J.A. Schultz and the Overlooked Importance of the Exogenesis of Courtly Love.

“Courtly love does not begin with sinful concupiscence nor with transient windiness. As any reader of medieval romance can tell you, it begins when the lover sees the beloved, the image of the beloved enters through the eyes, lodges in the heart, and takes the lover captive. There are variations, of course. But the common knowledge captures the important point: the efficient cause of courtly love is always external – an image, an attribute, a reputation. These enter the lover and provoke a reaction: love. Desire does not well up within the lover and seek an object. Something about the object assaults the lover and takes him or her captive…Whether it is the image of the beloved penetrating the eyes or reports of the beloved entering through the ears, the lover is consistently represented as the passive object of some external force or stimulus…Little of the evidence I have collected in the previous paragraphs will surprise those who have read the literature of courtly love. They know that love enters through the eyes and lodges in the heart. They know that Tristan and Isold fall in love after drinking the potion. What is surprising is the eagerness with which scholars turn this evidence into ornament. They tell us that the entry of the beloved image through the eyes is a topos, that the love potion is a symbol, that all-powerful Lady Love is a personification, and that all of them are figures for something more important….the love potion is a symbol, Lady Love is a personification. But what does the potion symbolize? What is achieved by the personification? If these figures are to be anything more than pure ornament, if they are to represent anything at all about love, then one has to take seriously the fact that they place the origin of love outside the lover…Nowadays, the “most common view contends that sexual desire is an innate motivational force (e.g., an instinct, drive, need, urge, appetite, wish or want) that impels the individual to seek out sexual objects or to engage in sexual activities” We read personal ads or go to singles bars or spend our evenings in online chat rooms hoping to find love or sex, hoping to satisfy a desire that is intrinsic to us and that motivates us to seek an object. We mope around the house, paralyzed by depression because our desire for true love is matched only by our despair of ever finding it. This is not the case for the actors in medieval romance or the singers of courtly lyric. They go about their business, welcoming guests, jousting at festivals, performing courtliness until they are taken by surprise, until some particular attribute of some particular individual impinges upon them, penetrates to the core of their being and causes them to be captivated by love. In this, the efficient cause of courtly love is completely unlike concupiscence, appetite, and modern desire.”

(Schultz, James. Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness, and the History of Sexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. pg. 71-75.)

Markale on Heretical Divergence of Fin’Amor – “God and His Spouse”

Revealing comments by Markale concerning yet another direction in which the basic elements of Courtly Love stray from any paths set by orthodox Christianity:

“Now fin’amor, particularly in the assais, was structured around a sacramental act performed in service of God and his spouse (the community of the faithful), an obvious memory of the pagan hierogamy between the god and the goddess. But this has absolutely nothing in common with marriage, an economic and social action in which the woman is obliged to submit to conjugal duty. In the assais (and this is what still smacks to a certain degree of the infernal component), it is the lady who decides whom she desires, when she will accept, and what she wants. The difference is huge.”

 

-Markale, Courtly Love: The Path of Sexual Initiation, pg. 210

Lewis, de Rougemont, and Modern Scholarship of Courtly Love

Lewis and de Rougemont are sometimes dismissed wholly or partially from recent studies of Courtly Love on the basis that they were too willing to find simple causes for the complex event that was the Troubadours and their audience. To state it as simply as possible, both Lewis and de Rougemont characterized the invention of passionate love in the west as being the result of Christian ideals encountering still-pagan cultures, thus yielding a new hybrid of passion, idealization and sensuality that altogether constituted a new sentiment within the western mind. This hardly looks like a recipe for over-simplification if one takes into account the breadth of Lewis’s readings in medieval literature or de Rougemont’s humility in acknowledging the sometimes unknown gulf of causae standing between himself and the spiritual and emotional developments he was attempting to describe and diagnose in his Love in the Western World. Both authors are aware that there are a sea of “causes” at work behind the phenomena and developments they describe, but they are sometimes slighted for the big pictures that emerge from the minutiae of their more critical scholarly work.

Both de Rougemont and Lewis are well-known for drawing attention to the appearance of courtly love and in doing so defining some of the limits and tone of the academic discourse that followed, but often ignored is their full acknowledgment that no one cause could solely carry the weight of explaining the appearance. De Rougemont stated clearly that the “causes” which he focused on, specifically Catharism, were not textual, but socio-political; those that had shaped the landscape from which Courtly Love had emerged, rather than textually influencing the poets themselves.

Lewis also makes clear that “Ovid Misunderstood” and “Northern Influence” are, at best, possible contributing factors rather than monocephalous explanations for the mystery of the origins of fin’amor. Likewise for de Rougemont, his posited thesis about Catharism stands in such opposition to Aroux, Peladan and Otto Rahn that it can not only not be identified with the maximum thesis that the trobar clus was the “secret language of heresy,” but also that it cannot be identified with a even minimal version of the same. De Rougemont appealed to the widespread influence of Catharism and it’s anti-Christian elements as being a fundamental element of the motivations for the audience of troubadour activities, rather than the slanderous dismissal that he was presuming an occultic and esoteric explanation for what he well knew to be a complex social and artistic movement.

The Upper and Lower Conceptual Limits of Fin’Amor

“Fin’amor coincides with modern notions of romantic love only to a degree. At the root of both medieval and modern romantic sentiments lies sexual attraction between man and woman. The modern reader finds nothing hard to understand in Bernart de Ventadorn’s hope that his lady might

“Receive me in that place
She lies in, to embrace
And press against me, tight,
Her, body smooth and white.

The Comtessa de Dia expresses much the same longing for her “naked knight.” While most troubadours sublimate love to some extent, Eros never completely loses his vitals. When love has been spiritualized to the degree of, say, Dante’s feelings for Beatrice, who guided him toward heaven, we have transcended the limits of fin’amor and risen into the realm of a more purely religious emotion.”(Lark in the Morning: The Verses of the Troubadours By Robert Kehew – pages from introduction)

Contested Nature of Feudalism in Fin’Amor- Summary of Kohler’s Politico-Economic Criticism

The feudal element of Courtly Love is universally acknowledged, but the meaning and emphasis placed upon it vary widely between its various definitions in post-’60s scholarship. A typical expression of the service offered by a fin’aman to his domna comes from Bernart de Ventadorn, perhaps the greatest of the love-troubadours.

Bona domna, re no us deman
mas que.m prendatz per servidor,
que’.us servirai com bo senhor,
cossi que del gazardo m’am.”
(Worthy lady, I ask nothing of you except that you take me as your servant, for I will serve you as one does a good overlord, whatever the reward might be. – Bernart de Ventadorn 1, vv.49-52)

Some twentieth-century reactions have interpreted this kind of lover/domna relationship more or less literally, expressing either an economic or social inequality that was played out and overcome within the lyric as a textual game. Particularly influential in this kind of reading is Erich Köhler. Simon Gaunt describes Köhler‘s overall programme and how its assumptions have replaced some of the more quaint and literal interpretations which had been (popularly) held previously to post-war troubadour scholarship.

“The myth of the love-sick troubadour wandering from castle to castle singing, with his hand on his heart, of his unrequited love for his haughty, but irresistible lady has little currency now in scholarly circles. Criticism over the last thirty years or so has examined the formal dexterity, the textuality and intertextuality, the eroticism, the theatricality and the humor of the canso. A further strand of criticism has followed in the wake of Erich Köhler’s influential work: according to his socio-historic reading, the troubadour’s love of a high-ranking lady sublimates the frustration of the lesser nobility or the landless iuvenes, whilst binding them to the more successful high-ranking nobility through a shared ideology. For Köhler and his disciples the troubadour-lover is primarily a spokesman for his class. ”
(Gaunt, Simon, and Michael Sheringham. Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. pg. 123.)

However, while I find many of the Köhler-influenced studies to be fascinating, especially in the relatively reasonable mode which some recent scholars such as James A. Shultz appear to be operating within, I nevertheless strongly suspect that by reducing the meaning of courtly love to an economic and social resolve, the danger for the Marxist critic is not that he will find an inequality, tension and resolve that aren’t there, but that he will reduce the personality and character of the metaphors employed to communicate that inequality to the inequality which they communicate; rather than to understand the difference of the context and the non-economic motivations for the success of the love metaphors, and particularly, the success of ‘this’ particular mode of love over ‘that’ particular mode.

All considered, there certainly is room for helpful improvements to the definition and boundaries of Courtly Love and fin’amor, but many of the current contentions seem to simply have trouble making any kind of generalization whatsoever – disliking the “lumping” of divergent individual perspectives into a single group of “Courtly Lovers” – and preferring to instead treat each poet and lyric with a close individual reading from an arguably unjustifiable structuralist perspective, destroying the context and cultural meaning of the poetry and transforming the entire landscape into a blur of economic impulses which cannot be felt or understood either in accordance with or opposition to a helpful definitional generalization – incomplete as it may be.