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For all the argument within medieval Christianity about the extent to which human beings could love without divine grace, or about the scope of the command to love one’s neighbour, or about the nature of love within marriage, or about the value of desire for earthly goods, certain things were not in dispute. One of them was that genuine love for another human being is necessarily love for the sake of God and experienced as such; another was that adulterous desire, never mind consummation, is taboo.

It therefore seems scarcely conceivable that there could be a corner of medieval Europe where love between Christian men and women was celebrated in an utterly different spirit: as a pageant of refined and often adulterous passion, devoted to its own earthly flourishing even when its subject also praises and fears God; passion which isn’t experienced as dependent on God if it is to issue in genuine love, or as directed ultimately at God; passion which, precisely at its purest, can be seen as incompatible with marriage; passion which is intensely serious about itself yet can also be ironic, playful and even bawdy; passion which is taken to rejuvenate a suitor and perfect his virtue, provided he serves his mistress with appropriate devotion and patience, courtesy and proportion.

Yet that is what happened in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Provence and more widely in the vast region of southern France, including the Pyrenees and northern Spain, known in modern times as ‘Occitania’. The troubadours of the region wrote and set to music numerous poems in praise of fin’ amor, or, literally, ‘refined love’ – widely regarded since the late nineteenth century as the first flowering of ‘courtly love’.1 Their greatness is not that they invented love as

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Women as ideals love and the troubadours

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passion – as many, like Nietzsche,2 think – for this quite obviously existed and was celebrated before: we have seen it, for example, in love for God from the Hebrews to Augustine, especially when expressed as the love of a bride for her groom; in the Song of Songs; and in the friendship of Jonathan and David. Indeed, passionate love for the Virgin Mary flowers at the same time as the troubadours pay homage to their married mistresses – and so is hardly their preserve.3 Nor, of course, were they the first to see love as a school in virtue, a way for the lover to strive for ethical perfection – for Plato and Aristotle had already articulated such thoughts in great detail. Instead, their radical innovation is to institute a cult of love for an earthly woman, through which her suitor (and sometimes she too) can attain to a nobility, freshness, and above all joy that are available in no other way.4

ADULTEROUS DESIRE

Like every great and innovative sensibility, fin’ amor is tremendously complex. Some troubadours, such as the first of whom we know, Guilhem de Peitieu5

(1071–1126), seem to celebrate not merely adulterous desire but also sexual consummation: ‘God let me live long enough to get my hands under her cloak!’,6 Guilhem sings, in a style pilloried by some later troubadours as crude and uncourtly. He can be torn between his different loves, though his anguish is seldom unmixed with play: ‘Knights, give me counsel in a problem!/ . . . I don’t know at all with which one I should stay, with Lady Agnes or with Lady Arsen.’7

His style is magnificently high-spirited, whether he is praising love’s enhance- ment of health and life, bemoaning his amorous failures or mocking a lady whose professed expectations of courtliness in a suitor won’t stop her settling for whatever man she can get:

I never saw a lady of such great faith who, if one refuses her plea or her entreaty, excluded from true valour, does not make her peace with baseness.

If for her you set good company at high price, she provides herself with what she finds at hand; if she cannot have a horse, she’ll buy a hack.8

Other troubadours, especially after Guilhem and his generation, repudiate adul- terous acts on ethical grounds (though some might do so because they are socially

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too far beneath their ladies to hope for sexual intimacy).9 One of these is Marcabru (active 1130–1149), thought to have been a Gascon clerk, who insists that love cannot be a school for virtue if it isn’t monogamous and rails against the sexual licence of courtly men and women. At times he sounds like a voice from Scripture,10

chiding human folly and immorality; and yet, like his fellow troubadours, his voice is predominantly secular. The wages of vice lie less in divine punishment than in human degradation: adultery, Marcabru declares, pollutes the noble bloodline with degenerate offspring.11 Wrong love – and Marcabru recognises that no area of life is more littered with false coinage – results in decadence: a decadence that is not a merely an ethical ‘Fall’, but a social and biological corruption.

Yet others, like Bernart Marti, are less clear either way about adultery – but insist that a married lady should confine herself to one lover: ‘A lady is perfid- ious towards her lover if she feeds three men with her love . . . I allow her one courtly, worthy friend as well as her husband’.12

Not that love within marriage was regarded as impossible. But marriage tended not to embody the love celebrated by the troubadours: the sort that, whether or not sexually consummated, purifies and rejuvenates the lover through the practice of the virtues of fin’ amor. It is said that in a celebrated judgement of 1174 a Court of Love under the Countess of Champagne clearly distinguished between the affection that belongs to marriage and the superior possibilities for love that are available outside it:

We declare and hold as firmly established that love cannot exert its powers between two people who are married to each other. For lovers give each other everything freely, under no compulsion or necessity, but married people are in duty bound to give in to each other’s desires and deny themselves to each other in nothing.13

The troubadours who espoused these views weren’t studs strumming their lutes below innocent girls’ balconies. Nor were they dandies like the inarticulate soldier, Christian, who wooed Roxane with verses supplied by Cyrano de Bergerac. They were skilled court poets and often, like Guilhem de Peitieu, aris- tocrats themselves, though a few were also of merchant or even peasant birth. Writing in a language called lenga d’Oc, more commonly known as Provençal or Occitan, they invented a way of loving suffused with the ideals of erotic delight, grace, proportion, play and service.

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122 L O V E

WOMAN AS VIRTUE-INSPIRING IDEAL

Apart from sanctifying adulterous desire, a second revolution of fin’ amor strikes us straightaway: a woman is now worshipped as a privileged repository of virtue, and as inspiring in her suitor an ennobling and virtue-giving love.14 In effect, if not self-consciously, the troubadours challenge a centuries-old view of woman as temptress who leads men to sin, on the model of Eve and Adam: of woman as the path of wickedness and the devil’s gateway.

The extraordinary reversal of roles, in which even a supremely powerful feudal lord subordinates himself to a lady who by all the social and political authority of the times is vastly his inferior, is perfectly illustrated by Guilhem’s verse. As Duke of Aquitaine and Count of Poitiers (and a direct ancestor of King Richard the Lionheart of England), Guilhem was right at the top of the hierarchy. Yet here he is speaking of himself – a ruler of vast territories – as love’s supplicant:

No man will ever be gracious to love unless he is submissive to it, and unless he is humble to strangers and those near by, and obedient to all those dwelling within its bounds.15

A later troubadour, Bernart de Ventadorn (c. 1147–1170), sings in similar terms:

I love and can fear nothing more than her, and nothing would ever be hardship for me, provided only it come to please my lady . . .16

At the same time, Bernart laments that a woman can also betray and be base; that she can falsely accuse the virtuous suitor and fall at the feet of the wealthy one. Indeed he might venerate and scorn her in the same poem.17 Argument, reproach and frustration are often found in his verse; and just as the Hebrew prophets might argue with God, so there is no reason to suppose that reproach is incompatible, indeed doesn’t go together, with veneration. In any event, for Bernart the joys that the lady inspires surpass all others:

When the fresh grass and the leaf appear, and the flower blossoms on the bough, and the nightingale raises high and clear its voice and pours out its song,

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joy have I for it, and joy for the flower, and joy for myself and for my lady yet more: . . . [for] that is joy which all other joys overwhelms.18

Nor do Guilhem and Bernart leave us in any doubt about the stakes of winning – or forfeiting – a lady’s acceptance:

For joy of her a sick man can be cured, and from her anger a healthy man can die, and a wise man go mad, and a handsome man lose his good looks, and the most courtly one become a boor, and the totally boorish one turn courtly.19

Guilhem de Peitieu

Since with my lady neither prayer nor mercy, nor the right that I have can avail me, and it comes not to please her that I love her, I’ll never more tell her so . . . she has caused my death and by death I answer her and go away . . . into exile, I know not where.20

Bernart de Ventadorn

Thus a lady’s decision to recognise and accept her suitor’s love – or not to do so – is experienced by him as a matter of life and death, if not physical then spiritual and moral. If she withholds her recognition he will undergo a living death. And if she grants it he will be rejuvenated in body and spirit, and even a boor will somehow become refined.

It is by no means clear, though, that a lady’s acceptance involves genuine reciprocation. Sometimes it seems to, as when Bernart de Ventadorn says ‘In accord and in assent is the love of two noble lovers’.21 But for Bernart the lady’s acceptance might also be signalled merely by some ‘honour and good’22 that she is pleased to bestow upon her suitor – a response that seems to fall short of anything like full requital.

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Even if adulterous desire is fundamental to the affective structure of fin’ amor, the real end of the troubadours, especially after the first generation repre- sented by Guilhem, is not sexual possession. Rather, it is the ethical and spiri- tual enrichment of the suitor, and perhaps of both parties.23 With or without requital, the very act of loving his lady with courtesy, service and measure, benefits him:

Each day I improve and grow more pure, for I serve and worship the most noble [lady] in the world – this I can tell you openly. Hers I am from head right down to foot . . .24

Arnaut Daniel (active 1180–1200)

Elsewhere Arnaut says that in all his travels and in all the women he has encountered ‘I find not thus in one person alone all such qualities, for in her God chose to display and establish them fast.’25 To love such a woman is an apprenticeship in virtue and the source of all good deeds:

Noble and true and more constant than is my wont am I towards love for my Fair Delight. . . . For this I love nobly, that by loving I am enhanced. . . . Love causes all good, seemly deeds to be done, and bestows those qualities which pertain to merit. Thus love is a school of valour, for no man is so stupid but, provided he love, love guides him to valorous port.26

Guiraut Riquier (1254–1292)

Love as the source of good deeds; as a schooling in virtue; as the path to purity; as seeking out a loved object that instantiates divine qualities: here again the long arm of Plato (extended largely through Neoplatonism) is unmistake- able. In many of the later courtly poems the lady personally embodies the perfection sought by the highest love. In other words, she exhibits in one person the goodness or beauty that is to be found, though in lesser ways, in anything or anyone we could call good or beautiful – and that inspires its lover to become virtuous and to give birth to great deeds and works. For these troubadours, just

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as for Plato’s Diotima, movement towards perfection is the supreme aim of love and central to a flourishing life. They sing of a love whose eroticism has nothing to do with physical reproduction and everything to do with a search for beauty that is also a search for moral goodness.

All of which is why fin’ amor might not be finally fulfillable. Not because lovers are riveted to the search for obstacles and suffering for their own sake, as Denis de Rougemont insists in his influential study of Western love;27 rather because spiritual enrichment and the perfection of virtue have no end point where they are fully attained. Progress is its own reward – and, as troubadours like Arnaut Daniel make plain, the cause of infinite happiness. Der Weg ist das Ziel: the path is the goal.

FIDELITY AND JEALOUSY

But one can’t in practice be absorbed in more than one beloved at a time. Nor can one easily think of more than one lady as embodying the essence of beauty or virtue. And so a golden rule of courtly love is that a suitor may not cheat on his lady – even if he does on his wife. He might be married and have lovers, but in its very structure fin’ amor is serially monogamous.

This might mean leading a double life; yet, being clearly out in the open, it is hardly a furtive one. And nobody lived it more flamboyantly than Guilhem de Peitieu. He venerated his lady as passionately as any troubadour; yet he was also a prodigious seducer, according to a thirteenth-century biographer:

The count of Poitou was one of the most courtly men in the world as well as one of the greatest deceivers of ladies, and a fine knight in deeds of arms, and generous in wooing; and he knew well how to compose and sing. And he trav- elled for a long time throughout the world in order to deceive ladies . . .28

Guilhem’s reported double life is matched, indeed outshone, by his complex lyrical style. On the one hand, he evinces the idealising, erudite, and subtle passion of fin’ amor. On the other hand, he is brutal, impatient, and deceitful. He yearns to worship women, and also to conquer them (not that these urges are inconsistent). He enjoys desire to the full and yet also deems it to be vain. His moods can be playful, satirising and lampooning; yet they are also intensely serious – and, behind the fun, seem threaded with suffering. It is hard to know

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exactly where one is with him, as if he has no ‘true’ face or, differently (but no more adequately) put, as if all is mask.

So too, but in a very different style, with Arnaut Daniel. On the one hand, he wants to serve his lady and become more virtuous. On the other hand, he wants to be in her bedroom – which, he is clear, is no Platonic nook: ‘Would I were hers in body, not in soul!/ and that she let me, secretly, into her bedroom!’29 Like Guilhem, but less bawdily, he embodies the joyful ‘immoralism’ of the Ovid of The Art of Love – which preaches thorough delight in sensual pursuits, whether in the chase or the quarry. And, again like Guilhem, but now much more overtly, we see traces of the idealism of Plato and Christianity, which seeks a high-minded transcendence of physical desire. In the character of his verse these (in many ways unnecessarily) warring traditions in the history of Western love are allowed to harmonise fruitfully. As if in the bedroom love’s virtue finds its confirmation and reward.

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One emotion that fin’ amor did need to regulate was jealousy. Even when its eroticism is largely spiritualised or its ends are primarily ethical, jealousy is bound to be on the cards. And, again, its position is fairly clear: husbands are not allowed to be jealous of rivals; suitors are. Indeed, a suitor’s jealousy is admirable. It reflects his uncompromising devotion to his lady. And it fosters a love that makes both parties finer.30

Whereas a husband’s jealousy has a crude motive: possessiveness. Worse, it is an implicit attack on courtly behaviour. Here is the troubadour Uc de Mataplana urging his colleague, Raimon de Miraval, to overcome jealousy of his wife’s suitors for the sake of upholding fin’ amor:

Let him not be worried about her, Nor grieved if his dwelling is frequented by courtly wooers, For in this way he will be pleasing to us who are courtly And repulsive to those who are jealous.31

Not surprisingly, the sort of jealousy we encounter least in troubadour poetry is that of suitors towards their ladies. The lady, elevated on her pedestal of virtue, is implicitly trusted to remain constant to her lover; and, if she strays a little, he, as her vassal in love, is hardly in a position to chide her – quite apart from the fact that her life is usually too private to be observed. Even when Guilhem de Peitieu

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fantasises about a lady he has never met and whose life is entirely unknown to him, he claims to be confident of her fidelity – unless, that is, she finds herself in the company of the feckless northern French (neighbours whom southerners had always regarded with the highest suspicion):

I have a lady love, I know not who she is, For I never saw her, by my faith; Nor did she do anything to please or vex me, Nor do I worry about this, For there was never any Norman or Frenchman in my dwelling.32

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The passionate love celebrated by the troubadours seeks and is steeped in ‘jois’: intense joy that heals suffering and self-doubt; the delight in life and its rejuve- nation that is to be found through love for a lady.33 As Peire Vidal says, ‘in her joy is born and has its beginning’.34 In jois, as Bernart de Ventadorn tells us, a noble person has his dwelling:

Any man is indeed of base life who has not his dwelling with joy, and who directs not towards love his heart and his desiring, since all that is, gives itself up to joy, and rings and is full of song: meadows and parklands and orchards, heathlands and plains and woods.35

For all their praise of jois, however, in our own day the troubadours’ veneration of their ladies has sometimes been viewed as expressing a masochistic fantasy enacted by men longing to submit to what Goethe mysteriously called ‘the eternal feminine’ – indeed to make an interminable ordeal of their submission. Thus the sweet torture of this ordeal is heightened by picturing a remote lady who is more an impersonal archetype than a real human being. The adulterous desire that the troubadours praise but seldom consummate is, on this view, a way of intensifying their ardour – to the satisfaction of which they then generate one obstacle after another, as if fulfilment is the last thing they want. And the idealised

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lady of fin’ amor is (like most idols) constructed narcissistically by the worshipper for his own delectation, so denying her actual nature – as well as preserving male dominance after all by making the worshipped lady merely a prop in his ritual of self-punishment. Seen in such terms, courtly love is a prime instance of how love’s very nature is to crave unreachable ideals and thus its own frustration.36

But even if this masochistic-narcissistic picture is useful in understanding why, or one reason why, human beings might delight in submitting to an idealised object of desire, pictured as removed from our grasp by numberless obstacles, it will apply to any such structure of love, including one where the ideal object is in heaven. In other words it will fail to explain what is peculiar to courtly love: the lady (rather than God or absolute beauty or any other ultimate reality) as the ideal; the sanctification of earthly and sometimes adulterous desire (rather than exclusively of desire for God); the celebration of joy in worldly goods.

Indeed, if unfulfilment is crucial to love’s development, this is not because love is a masochistic drive that craves obstacles to its own flourishing or delights in its own unhappiness; nor because it feels genuine only if endangered. Rather it is because unfulfilment keeps love focused on cultivating those dispositions that are essential to its success: the ‘courtly’ dispositions of service and courtesy, patience and proportion. Then love will be a nobility of the heart that rejuve- nates its practitioners with the vitality of jois, whether they suffer or not, and whether they win their beloveds or lose them.37

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