In the 18th and 19th c., when French scholars first began to interest themselves in medieval texts, they called the kind of love they found there amour chevaleresque. Later in the 19th c. Gaston Paris pioneered the use of the term amour courtois or ‘courtly love’, which is still used widely today. The term most usually found in medieval texts of the 12th c., however, is amour fine, equivalent to the Occitan fin'amor, which means something more like ‘true love’ or ‘pure love’. (In Medieval French and Occitan amour|amor is feminine; hence the adjectival agreement fine, or fin', for fina.)
This variety in terminology highlights the problem of characterizing an emotion which is experienced at the level of the individual, but also helps to give shape and direction to a wider community that we might call ‘courtly culture’. The term amour chevaleresque centres emotion on the male lover-hero, a lover who is also a knight. Lancelot would be an obvious example: engaged in a constant series of chivalric encounters, he fights, at least in part, because inspired by love, and is loved, at least in part, because of his successes as a knight. Individual emotion, on this account, expresses itself primarily in action, which, although placed at the service of the lady, also serves the interests of community since the hero's opponents merit their defeat.
The term amour courtois highlights instead the requirements of decorum and discretion in love. It helps direct our attention to the ways in which love is regulated by principles of exchange in the same way as other feudal and courtly institutions. The lover, indeed, is involved in a complex way with his community, since the court helps to define his status and identity, and he in turn contributes to its welfare by his heroic actions. Individual emotion, on this account, is framed by social pressure and communal interest.
The term amour fine, finally, places the emphasis much more firmly on the individual sensibility of the lover, on his or her quality of interiority and personal inspiration. The metaphor is from metal refining; the term esmeré, ‘refined (metal)’, is often used as well, both by troubadours and northern French writers. An extended example of this image occurs in the epilogue of Li Roman du castelain de Couci [see Chastelain de Couci]: true lovers, purified in the fire, are cleansed of their weaknesses and enabled to endure their sufferings. These differences of nomenclature suggest a major shift in values, whereby what for medieval poets seemed ‘personal’ and ‘inner’, for later readers seemed ‘communal’ and directed outwards, into the sphere of action. In the 12th c., ‘true’ love seems to have offered a new experience of interiority, even though now it can appear as one more variant of the concern with sociality so evident throughout medieval literature.
A prominent role in the development of ideas of love in the Middle Ages was played by the Tristan legend. Its importance is attested not only by the actual Tristan texts, but by the proliferation of allusions to the legend in troubadour and trouvère lyrics from the early 12th c. onwards, and by the large number of narrative works (several of the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, most notably his Cligés) which can be seen as recasting scenes or themes from it. The potion in the Tristan story was brewed in order that the married couple, Iseut and Mark, should fall in love with each other. It was intended, that is, to promote the existence of a single order: one where personal desire would merge with political advantage, and private sentiment be effortlessly integrated to the public institution of marriage. But although Iseut married Mark, it is she and Tristan who drink the potion by mistake, and consequently fall in love; their love is adulterous, if only by default, and the worlds of inner sentiment and public institutions are driven irrevocably apart. An unbridgeable divide is created between two quite separate orders of reality. The domain of fin'amor, inhabited by the lovers and their confidants, lies sometimes alongside the public world of the king and his feudal barons (especially in what survives of Beroul's version of the Tristan), and sometimes outside it (as when one or both of the lovers are exiled from Mark's court; this is particularly characteristic of the ending of the Thomas version). But wherever love is located, it cannot be properly understood by people from the other world, an incomprehension responsible for many of the most famous scenes in the Tristan story, such as Iseut's ambiguous oath (which means one thing to her and Tristan, but something quite different to everyone else), or Mark's discovery of the lovers sleeping with the sword between them (which he interprets, wrongly, as proof of their innocence).
The separation between different worlds of value which in the Tristan legend is engendered by the potion is simply assumed in a large number of other texts that deal with fin'amor. It produces a wealth of irony. A frequent scenario of both lyrics and romances, for example, is the punishment of someone who opposes the lovers. This scenario is inherently paradoxical, in that the lovers' opponent is ‘wrong’ precisely because he is ‘right’: in terms of the public order, his suspicions are well founded, but the lovers, mysteriously entitled to protection, can ironically reverse the values of right and wrong. Irony is also exploited as a stylistic resource, to guarantee the discourse of the lovers against comprehension by others. Courtly rhetoric constantly appeals to a play of inclusion and exclusion. Elaborate metaphors, for instance, or other forms of indirectness such as allusion or euphemism, are offered to the discerning audience with the gratifying assurance that they alone will understand them; the vulgar and undeserving will have no share in their understanding.
Fin'amor remains the emotion of an élite even when, as is often the case, the emotion in question is not transgressive. In Old French narrative, love which leads to an uncontroversial wedding is more common than an adulterous affair conducted in the teeth of an existing marriage. (It is worth noting that it is always the wife who is the adulterous partner; she is the best placed to expose the irony, and indeed the anxiety, arising when an object acquired in a public contract turns out to be a subject with private desires of her own.) And in the poetry of the troubadours and trouvères, despite constant appeals for secrecy and discretion, there are virtually no explicit indications that the lady for whom the poet sings is married. The interiority of individual emotion always seems to be under threat, even if there is no apparent reason why the public order would condemn it. It can only survive in the noblest and best; and it can only be shared with other like-minded individuals—the constituents of what I earlier termed ‘courtly culture’. Fin'amor is thus both individualistic and social in its orientation: it turns away from the existing social order to found a new (and perhaps imaginary) community of its own.
There are many theories about what historical circumstances led to the success of fin'amor as a literary theme. One line of thought, which has been in disfavour for some time and is probably due for revival, discerns analogies between it and developments in Christian spirituality in the 12th c. Current explanations look to changes in feudal society, and especially in marriage practices. It could be, for instance, that fin'amor, with its emphasis on individual choice, was an appropriate ideology for an emergent monarchical state, in which relationships were perceived as being mediated via the abstract notion of the state rather than by the old, personal bonds of homage, and in which personal responsibility and private conscience were beginning to supersede earlier notions of honour and shame. This view is associated with the writings of R. H. Bloch. Or it could be that the gradual encroachment of the Church into marital law and practice focused fresh attention on love and emotional choice, and particularly on the status that being loved by a socially well-placed woman could confer on a man. Furthermore, the difficulties encountered by many young noblemen in finding a bride, when their families were reluctant to settle property on any of their children except the eldest son, may have made them a ready audience for the literature of fin'amor, offering them as it did fantasies of enhanced value and erotic success which were the reverse of their lived experience. This view is promoted by Georges Duby.
Whatever the historical reasons for it, fin'amor marked a turning-point in European culture. It put gender at the top of the ideological agenda and gave to the feminine (though probabably not to real historical women) a literary prominence never before enjoyed. Although diverse in its manifestations even in the 12th c., fin'amor was sufficiently vital to inspire poets throughout the Middle Ages and beyond.
[Sarah Kay]
Bibliography
- R. Boase, The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love (1977)
