In fact, the poet Geoffrey Chaucer refers to this in his poem "The Parliament of Fowls”, which features a gathering of birds to choose their mates:  "For this was on St. Valentine's Day, when every fowl cometh there to choose his mate."

 

To put us in the mood, we were first shown a striking and vivid image of a fifteenth century tapestry, now in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, of a young man holding out a red heart and offering it to a young lady, whose response could be best described as rather distant.   The remoteness in her response points us to a key aspect of the courtly love tradition:  it usually involves a young man being subservient to a lady who is above him in the social sphere and who tends to be aloof in her reactions to him.

 

The term "courtly love" was coined in 1883 by the scholar Gaston Paris to describe a literary and artistic phenomenon that appeared in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries and continued throughout the medieval period.   It was at first associated with the troubadours (sometimes called "jongleurs"), predominantly in the Occitan-speaking areas of France.  (One famous jongleur composer and singer was no less a personage than Duke William IX of Aquitaine, the grandfather of Eleanor of Aquitaine!)   The custom of singing these courtly songs, accompanied by instruments, spread throughout western Europe - and indeed beyond.    One particularly active area was the court of Marie of Champagne (the daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine by her first husband Louis VII of France).   The stories told of young men sighing, usually fruitlessly, over women of great beauty and position, who were generally unattainable, and   serving them in a kind of love-version of the feudal relationship between a lord and his knights.     Rules of appropriate behaviour crept in:  the young man had to show humility (including total obedience to his lady's slightest whim) and "courtesy" , since this always took place in "courts".   The amorous feelings were almost invariably adulterous, since the lady in question was usually married to someone else, and were only rarely consummated.  Lancelot and Guinevere managed to consummate their relationship, as did Tristan and Isolde, but more often than not the young man could only pine sadly.   

 

We were treated to some wonderful pictures of young men, usually knights, undertaking dangerous or humiliating tests - notably Lancelot crossing a bridge made of a huge sword (and receiving the inevitable cuts) or obliged to travel in a "cart of shame”, a dung cart.   As the story goes, his lady (Guinevere) then reprimanded him - not for travelling in the cart of shame but for hesitating even for a second before doing so!

 

Many other stories that are featured in the literature and art, in addition to those of Lancelot and Guinevere, belong to the Arthurian world, notably the story of Tristan and Isolde.   Beautiful images in that story include the lovers playing chess, and we were reminded that playing games, winning and losing, were often associated with seduction and love.   Particularly appealing, and amusing, were the various images of The Tryst by the Tree, where the lovers arrange to meet and Isolde's husband, King Mark, tries to catch out the guilty pair.

 

We were shown so many beautiful works of art that it is hard to select - including lovely ivory mirror cases, one showing young men attacking the Castle of Love (presided over by the god of love of course) and being bombarded with roses by the ladies in half-hearted attempt to ward them off!    Then there was the gorgeous Limoges casket:  in one of the images an instrument is  being played (so often a prelude to love) and the woman has put her girdle/sash around the man's neck , reminding us perhaps of the lady in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight  trying to seduce Gawain and persuade him to accept her girdle/sash.    Clearly from time-to-time seduction wasn't all one way traffic!  The casket had some very clear sexual symbolism in the sword and the keyhole, to make sure we couldn't miss the point.

 

No lecture on the courtly love tradition would be complete without some attention to the "Roman de la Rose", the famous allegorical poem by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, written in mediaeval French.     This was beautifully illustrated by images from a series of manuscripts.  The "hortus conclusus" (enclosed garden") was famously a metaphor for the virginity of Mary but found its place in the "Roman de la Rose" as the garden of the rose, symbol of the hard- to-obtain woman.   Eventually the dreamer in the story receives a staff with which he can pierce the fully opened rose....(For anyone interested in the Roman de la Rose, by the way, there is a version by Chaucer, written in relatively easy Middle English).

 

This was a thoroughly enjoyable and informative lecture.   I would have liked to hear more about the origins of the courtly love tradition, which seemed to emerge fairly suddenly with the Languedoc troubadours.   So often, of course, beautiful and often very young women were left in sole charge of huge castles if their lord was away - and this was particularly true of the period of the crusades. (The first crusade was from 1096-1099, which coincides remarkably closely with the emergence of the troubadours - and of course there were further crusades.)   During such long periods of the lord's absence, his lady was surrounded by large numbers of young men - younger knights, squires and pages- who were fizzing with hormones but had few outlets for their yearnings.   It is easy to understand how a beautiful high-status lady could become a focus of almost religious adoration.   The lady's position as feudal superior but also as the lord's wife put her impossibly beyond the reach of those young men.  It is also true, of course, that, because arranged marriages rather than love matches were the norm for the aristocracy, passionate but impossible attachments were almost inevitable.

 

Perhaps, in some ways at least, the rising middle classes and even the peasantry had an easier time in their love life than their aristocratic contemporaries!

 

Wendy Crozier