The Foundations of Romantic Love and Chivalry

Another important source for our ideas about love is medieval Arab lyric poetry, which found its way into Europe and got Christianized in the 11th century. It led to the great tradition of courtly love and the extraordinary flourishing of troubadour love poetry in the 12th and 13th centuries. Courtly love poetry became the basis for much of subsequent Western love poetry – a tradition that has carried over into the lyrics of pop music.

Can our current representations of love, such as gifting flowers or chivalrous acts, be traced to particular historical sources?

Chivalry, gifting, kindness: These all have courtly origins, hence go back to those 12th and 13th century courts in the south of present-day France where Western lyric poetry first originated.

Could you give an example of a Western lyric poem?

The following verses, composed by a female poet around the beginning of the 13th century, showcase the troubadour tradition. The poem was originally written in Occitane, a Romance language of the south of France that has since gone defunct.

If he wants me to give my love,
he will have to be cheerful, worthy,
open and humble; let him argue with no one,
and respond to every person kindly;
because what suits me is not a mean or prideful man
who would harm and diminish my worth,
but a free and true, discreet and amorous man
if he wants me to let him be in love with me.

The whole poem can be found in Songs of the Women Troubadours. Female troubadour poets, many of them anonymous, were called trobairitz. The poems of about two dozen trobairitz have survived.

How do you think our ideas about romantic love evolved over time? What do you say to people who argue that chivalry is dead today?

Chivalry is not completely dead if one takes the verses above as an expression of what chivalry means in the realm of love. Kindness, gentleness, humor and a lack of arrogance are still very desired qualities these days, I hope. They may take different forms, but the ideal is still alive.

I think that our ideas about romantic love have evolved very little over time when it comes to the essentials – we still think of love as ennobling and intimate, a deeply personal form of spiritual transcendence.

Are there any examples of interesting representations of romantic love that can be found in medieval times or in our earlier past that would seem surprising to our culture today?

What is wholly foreign to us today is the prevalent medieval assumption that romantic love is not possible within the confines of marriage. We tend to believe that love finds its consummation in marriage, whereas in the past marriage was seen as a contract with strict obligations between husband and wife, where the wife was subjected to the authority of the husband. It was incompatible with love because love must be wholly free – freely given and free from the social hierarchies that govern human and gender relations in the real world. It is hard for us to understand why love was almost by definition adulterous back then.

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The Foundations of Romantic Love and Chivalry

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