1. I thank Will Crooke for his insightful suggestions and Jason Jacobs for his editorial
assistance. This research was supported by faculty research funds granted by the University of
California, Santa Cruz.
2. See Peggy McCracken, The Romance of Adultery: Queenship and Sexual
Transgression in Old French Literature (Philadelphia, 1998).
3. Henry I is famous for his huge brood of illegitimate children, including Robert, Earl of
Gloucester, one of the dedicatees of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae.
What was odd, in fact, was not taking a mistress. At the end of the twelfth century, Flemish
chronicler Gislebert of Mons described Count Baldwin IX as uxorious for his singular devotion to
his wife. "At Mons and Valenciennces," as Georges Duby puts it, "people laughed about this
stripling who, by getting married, had joined the ranks of the seniores and who, right from
the start, should have behaved like a senior; people laughed at him because he had
start of page 49
respected his
wife's wish to remain chaste, because he had not taken her by force; above all, people laughed at
him because he did not transfer his desire elsewhere, because--the text which I am using stresses
this--he was content with her alone.' In other words, he was an eccentric, a ridiculous man"
("What Do We Know About Love in Twelfth-Century France?" Love and Marriage in the
Middle Ages, trans. Jane Dunnett [Chicago, 1994], p. 31). This is a nice bit of irony since his
wife Marie was the daughter of Countess Marie de Champagne, at whose "command"
Chrëtien de Troyes had composed the adulterous tale of Lancelot and Guenevere.
4. Les Lais de Marie de France, ed. Jean Rychner, Classiques français
du moyen age 93 (Paris, 1983). English translation based on The Lais of Marie de
France, trans. Robert Hanning and Joan Ferrante (Durham, 1978). Subsequent references to
these texts are given by line number in parentheses.
5. Pauline L'Hermite-Leclerq, "The Feudal Order," Silences of the Middle Ages,
vol. 2 of A History of Women, ed. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, trans. Arthur Goldhammer
(Cambridge, 1992), p. 226. Occasionally, when a man married a woman of higher rank, his
dominance might be challenged: one thinks of William the Conqueror's daughter Adele of Blois,
who shamed her husband Count Stephen into returning to the First Crusade after he had deserted
the siege of Antioch, or Mathilda Empress, protesting the disparagement of her marriage to Count
Geoffrey of Anjou.
6. The term "amour courtois," however, is a nineteenth-century invention, coined by
Gaston Paris in two articles on Chrëtien de Troyes's Le Chevalier de la Charrete:
"Etudes sur les romans de la table ronde," Romania 10 (1881), 465-96 and "Etudes sur les
romans de la table ronde: Lancelot du Lac," Romania 12 (1883), 459-534. See
also David Hult, "Gaston Paris and the Invention of Courtly Love," Medievalism and the
Modernist Temper, ed. R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols (Baltimore, 1996), pp.
192-224, and R. Howard Bloch, "Mieux Vaut Tard que Jamais," Representations 36
(1991),
64-86.
7. Georges Duby, "Courtly Love" in Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages, p.
63.
8. "Courtly love was a game, an educational game. It was the exact counterpart of the
tournament. As at the tournament . . . the man of noble birth was risking his life and endangering
his body . . . in the hope of improving himself, of enhancing his worth, his price, and also of
taking, taking his pleasure, capturing his adversary after breaking down her defenses, unseating
her, knocking her down and toppling her" (Duby, "Courtly Love," p. 57). On courtly love as a
means of limiting women's power, see R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the
Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago, 1991).
9. Duby, "Courtly Love," pp. 61-2 and 63.
10. Charmingly fictionalized by Amy Kelly as Chap. 8, "The Countess and the Poet," in
her Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings (Cambridge, 1950).
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11. Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Lewis
Thorpe (Harmondsworth, 1966), pp. 205-08.
12. Note, for example, a charter complacently dated "the year when Philip took to wife
Bertrade, wife of Fouque, count of Anjou" (Georges Duby, The Knight, the Lady, and the
Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France, trans. Barbara Bray [New
York, 1983], p. 8). Louis Halphen calls Fulk "un homme sans prestige, dont la conduite
privée fut un objet de scandale." His first wife, daughter of Lancelin de Beaugency, died;
he then married and repudiated Ermengarde de Bourbon, Orengarde de Chatelaillon, and the
daughter of Gautier I of Brienne. Bertrade, his fifth wife, ran away with Philip in 1092 (Halphen,
Le Comté d'Anjou au XIe siècle [Paris, 1906], pp. 169-70).
13. Urban II excommunicated the king at the Council of Clermont (1095), confirming the
excommunication pronounced the previous year by papal legate Hughes of Die, the Archbishop of
Lyons. In a sense, Henry of Anjou's 1152 marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine without the
permission of her ex-husband and their common overlord Louis VII symbolically redressed the
slight that Louis's grandfather Philip had inflicted on Henry's great-grandfather, Fulk le
Réchin.
14. Duby, The Knight, the Lady, pp. 5-6.
15. Henry II of England, the king sometimes identified as the "noble reis" to whom
Marie dedicates her Lais (Prologue, l. 43), relied on seneschals to help him govern his
far-flung empire. In Normandy, Poitou, and Brittany, the office survived Henry's decentralization
of power to his sons, and it remained strong in his patrimony of Anjou. See John W. Baldwin,
The Government of Philip Augustus: Foundations of French Royal Power in the Middle
Ages (Berkeley, 1986), p. 233.
16. Had she read her Andreas Capellanus, she could have borrowed from the script of the
woman of simple nobility importuned by a man of higher nobility (Book I, Part IV, Dialogue 7)
and protested that his extravagant praise of her detracted from the courtesy he ought to show
other women "more worthy of the honor," making him seem less worthy; similarly, any special
favor she might show him would be "to the disadvantage of others who have as much desire to
serve [her] as [he has], or perhaps even more" (Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly
Love, trans. John Jay Parry [1941; rpt. New York, 1969], pp. 95-96).
17. Of all Marie's Lais, Equitan makes the heaviest use of direct discourse,
particularly in the "four long tirades" (of which this is the second) spaced throughout the text
(Jeanne Wathelet-Willem, "Equitan dans l'oeuvre de Marie de France," Moyen
Age 69 [1963], 340.
18. The line which resolves the second couplet, however, falls with a thudding finality:
"Then died of it in the end" "Puis en mururent e finirent" (184).
19. After his only legitimate son drowned in the White Ship disaster in 1120,
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Henry I of
England, a widower, quickly took a young wife in a futile attempt to produce a new heir. Though
he subsequently designated his daughter Mathilda as his successor, at his death in 1135 the throne
was seized by his nephew, Mathilda's cousin, Stephen of Blois. Note too that Louis VII of France
married three times before finally fathering a son; that son, Philip Augustus, also married three
times and endured a twenty-year battle with the church in his pursuit of Capetian marital politics.
On literary representations of genealogical reproduction as the central function of the feudal
nobility, see Sharon Kinoshita, "Heldris de Cornuälle's Roman de Silence and the
Feudal Politics of Lineage," PMLA 110 (1995), 406.
20. The motif of the lord who discomfits his vassals by refusing to take a wife recurs in
Marie de France's Fresne. See also Jean Renart's early thirteenth-century Le Roman de
la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole, in which the German emperor Conrad, seduced by fictional
representations of the courtly ideal, selects as his queen the sister of his humbly-born vassal
(Le Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole, ed. Félix Lecoy, Classiques
français du moyen age 91 [Paris, 1979]).
21. On literary representations of bathing, see Danielle Régnier-Bohler,
"Imagining the Self: Exploring Literature," A History of Private Life II. Revelations of the
Medieval World, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 363-66. On moralists'
suspicion towards bathing, see Georges Duby, "The Emergence of the Individual. Solitude:
Eleventh to Thirteenth Centuries" in A History of Private Life II, p. 525. Compare
Mélusine, Jean d'Arras's late fourteenth-century genealogical romance of the house of
Lusignan, in which the bathhouse also plays a key role.
22. Even though killing someone in bed (that is, without proper warning) normally
counted as murder. According to the late thirteenth-century jurist Philippe de Beaumanoir, the
fact of being alone in a private place established criminal guilt. The husband needed only raise
public cry in order that the deed be known. See R. Howard Bloch, Medieval French
Literature and Law (Berkeley, 1977), pp. 54-6.
23. In the Middle Ages, the punishment of being boiled alive (in water, oil, or pitch) was
particularly associated with counterfeiters who, like illicit lovers (Jean-Louis Picherit notes) are
guilty of adulteration. He cites this interesting parallel from Nicole Oresme's fourteenth-century
treatise, De moneta: "So, just as the community cannot grant to the prince authority to
misuse the wives of any of its citizens he will, it cannot give him such a privilege over the coinage
as he can only misuse, by exacting a profit from changing it." See Jean-Louis Picherit, "Le
Chatiment des amants dans le lai d'Equitan de Marie de France," Le Moyen Age
102:3-4
(1996), n. 20.
24. Duby, "Courtly Love," p. 61.
25. In 1105, Philip swore he would "never again have relations or converse"
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with
Bertrade "except in the presence of trustworthy persons." The two, however, continued to live
together and the following year were even accorded "a warm welcome" by Count Fulk himself
(Duby, The Knight, the Lady, p. 13). Philip's tenaciousness in refusing to give Bertrade
up is matched at the end of the twelfth century by his great-grandson Philip Augustus's
twenty-year refusal to take back his second wife, Ingeborg of Denmark, once again despite papal
excommunication.
26. See Sharon Kinoshita, "Two for the Price of One: Courtly Love and Serial Polygamy
in the Lais of Marie de France," Arthuriana 8: 2 (1998), 33-55.
27. McCracken, Romance of Adultery, p. 15.
28. Erich Köhler, L'aventure chevaleresque: idéal et réalité
dans le roman courtois, trans. Eliane Kaufholz (Paris, 1974).
