bizarre” (Romania 10:469). The idolatrous passion of Lancelot for Guenevere entails a
type of rule-oriented behavior, predicated upon the superiority of the beloved and the
lover’s efforts to gain her favor. Although Paris cites the Lancelot as the first narrative
fiction to glorify “courtly” love, the emotional construct was not necessarily Chrétien’s
invention; the romance conveyed an “absolute” vision of the lover “such as it had long
before been conceived in lyric poetry and dreamed about, if not brought to realization, in
life” (Romania 12:517). The tradition of love literature thus initiated in 12th-century lyric
and romance continued in an unbroken line through to the 15th century in a variety of
genres—lyric poetry, romance, short story, debate—that were the stock-in-trade of
vernacular authors of the period, including many of France’s most illustrious: Guillaume
de Lorris, Thibaut de Champagne, Richard de Fournival, Adam de la Halle, Guillaume de
Machaut, Jean Froissart, Charles d’Orléans, Alain Chartier.
Paris lists four characteristics of the type of love in question: (1) it is furtive and
illegitimate, for such a desire founded in the perpetual fear of loss or distancing, requiring
a constant sacrifice of oneself, could not take place in a context of public possession (i.e.,
marriage); (2) the lover, however great a knight, is always an inferior, while the beloved
is haughty, capricious, and disdainful; (3) knightly deeds are conceived as a means of
increasing one’s value in the service of love, thus exalting the love relationship itself; and
(4) “love is an art, a science, a virtue, which has its rules just as chivalry and courtliness
have theirs.” When Paris proceeds to summarize these qualities by coining the phrase
“courtly love,” it should be clear that he is establishing, through his use of italics, a
precautionary critical distance. For his purposes, the phrase translates the vaguely
paradoxical nature of this construct, uniting as it does the social or communal (courtly)
and the personal (love); the playfully rule-oriented and the serious; the sensual and the
mystical.
Paris depends for much of his material upon a text roughly contemporary to Chrétien’s
Lancelot, considered by many to be a serious treatise on the subject, Andreas
Capellanus’s Latin De amore (frequently translated as The Art of Courtly Love). In a
series of fictional judgments pronounced by “authorities” like Eleanor of Aquitaine and
her daughter Marie of Champagne (the patron to whom Chrétien’s romance was
dedicated), the treatise provides an outline of some of the cultural and social problems
encountered in love relationships along with an enumeration of the rules and regulations
themselves (e.g., “he who is not jealous cannot love”). This work, divided into three
books, on the model of Ovid’s Ars amatoria, itself remains highly ambiguous, however,
for the third book functions as a palinode of the first two, a vociferous condemnation of
the frivolity—indeed, the moral perniciousness—of such love relationships.
Paris’s felicitous expression seems to have gained immediate acceptance, becoming
common currency in discussions of medieval love literature: finally, a term was available
to denote a phenomenon that had intrigued 19th-century scholars dating as far back as
Stendhal’s famous 1822 Essai sur l’amour. Although many had spoken of the appearance
of a new type of romantic love in early 12th-century France, Gaston Paris gave it a name.
As the use of the expression spread, however, so did its application become increasingly
normative. The most influential account of courtly love since Gaston Paris, the one that
has been read by generations of scholars and students as the “last word” on the subject, is
C.S.Lewis’s Allegory of Love, published in 1936: “The sentiment, of course, is love, but
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