Texts in Context:
The Secret of the Rose
—Part II
By Gabriel Blanchard
Both the origin and the ultimate development of courtly love are to be found in far stranger places than we might predict.
Songs of Suleiman
Two weeks ago, we left off on the question of where the bizarre innovation of courtly love could possibly have come from. It was clean contrary to everything the High Middle Ages had inherited from Classical Antiquity, or indeed from the Early Middle Ages; it hardly seems like it can have been brought in by Christianity, which shows exceedingly little interest in romantic love before this.
About the closest thing we have to a theory is that the seeds of this phenomenon may have been sown in Spain (which was adjacent to the French regions of Aquitaine, Languedoc, and Provence in which the love-lyrics of the troubadours first appear), and may originate with Muslim poets of al-Andalus. If so, this would make courtly love a kind of opposite twin to Scholasticism—both European flowerings with roots in the Islamic Golden Age. The great Persian philosopher Avicenna wrote a book on the topic, the straightforwardly-named رسالة ف العشق [Risāla fi’l-‘Ishq] or Treatise on Love, which appears to have taken a similar line to Plato’s Symposium: Eros is a rung on the ladder of learning to adore the Beautiful, but a rung in the strict sense, i.e. something one must leave behind to attain the next rung up. Avicenna’s near contemporary, Ali ibn Hazm, a jurist and polymath from Córdoba, composed just one literary work, طوق الحمامة [Tawq al-Hamāmah], or The Ring and the Dove, recounting an unrequited love; this aligns with the earlier writings of Muhammad bin Dawud al-Zahiri,1 the ﻛِﺘَﺎﺏ الزهراء [Kitāb al-Zahra], which can mean either Book of the Flower or Book of Splendor, and which frequently praises lovers that practice chastity, exclusivity of affection,2 and secrecy. It is not a certainty that this is what provided the first impetus to courtly love, but if it was not, then it is to all appearances “without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life.”
The Romances
But enough academica. We know what our readers have really come here for; it’s the same thing patronized by Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine in her own right and queen consort first of France, then of England: the unforgettable tale of Melior, the daughter of the emperor of Rome and beloved of Guillaume of Palerne! … No? Then surely you want to know our thoughts on the most renowned of all stories of the Round Table, yes, that of Sir Erec and his bride Enide? … Really? It seems a little abrupt to get into them right away, but why not be a little unorthodox! Troilus and Criseyde can be our first— … No?
The quantity of Medieval love-stories, even restricting ourselves to those that are still extant, is enormous, and would remain enormous even if we cut either all the tragedies or all the comedies. We can, however, reasonably confine ourselves to just four exemplary entries from the Author Bank (spanning the High and Late Middle Ages, but the two periods were as one on the subject of courtly love): Marie de France, the Nibelungenlied, Dante, and Thomas Malory.
I had gone in summer at the king's word to explore
the coast of the kingdom towards the Pole; the roar
of the ocean beyond all coasts threatened on one hand;
on the other we saw the cliffs of Orkney stand.
Caves and hollows in the crags were filled with the scream
of seamews nesting and fleeting; the extreme theme3
of Logres4 rose in harsh cries and hungry storms,
and there, hewn in a cleft, were hideous huge forms. ...
When from the sea I came again to my stall
King Arthur between two queens sat in a grim hall,
Guinevere on his right, Morgause on his left;
I saw in her long eyes the humanized shapes of the cleft.
She sat the sister of Arthur, the wife of Lot,
four sons got by him, and one not.
I heard as she stirred the seamews scream again ...
Britain
Marie de France lived in the latter half of the twelfth century, and was the author of (among other works) a set of twelve love-poems known as the Lays. A handful of these afford us an interesting glimpse at early Arthurian literature, before the quest for the Holy Grail has been incorporated into the cycle,5 and many involve magical transformations. Lanval recounts a knight of that name being sought out by a fairy maiden to be her lover, on condition of absolute secrecy; Chevrefoil, or “Honeysuckle,” touches on the famous affair of Sir Tristan with his uncle’s wife, Iseult; along with some of the other lays, it shows a surprising tolerance for adultery—a standard feature of the Medieval courtly love tradition—at least if the canonical spouse has a cruel disposition. However, de France is equally ready to punish treacherous spouses, as occurs in Equitan and Bisclavret (the former involving a king plotting to murder his steward in order to marry his widow, the latter a werewolf who has been betrayed and trapped in lupine form by his wife). Several of the tales are tragic, but the poet was not above happy endings, sometimes happier endings than the Church would smile upon: The twelfth and last lay of the collection, Eliduc, relates the story of a married knight who falls in love with another woman, but whose wife, when she discovers the affair, reveals that she has long wanted to take the veil, and gives the lovers her blessing to wed!
Three hundred years later, with Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, we come to the “canonical” form of the Arthurian cycle. Courtly love, by now, has taken on a somewhat more settled form, at least in the context of the grim history of Logres; a new character was introduced in the thirteenth century:
He rode between the barley sheaves,
The sun came dazzling thro’ the leaves,
And flam’d upon the brazen greaves
…..Of bold Sir Lancelot.
A red cross knight, for ever kneel’d
To a lady in his shield,
That sparkled on the yellow field,
…..Beside remote Shalott.6
But by this time, the Grail has come into things, and with it, Christian morality. Not that druidic or classical pagan morality looked more kindly upon affairs between the queen consort and the prime minister; which, if without those exact titles, is what Guinevere and Lancelot were. There are happier loves in the cycle as a whole, like the stories of Gareth and Lyonesse or Erec and Enide; there are others still darker, like the parentage of Sir Mordred. But the failure and, in the end, mutual triple betrayal of Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere has become—alongside the, in most tellings, failed quest for the Grail—one of the two defining features of the doomed court of Logres.
Burgundy
Even the twilight of the Arthurian cycle hardly succeeds in being half as dark as the tale of the betrayal of Siegfried7 and the fall of the Nibelungs, the royal dynasty of the Kingdom of Burgundy. Penned around 1200, the Nibelungenlied8 seems to retain hazy memories of the ruin of the historical Burgundian foederati in the fading years of the West Roman Empire. But in the lied, everything becomes mixed up with personal treacheries between friends and siblings—Siegfried of Gunther, Gunther of Brunhild, Hagen of Siegfried, Kriemhild of Gunther and Hagen—and with the cursed treasure-hoard of the family. The Nibelungenlied is arguably a love-tragedy, but what it overwhelmingly is is a revenge-tragedy, more akin to the Oresteia than the Morte.
Florence
Britain is fallen; Burgundy, extinct. And what fresh disaster do we hold in store for late-thirteenth and early-fourteenth century Florence? None. With Dante, one of the founders of the dolce stil nuovo (the “sweet new style”), we come upon a thing unprecedented within the unprecedented tradition of courtly love: a serious attempt to fuse that tradition with Catholic morals and orthodoxy.
One element of courtly love on which we have spent little time was one of its internal debates. Was conjugal union with the beloved (as often as not, in defiance of one or both parties’ conjugal vows to others) the supreme expression or experience of love? or was the pinnacle of love simply for the lover to adore and serve the beloved lady? Dante gave the latter answer. There are tragic moments in his love of Beatrice—above all, for obvious reasons, her premature death (she was only twenty-five years old). But there are no cunning evasions of her husband or Dante’s wife in the Vita Nuova, and the Divine Comedy features such things only in hell. It is tempting to say that in Dante, courtly love and Christianity were wedded; on one level, that is true; and yet the marriage is not one many people have imitated, or even aspired to imitate. And it would not be true to say that our society has pursued Dante’s synthesis, for it has made marriage the expected goal of romantic love, whereas for all we know, the Florentine poet never even contemplated the idea of marrying Beatrice. He certainly never attempted to do so. To many of us today—what an anticlimax! But to the lover himself:
…..My heart from every other longing went
…..Completely free while I perused her face,
For the Eternal Joy, its radiance bent
…..Direct on Beatrice, and from her eyes
…..Reflected, held me in entire content.
She, with a smile that left my faculties
…..Quite vanquished, said to me: “Turn and give heed;
…..Not in my eyes alone is Paradise.”
—Paradiso XVIII.14-21 (Sayers-Reynolds translation)
1Ibn Dawud, 868-909; Avicenna, 980-1037; ibn Hazm, 994-1064 (all dates are approximate).
2It would be misleading, albeit only slightly so, to refer to this as “monogamy.” Then as now, romantic love sprang up without, before, and sometimes athwart the boundaries of matrimony.
3In Byzantine terminology (and Williams’ Arthurian verse), theme was synonymous with province.
4This is one of a small number of names by which Arthur’s kingdom is traditionally known. It is related to the medieval Welsh Lloegyr, a term for the southeastern “half” of England (along a line from the mouth of the Humber to that of the Severn, excluding Devonshire and Cornwall); in modern Welsh, this has become Lloegr, referring to England as a whole.
5Of the twelve lays, only Lanval is explicitly Arthurian, but Guigemar, Chevrefoil, and Eliduc all contain allusions to characters that came to be associated with the “matter of Britain.”
6Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Lady of Shalott III.2-9.
7Siegfried is the German form of the name, going with Gunther, Hagen, Etzel, Nibelung, Gibichung, Brunhild, and Kriemhild; in Norse tellings, although the characters are the same, the names become Sigurd, Gunnar, Högni, Atli, Niflungr, Gjúkingar, Brynhild, and (puzzlingly) Gudrun.
8Pronounced nē-bĕ-lüŋ-ĕn-lēd.
Gabriel Blanchard has worked for the Classic Learning Test since 2019, where he serves as staff writer and editor at large. He lives in Baltimore, MD, and is a proud uncle to seven nephews.
If you’re just joining us, this is our sixth post on the High Middle Ages, part of our broader Texts in Context series, offering background on the books and writers of the CLT Author Bank. You might also enjoy our series profiling the entries of the Bank individually, or our series discussing the concept and the many topics of “the Great Conversation,” handily indexed here. Thank you for reading the Journal.
Published on 27th April, 2025. Page image of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine depicted in an illuminated capital from a fourteenth-century French manuscript.