love of a highly specialized sort, whose characteristics may be enumerated as Humility,
Courtesy, Adultery, and the Religion of Love” (p. 2).
Early scholarship, taking the courtly-love paradigm as a sociological given, a real-life
phenomenon fostered in the “courts of love,” steered the question of origins in a
multitude of directions. How could such a strikingly new way of expressing and
codifying male-female relations have appeared from nowhere? Where did it come from?
Answers to the latter question were proposed over the first half of this century, ranging
from Neoplatonism to Arabic poetry, from Cathar heresies rampant in the south of France
(prior to their extirpation in the Albigensian Crusade) to a rediscovery of Ovidian poetry.
Historically oriented studies have attempted to demonstrate the appropriateness of courtly
love’s appearance at a time when feudal society was entering a new phase, in which a
recently achieved economic and political stability gave rise to interconnected
sociocultural phenomena: widespread civilizing impulses, an extensive network of
literary patronage, and a generation of young disinherited nobles in search of a fortune
and a family. Feminist critics have more recently debated the influence of noble-women
in the conception and reception of the courtly ideal. No single theory has gained general
acceptance, nor is there likely to be any consensus, as this side of the debate has been
eclipsed by other issues.
The most vigorous work in recent years has tended to negate the validity of the
expression itself. Preeminent among such critics, D.W.Robertson issued a strong
challenge to those who believe in the existence of courtly love, basing his argument upon
a Christian interpretation of medieval society. The criticism aimed at eliminating courtly
love as a part of our literary vocabulary centers principally upon three issues. The first is
terminological, arising from the fact that “courtly love” is a 19th-century concoction and
not genuinely medieval. The second issue stems from the observation that what we know
as courtly love is found almost exclusively in literary texts and is nowhere substantiated
in legal, theological, or historical writings. Indeed, much of what is depicted in the
courtly-love literature must be labeled either illegal or immoral when measured against
the mores of medieval society. The third aspect of the criticism arises from an ethical and
rhetorical interpretation of the texts themselves. Works like Lancelot, which seem to
depict an antisocial “religion of love,” are actually to be understood ironically, as the
parodic presentation of idolatrous cupidity, for (so the argument goes) no medieval
Christian audience could tolerate the serious depiction of such otherwise immoral
behavior.
Jean Frappier has been the most effective defender of courtly love. While admitting
the expression’s lack of authenticity, he has convincingly demonstrated that the Middle
Ages did have a term for the concept in question: fin’amors, or “pure love.” The charge
that the term’s inauthenticity entails that of the concept is thus without substance, and the
question becomes one of deciding how to redefine an expression that has become
indispensable to our common critical vocabulary. As for the second critique, to expect
socially orthodox behavior in the literature is to misunderstand the very status of
vernacular courtly lyric and romance as escapist forms of literary creation cultivated in
many cases at the margins of the dominant (theological and political) power structures
and all that this status implies in terms of wish-fulfillment, personal fantasy, and
potentially antiestablishment tendencies. Finally, Frappier’s answer to the problem of the
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 510