Texts in Context:
The Secret of the Rose—Part I
By Gabriel Blanchard
"There flames my heart, there flames my thought ..."
The Forefathers of Romanticism
Having done some (minuscule!) justice to the Scholastic revolution in theology and philosophy, and to the orthodox and heretical forms of the apostolic poverty movement (as well as the response of the Church to heretical forms), we now turn to a transfiguration of literature in the High Middle Ages. This may have been the single most potent change in the entirety of the period, perhaps more than Scholasticism itself, and, while its influence has both dramatically changed and waned somewhat, it has never yet been eclipsed.
Like Catharism, this first flourished in the sunlit south of France—Aquitaine, Languedoc, and Provence. Like the Cathars, its sympathizers were often viewed as flouting the Catholic religion; sometimes the accusation was even correct. It was a movement whose name you may have heard: the troubadours.1 They fell under suspicion not of heresy, but of idolatry—and a truly silly variety of idolatry, for the objects of their worship were living women. Dorothy Sayers describes the cultus of courtly love in her brilliant introduction to one of the movement’s masterpieces, the Purgatorio of Dante Alighieri, as follows:
Courtly Love … was a devotion—part amorous and part worshipful—to a particular lady who in rank and culture was your acknowledged superior, and who was addressed normally as “madonna,” but frequently also, among those Provençal poets with whom the cult started, by the masculine title “midons2—my liege.” It postulated, therefore, a subservience and humility on the man’s part, which was extended to cover his general behavior to all ladies, though not by any means necessarily to all women.3 … The courtly convention, running counter as it did to ecclesiastical and civil sanctions, was always anomalous and felt to be so … And, with all its extravagance, the doctrine of Courtly Love is so far realistic that it assigns all the amorous fuss and to-do, all the tormented philosophy of love, to the male. He presents his pierced and burning heart on a plate, wreathed round with elegant devices: the lady (who has a pretty taste in such matters) considers it critically and either approves it or waves it away. It may be death to him, but to her it is a pastime.4
Something New Under the Sun
Naturally that is only a summary, albeit an excellent one. But what must be emphasized the most about courtly love is that, in the High Middle Ages, it was new. It is difficult to communicate just how momentous and even bizarre this revolution in sentiment was. Before the eleventh century, an individual who was at that moment in the throes of romantic passion might have upheld it as something profound and spiritual. Nobody else would; and really, even the lover-in-said-throes probably wouldn’t. Among other things, the notion of a man taking orders from a woman was, to Classical and Early Medieval minds alike, ludicrous to the point of disgust (if the woman and man in question were of similar class,5 that is—for a man of a lower class to take orders from a woman of a higher class was, or at any rate could be, natural and appropriate).
Et plus en gré son recéu
li biens dont l'en a mal éu.
More happiness it brings to gain
those blessings that have caused us pain.
Now, the Medievals delighted in basing themselves on Classical models. It so happened that in Cæsar‘s day, Ovid had written a satire, the Ars Amatoria,6 for the express purpose of mocking love and lovers.
Go early ere th’appointed hour to meet
The fair, and long await her in the street.
Through shouldering crowds on all her errands run,
Though graver business wait the while undone.
If she commands your presence on the way,
Home from the ball to lackey her, obey!
Or if from rural scenes she bids you, “Come!”
Drive if you can, if not, then walk, to Rome …
In the same book, as if to forestall people a millennium or two in the future saying Well, but what if he really meant it?, the poet also advises, “Don’t visit on her birthday; it costs too much.” As C. S. Lewis put it, “Ovid naturally introduces the god Amor [Cupid] with an affectation of religious awe—just as he would have introduced Bacchus if he had written an ironic Art of Getting Drunk.”7 Unlike some other ancient books, the Ars Amatoria survived in the Medieval period, and was highly accessible to any literate person, as Latin was still the pre-eminent cultural language. Whether the troubadours’ reading of this book was moved by ignorance or defiance cannot be known with certainty. Both explanations are possible; the present author thinks the latter far more credible, since there was cultural continuity with the ancients in Italy and southern France (and anyway, the Medievals were neither stupid nor humorless). Regardless, they took Ovid’s exquisite sarcasm and responded, as if in the style of a contemporary meme, Yes, do that. Written as an almost bullying satire, the Ars Amatoria was adopted as a formal handbook for chivalric “courts of love.”
L’Aurore de la Rose
The metaphor of the God of Love holding court among his poet-chevaliers was thoroughly elaborated. One of the most celebrated literary works of the Middle Ages, which laid foundations for practically all the rest of the period’s love-literature, from the Arthurian cycle to the Divine Comedy, was penned in the thirteenth century by a poet from northern France, Guillaume (or William) of Lorris. It was titled The Romance of the Rose. He recounts his own first sighting of “the God of Love,”8
……………whose mighty hand
Dealeth to lovers weal or woe
As seemeth good to him; alow
He casteth pride, and oft-time makes
High-minded men for ladies’ sakes
Right humble, and proud dames to bow
With meekness ’neath his yoke …
And take note: This is not the Christian deity. It is Amor, Cupid—by way of a literary affectation, to be sure, not a serious revival of the pagan worship of the son of Venus; but the Church was not always easy in her mind about the whole business (and even this was the least of her reasons why). To him, the lover must swear fealty—and fealty in its stricter form, homage.
“Good friend,” quoth he, “full oft my fate
Hath been false homage to receive
From men who swear but to deceive.
Base rebels have, with many a wile,
My courtesy repaid by guile
And villain strife, but they shall know
My wrath if ever chance should throw
Them ’neath my hand; they dear shall buy
The fruits of vile hypocrisy.
But I such fond affection feel
For thee, that surely would I seal
Thy heart to mine, and hold it fast …”
To which the lover says:
“This heart is yours that once was mine,
And now is bound, without repine,
To follow your command. Therein
You have a garrison will win
The victory ’gainst all comers. But
If thou hast doubt thereof, then shut
And lock it close, and guard the key.”
Even now, all of this is—while extravagantly Medieval—recognizable and resonant to us. It would have been merely baffling to the likes of Aristotle, who grudgingly admitted that the love between man and wife can sometimes rise to the stature of real friendship (always otherwise presumed to be between men). Nor was this a specially Greek blind spot; much the same would go for Roman intellects like Cicero, who, though he doted on his daughter, concluded both his marriages in divorce. And although the New Testament is not concerned to disparage romantic love, no trace of veneration for it can be found in there, either. So where on earth did it come from?
Naturally, we are not so ingenuous as to answer that question yet. That must wait for Part II.
1In northern France and, slightly later, in Germany, they were called trouvères and Minnesänger.
2Pronounced mĭ-dûn. This may be a contraction of meus dominus, “my lord.”
3This sentence may confused some readers: In American English, “ladies” and “women” have long functioned as synonyms (save that “lady” in direct address has so long been used sarcastically, it is now presumably rude). In other and older dialects, “lady” specifically denoted a noblewoman, the feminine counterpart of a lord—in fact, the two words have a half-shared etymology: lady comes from the Anglo-Saxon ᚻᛚᚫᚠᛞᛁᚷᛖ [hlæfdige], “bread-kneader,” and lord from ᚻᛚᚫᚠᚹᛠᚱᛞ [hlæfweard], “bread-guardian” (ᚻᛚᚫᚠ [hlæf] “bread” came down to us with far less change, as loaf).
4Sayers goes on: “[W]hereas there has been from time immemorial an Enigma of Woman, there is no corresponding Enigma of Man. … Lovers, husbands, children, households—these are major feminine preoccupations: but not love. It is the male who looks upon amorous adventure as an end in itself, and dignifies it with a metaphysic. … If we search the pages of serious literature for the woman-made male counterparts of Helen and Cleopatra, Dido and Delilah, … all the devouring women who have pursued their devastating way through a shambles of broken hearts and broken lives, we shall find but a brief list, almost beginning and ending with the comparatively harmless figure of Mr. Edward Fairfax Rochester.”
5This may strike us as shockingly crass. However, it is worth adding that in the Medieval mind, class was not determined by income (as it is to most capitalists), nor by a person’s relationship to the means of production (as in Marxist and other socialistic theories). Class, or estate, was an essential facet of society’s function. The estates were determined mainly by birth, with a few added nuances; a three-estate system of clergy, nobility, and commoners was typical, though not universal (e.g., the English system had simply “lords,” temporal and spiritual, and “commons,” reflected in Parliament today). But all estates were held to do strictly necessary work. Meddling with them was accordingly seen as not merely insolent, but violently antisocial. A family might gradually advance in its fortunes over generations, but the only estate in which an individual could significantly advance in rank in a single lifetime was the Church.
6It is not hard to translate the words of this title, but it is difficult to convey their total feel effectively in English. Amātōria means “the business of an amātor [i.e., a lover]” or “things concerned with being an amātor“—no great difficulty there. But ars, conventionally rendered “art,” has very different connotations from its English descendant; “craft” or “skill” are better translations, with secondary meanings running to “trade,” “employment,” “industry.” This is due to another dramatic cultural shift, which we owe not to the troubadours but to the Romantics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; this is discussed in our Great Conversation essay on art.
7Both this quote and the two translations of Ovid come from the first chapter of Professor Lewis’s The Allegory of Love (pp. 6-7 of the sixth printing of the Galaxy Books edition from 1963), published in 1936.
8All quotations from the Roman come from Frederick Ellis’s 1900 translation, available on Wikisource.
Gabriel Blanchard is a freelance author and CLT’s editor at large. He lives in Baltimore, MD.
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Published on 14th April, 2025. Page image of an illumination from a medieval manuscript of the Roman de la Rose, showing Amor locking the lover’s heart. Today’s author thumbnail comes from one of Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for an 1893 edition of Le Morte d’Arthur, captioned “How King Marke and Sir Dinadan heard Sir Palomides making great sarrow and mourning for La Beale Isoude“: Beale Isoude, or Iseult the Fair, was the wife of King Mark of Cornwall, a contemporary of Arthur’s, while Dinadan and Palomides were knights of the Round Table; the figure in the thumbnail is Palomides. The quotation at the heading of the post (“There flames my heart, there flames my thought”) is put in the mouth of Palomides by Charles Williams in his poem “The Coming of Palomides” in the volume Taliessin Through Logres—Palomides’ arrival called for description because he traditionally appears as a Saracen who came north to see the splendor of Arthur’s court.