texts’ irony, framed as a rhetorical question, is succinctly co-gent: “How [or, we might
add, why] could one mock or parody something that never existed?” (Frappier, p. 64).
The crux of the matter is not so much that the concept designated by the expression
“courtly love” never existed, but that common usage of it needs to be subjected to as
much caution as Andreas Capellanus’s seemingly authoritative treatise. In this, the
criticisms of “courtly love” are not totally foundationless, for they underscore a problem
inherent in Gaston Paris’s initial definition and more fully elaborated in C.S.Lewis’s
categorical restatement: a failure to differentiate lyric from narrative, subjective
expression from fictional event, rhetoric from reality. As a complex of thematic elements
and rhetorical figures that appears to have found its first formulation in the lyric poetry of
the troubadours, thence gravitating to the courts of northern France, “courtly love” is first
and foremost the expression of a male subjectivity confronted with the joyous exaltation
and pain of erotic desire, accompanied by a consequent fear of isolation and potential
loss. Elaboration of love on the psychological level tends to glorify its status as a
sublimating virtue, while metaphoric developments of its enslaving power, frequently
drawn from the registers of armed combat or imprisonment, abound. When transferred to
a narrative setting, a fictional pretext for the lover’s isolation needs to be found: hence,
the frequently exploited theme of adultery. Adulterous relations are, to be sure, a
recurring theme in troubadour lyric as well, but to assert that adultery is a constitutive
element of courtly love is to mistake the incidental for the essential.
Short of extending the definition of “courtly love,” it is impossible to account for the
broad spectrum of literary creations, both in France and elsewhere in Europe, that
developed the exalted expression of love-longing in both ironic and spiritual directions.
Such divergent works as the lyric corpus of Jaufre Rudel, Thomas’s Tristan, and
Guillaume de Lorris’s Roman de la Rose, all seminal items in the “courtly love” canon,
scarcely present similar attitudes toward love. Adultery is central to Tristan, nonexistent
in the other two. The particularity of the love object in Tristan and the Rose contrasts
with the immateriality of Jaufre’s beloved. Another work, the anonymous 13th-century
Chastelaine de Vergy, seemingly a classic example of the paradigmatic situation
described by Gaston Paris, all but eradicates the social aspects of the lovers’ situation (the
adulterous triangle) as it highlights the theoretical ramifications of the knight’s
unfortunate revelation of the furtive love affair: the Châtelaine dies for no other fictional
reason than her inner disappointment at the breach of secrecy. Secrecy is no longer a
fictional means to an end (maintaining the love relationship), but an end in its own right.
By contrast, Cele qui ne pooit oïr parler de foutre, one of the many fabliaux predicated
upon courtly stereotypes, pokes fun at the hypocritical courtly injunction toward proper
speech by juxtaposing it with the pleasure of the uncourtly sexual act. The literary
masterpieces that appeared elsewhere in Italy (Dante, Boccaccio), Germany (Gottfried
von Strassburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach), and England (Chaucer) adapted French and
Occitan courtly models to their own social and cultural needs.
To eliminate the term, to insist that there is no such tradition with specific rhetorical
and thematic topoi, would be to impoverish our understanding of many works that
presuppose a familiarity with its stereotyped erotic themes and vocabulary. This is
especially true of those works, often written late in the Middle Ages, that maintain an
ambivalent or overtly satirical stance toward the idealized tenets of courtly love service.
How otherwise are we to comprehend the disintegration of the tradition in the 15th
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