The Meaning of Courtly Love

Abstract

T HE poetry of the troubadours and minnesingers has puzzled several generations of scholars. It has always been felt that there is something unreal and abnormal about the troubadour concept of love, overly sentimental, diffident, and submissive, and yet considered to be appropriate exclusively for noblemen and knights. A further puzzling aspect consists in the cultural implications of love. While it had originally nothing to do with married life or its customary preliminaries, it greatly influenced the standard behavior of the upper classes, especially their conduct in the presence of ladies. The entire complex of sentiments and modes of behavior as well as the corresponding poetry was alive only in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries; much of it, however, finally entered the mainstream of Western Civilization, such as the high evaluation of sentimental love and the conspicuous politeness of gentlemen toward ladies, which became specific Western culture patterns.' When courtly poetry flourished, in the High Middle Ages, it was basically oral literature; it was never read in private, but always recited in public to the accompaniment of music. Before this poetry had acquired prestige in noble society, there was no incentive for its preservation, and only a small fraction of the entire production of courtly lyrics has been transmitted. The first poems of the courtly type which have survived, both in Old Provencal and in Middle High German, were committed to writing because they were the work of great noblemen, among whom William IX of Aquitaine and Henry VI of Hohenstaufen were most outstanding. Later, many poets of lower social status and not a few of obscure origin owed their literary survival solely to the appeal of their lyrics to courtly society. Finally, the chance of personal and local interest determined the composition of anthologies in the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; Switzerland, for instance, became overrepresented by the great number of its known minnesingers, because the largest collection of Medieval German verse was compiled in Zurich. These chance factors of preservation, however, have not seriously impaired our knowledge, because of the almost ritualistic uniformity of courtly poetry. The troubadours and minnesingers strained themselves to produce what their audience expected to hear, and even though the individuality of the greater poets is clearly noticeable in their lyrics and some poems reveal the emotional involvement of their authors, the whole corpus of courtly poetry was a product of the interplay between the poets and their public and reads like a compulsive reiteration of a few themes. If a society does not weary of the continual repetition of the same imagery, and rewards its poets and performers for it, the assumption is warranted that this imagery is emotionally stirring and fascinating, and therefore psychologically meaningful to a significant number of members of that society-on the unconscious as well as on the conscious level. The thematic content of courtly