thumb|upright=1.2|[[God Speed (painting)|God Speed by Edmund Blair Leighton, 1900: a late Victorian view of a lady giving a favor to a knight about to go into battle|alt=]]
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, and . 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 in a late 12th-century poem by Peire d'Alvernhe.
It is associated with the Provençal term ("fine love") which appears frequently in poetry, as well as its German translation . Provençal also uses the terms , .
Modern usage
The modern use of the term "courtly love" comes from Gaston Paris. He used the term ("courtly love") in a 1883 article discussing the relationship between Lancelot and Guinevere in Chrétien de Troyes's Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart ( 1181). In his article, Paris outlined four principal characteristics of :
- The love is illegitimate, furtive (ie. adulterous).
- 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 . 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 (1294). 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: