure and its sentiments derived from Ovid's Ars amatoria.

Andalusian and Islamic influence

One theory holds that courtly love in Southern France was influenced by Arabic poetry in Al-Andalus.
In contemporary Andalusian writing, Ṭawq al-Ḥamāmah by Ibn Hazm is a treatise on love which emphasizes restraint and chastity. Tarjumān al-Ashwāq by Ibn Arabi is a collection of love poetry. Outside of Al-Andalus, Kitab al-Zahra by Ibn Dawud and Risala fi'l-Ishq by Ibn Sina are roughly contemporary treaties on love. Ibn Arabi and Ibn Sina both weave together themes of sensual love with divine love.
According to Gustave E. von Grunebaum, notions of "love for love's sake" and "exaltation of the beloved lady" can be traced back to Arabic literature of the 9th and 10th centuries. The ennobling power of love is overtly discussed in Risala fi'l-Ishq.
According to an argument outlined by María Rosa Menocal in The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History, in 11th-century Spain, a group of wandering poets appeared who would go from court to court, and sometimes travel to Christian courts in southern France, a situation closely mirroring what would happen in southern France about a century later. Contacts between these Spanish poets and the French troubadours were frequent. The metrical forms used by the Spanish poets resembled those later used by the troubadours.

Analysis

The historic analysis of courtly love varies between different schools of historians. That sort of history which views the early Middle Ages dominated by a prudish and patriarchal theocracy views courtly love as a "humanist" reaction to the puritanical views of the Catholic Church. Scholars who endorse this view value courtly love for its exaltation of femininity as an ennobling, spiritual, and moral force, in contrast to the ironclad chauvinism of the first and second estates. The condemnation of courtly love in the beginning of the 13th century by the church as heretical, is seen by these scholars as the Church's attempt to put down this "sexual rebellion".
However, other scholars note that courtly love was certainly tied to the Church's effort to civilize the crude Germanic feudal codes in the late 11th century. It has also been suggested that the prevalence of arranged marriages required other outlets for the expression of more personal occurrences of romantic love, and thus it was not in reaction to the prudery or patriarchy of the Church but to the nuptial customs of the era that courtly love arose. In the Germanic cultural world, a special form of courtly love can be found, namely.
At times, the lady could be a princesse lointaine, a far-away princess, and some tales told of men who had fallen in love with women whom they had never seen, merely on hearing their perfection described, but normally she was not so distant. As the etiquette of courtly love became more complicated, the knight might wear the colors of his lady: where blue or black were sometimes the colors of faithfulness, green could be a sign of unfaithfulness. Salvation, previously found in the hands of the priesthood, now came from the hands of one's lady. In some cases, there were also women troubadours who expressed the same sentiment for men.