Courts of Love: Challenge to Feudalism"

Robert V. Graybill

    That political liberation from the medieval feudal system in southern Europe was accomplished by myriads of small causes crusades, commercial trade, gunpowder is an old story. Yet there is an ever-new fascination in tracing some of the forces that were strong not merely for that age but for all time. Although C. S. Lewis may have overstated the case in The Allegory of Love, the natural freedom toward which the sexual instinct urges humans is widely held as a foremost politically liberating force. That instinct, expressed through the culture of twelfth-century Provence, particularly in terms of courtly love, played a significant part in the breakup of feudalism. Indeed, one institution of courtly love, the Court or Parliament of Love, had an importance far out of proportion to its time or place.

    The Feudal political system, based on undying loyalty to a lord or king, had its judicial system too. Although the church exercised power through ecclesiastical courts, the political courts were far from weak. It was an age of formality, legalism, and scholasticism a fixed system. No wonder then that for romantic love to be a part of the culture it had to have its own system of authority, its own court.

    At first the concept of courtly love was not competitive to established legal and ecclesiastical systems. Rather, it filled a vacuum in feudal marriage. Since marriage was not based on romantic love, and since romantic love had a never-flagging impetus, some way had to be found to regulate it. The answer was courtly love, a convention which turned passion, jealousy, secret

    But the substitution of one form of control for another rent the fabric of feudal society. A courtly lover, bound to his lord by ties of homage and duty, found himself bound to an even further degree to the lord's lady. Feudal loyalty was split into different and sometimes opposing obligations.

    Nor was personal political loyalty the only kind of faith to suffer. Religious faith waned as romance grew, and the new spirit "was not merely non-religious; it was potentially unorthodox and anti-clerical. It is no accident that the cradle of the courtly literature and culture should have also been the centre of the Albigensian heresy and the first country in the west of Europe to revolt against the religious unity of Christendom" (Dawson 157).

    Once the idea had been established that loyalty and faith antipathetic to one's lord and one's church could be practiced, the challenge to authority was evident. A vassal who broke faith with his lord by seducing the lord's wife (and vassals likely crept into bedrooms as often as did minor nobles) would naturally find it easier to break his political or ecclesiastical ties after the initial breach of faith. Sometimes the courtly love relationship itself would suffer, as when, for example, in 1173, "Jacques d'Avesnes, having protested in vain against what he regarded as infringements of his rights by his lord, Count Baldwin V of Hainault, broke off relations with the countess, who was governing the country in her husband's absence, and 'dared to break his faith to her'" (Ganshof 99).

    The idea of a god of love or of love as an absolute ruler with power to enforce his will can be traced to the Greeks. From the fertility gods of the near East to the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine the idea persisted that sexual love, both physical and idealized, was meaningful and desirable, a human force not to be denied. It remained for the women of the troubadours to give the god of love a local habitation. C. S. Lewis points out that love permeated to the

    Some scholars have seen courtly love as similar to the feelings that caused the Albigensian heresy. Other have traced its bases to the influence of Hispano-Arabic lyrics. Although its bases may have been eclectic, one can safely say that it was inclined to be heretical and was likely a carryover from paganism. Rowbotham suggests that luxury itself helped cause the heresy of romantic love: "Whether it were a secret unbelief or a spirit of social rebellion against the moral constraints of religion engendered by luxury and looseness of life, certain it is that the troubadours throughout their history will generally be found to constitute the anti-clerical party a natural position, some will say, for a race of men and poets who represented so strikingly the blithe, unfettered, and pagan conceptions of life" (48). However, pagan or not, the institutionalization of courtly love was couched in language and custom that was nominally Christian. It took on "the organizing structure of an imitated or assimilated Christian cosmos, with its worshipers, its martyrs and angels, its God of Love, and its Paradise" (Muscatine 17).

    Courtly love, whose beginnings lay in the social control of the culturally disruptive sexual urge, became an immensely powerful movement under the leadership of Eleanor of Aquitaine. As Patricia Terry says, "... courtly poets raised love to the same important level as religion and warfare within the realm of poetry. Ecclesiastical poets had celebrated the fidelity of saints and martyrs. Authors of the chansons de geste had rejoiced in the victories and had lamented the defeats of brave warriors. How appropriate that the household poets should likewise proclaim the dangers, the joys, and the sufferings embraced by the lover!" (x-xi) The idea saturated Provençal culture, but failed, ultimately; to do the very thing it first set out to do reduce the friction and dissension that love caused to the feudal system. Courtly love defied the social order by making love more important than politics or religion. It became, in its own right, a political power and a new religion. As

    For de Rougemont, courtly love was pagan. But the temper of the age seemingly made the new convention necessary. Masculine harshness, feudal inequity, and legalistic religion had little appeal to the refined mind. Satisfactory alternatives could be found only in the idealization of the oldest of human expressions

    Friedrich Heer, talking about the songs of Bertran de Born, makes the interesting statement that they "breathe all the passionate hatreds of the South, now consciously committed to a way of life which flouted all convention" (175). One wonders exactly when the dedication to a new way of life became "conscious." The origin of the Court of Love gives a terminus a quo to that question. When ladies established "courts" with even the smallest judiciary function about them, they must have been conscious of what they were doing. Some authors insist that there were never any such courts, that such a concept is a figment of the imagination of Andreas Capellanus, Jehan de Nostradamus, and Martial of Auvergne. Robert Briffault, however, while denying the existence of the Courts of Love, curiously enough gives a great deal of seemingly authentic information about something which supposedly never was. Such a full-blown negation as his demands quoting in its entirety:

Nothing could be at wider variance with courtly principles than to pass judgement on individual cases or even to refer in such a connection to any person by name. But it would, nevertheless, be fully in the spirit of twelfth-century gallantry to bestow such an appellation on fashionable gatherings enlivened by tuneful flattery of the poets and

Quite a long list of courtly judges who never were. But perhaps Briffault's difficulty is semantic. He seems to define the Love Court as equal to any other medieval court, possessing the power to legally punish wrongdoers. Punitive the court of love could not have been beyond the power to socially shame those who had not lived up to the loose conventions of courtly love. But even that power was great. If hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, one wonders what fury a courtful of them would have.

    Justin H. Smith likewise denies a formal Court of Love, but admits that "there was a custom resembling the fanciful institution; something far more graceful and appropriate. When all were thinking of love and its complications, it was natural to speak of them. Great ladies of the 'world edited; here, it is as close to what Trevisa saw as are P and R. PQRX does not form a related group of MSS except insofar as the translation is concerned; it occurs only once in error, at 44.9, adding a superfluous scilicet after vero where Bartholomew discusses finding a "geometric" middle and gives the example that vi et xii multiplicata faciunt septuagesies dispondius, media vero viii et ix multiplicata tantum faciunt. Evidently not understanding this simple arithmetic, Trevisa omits the latter part, leaving only "sixe and twelue ymultiplyed make[th] two and seuenty" (1368.28-29).12

   As in our conclusions about the MSS' relationships, Clinton's conclusions and mine about what Trevisa's Latin copy most resembled again differ but for the possibility that Trevisa compared texts. In the latter part of Book XIX, Trevisa's copy was something resembling both the ancestor of PQR and that of X; in Book X "Trevisa's primary exemplar seems to have been a manuscript related to the group NPQRSUWXY. It is safe to rule out P, R, andY as possibilities," though "he sometimes followed readings exclusive to IJLMOTV" (76). Ruling out P, R, and Y leaves NQSUWX; so the only agreement we have is that W and X look at all like what Trevisa saw. The two being generally unrelated late in Book XIX and not particularly close in Book X leads to the conclusion that Trevisa conflated copies or owned a copy that itself had conflated different traditions. Seymour concludes that Trevisa's copy-text was related to a subgroup JLOTVX, "a single Latin manuscript, no longer extant, primarily of an L-type text which had been sporadically conflated with an I-type manuscript" (3: 9). His evidence is based on selected readings throughout the work, though favoring the first thousand pages, and is admittedly provisionary. Now, of course, the three of us obviously disagree, but I would say that this apparent contradiction is due to the evidence surveyed, to its presentation, and to the history of how Bartholomew's text was copied on the continent.

   In his 1974 article, Seymour included the British Library Sloane MSS 471 and 511, written by English hands, among those of English origin; but for the Trevisa project not only were the fragmentary and abridged MSS left out of consideration but so also were these two, for they were considered as being "of the French rather than of the English tradition" (Clinton 12). In all, Seymour traced 23 substantial MSS (157), 15 with extracts including one in Welsh (158), 5 in bindings (156-57 n. 4), 36 references to ownership (159-63), and 7 uses by other writers in English (164). International travel and commerce were well developed and the English "nation" at the University of Paris had already had a long history, its seal first appearing on an act of 1252 and some of its masters founding St. Andrews University in Scotland as late as 1413 (Toulouse 16, 28). Bartholomew himself had taught at Paris 13 and left long before Trevisa began his translation.14 Even during Trevisa's lifetime the Hundred Years War did little to lessen the English nation's lists of suppositi, those over whom the nation had jurisdiction (Boyce 31, 28 n.4).

   Trevisa himself travelled abroad. In his translation of Higden's Polychronicon, which he says he finished 8 April 1387, he noted that he had seen the hot baths "at Akene in Almayne" and used those "at Egges in Sauoy" (2:61), that he changed money at "Brisak uppon [th]e Ryne" (6: 259), and that Higden is wrong about there being only one kind of French, for "[th]ere is as many dyuers manere Frensche in [th]e reem of Fraunce as is dyuerse manere Englische in [th]e reem of Engelond" (2:161). Clearly, he must have crossed the Channel, passed through Belgium or Holland to Aachen just inside Germany, then probably to Cologne for a boat trip along the Rhine, stopping at Breisach (just west of Freiburg) not far from the Swiss border, and on, either inland through Aix-les-Bains between Geneva and Grenoble or elsewhere, maybe stopping at Aix-les-Bains on the return trip, perhaps a land route across France, though when he speaks of "money of turoneis" he merely speculates about practice in Tours (6:259). If he went to Italy on this trip, he did not reach Rome, for his comment that the Coliseum "was [th]e place of [th]e ymages of provinces and of londes" (6: 337) betrays hi