“Courtly Love,” or fin’ amor

Arises in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in the South of France. Developed in troubadour poetry where the man is supposedly subject to a sovereign lady, and suffers for love, while she remains aloof or hard-to-get. Achieves fuller expression in Petrarch and, later, Wyatt and Surrey. C. S. Lewis described it as a “religion of love” with sacred rituals, prayers, dispensations of grace, and martyrdoms (e.g., Knight’s Tale 1460).

An example in the tradition is Andreas Capellanus’ De arte honneste amandi (Art of Courtly Love), a twelfth-century treatise in which love is described as exquisite suffering. Originally written in Latin in the 1170s while Andreas stationed in the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine, the book captures something of the high life of the medieval court. He sets out, probably with tongue firmly in cheek, to codify love. His doctrine includes:

• love must be secret and hard-won • love has physiological symptoms • love is incompatible with marriage • love is volatile: always increasing or decreasing

The etymology of amor is said to be amus “hook,” which suggests love is a dangerous but alluring trap. Metaphors of capture, imprisonment, and chains of desire are common to the discourse of fin’ amor. The literature is filled with Petrarchan oxymora – as when Arcite calls Emily “my sweet foe” in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale. Love is a struggle to the death. But what is really going on by treating trivial matters so gravely? Courtly love is best seen as a fantasy that sometimes impinged on reality, but for the most part it was known to be counterfactual. It inverts traditional marriage arrangements. Women were typically assigned subordinate positions in the legal, social, and political spheres, and yet courtly love is the fantasy of women’s power in a temporary wooing process. It also consists of a means of social advancement and class solidarity at the court. In that respect, courtly love often appears to be a game men play among and for other men – and so there is a conspicuous homosocial dimension that is critical to the phenomenon.