TROUBADOR LOVE

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By Marianna Beck

Part One: The Birth of Romantic Love


Romantic love. Brain scientists blame an overabundance of epinephrine; country western singers look for it in all the wrong places and cynics define it as the simultaneous exchange of fantasies and skin.

The question is: how did we ever get into this mess?

Do we blame the Greeks for the peregrinations of Zeus, the Romans for engineering the horny festival of Lupercalia — or the French for inventing champagne and underwear?

The truth, as usual, resides a little bit of everywhere. But for those standing on the millennial precipice, still wondering how we become a love-sick, Hallmark-card carrying culture, the answer lies (mostly) with a bunch of sensitive, poet types in the 12th-century called troubadours whose vocal and literary ambitions merely disguised their horizontal urges.









KNIGHT WITH VENUS HEADDRESS
The idea of chivalry and courtly love was a very short-lived phenomenon that most likely started in southern France in the early 12th century.













That the troubadours managed to blossom out of a warrior culture is strange enough. That they told stories and sang about sex, albeit in disguised and symbolic fashion, addressing their mating calls to unattainable married women — the wives of their bosses no less! — is even more paradoxical and speaks to a kind of harmonic convergence of social, religious and political change.

Naturally, there are all sorts of theories as to how the concept of courtly love, defined as a kind of obsessive, doggy devotion governed by rules, gifts, glances, and symbolic gesture, grew out of the gothic chivalric tradition.

The troubadour movement most likely started in the Provence and Languedoc regions of southern France in the early 12th century. Some historians have fingered a feudal lord, Guilhem of Aquitaine, as the inventor of courtly love.

It seems that Guilhem had a habitual Lewinsky problem but a short supply of damsels — particularly after a local clergyman began preaching that the fires of hell and damnation awaited adulterers of both sexes.

Guilhem’s defense was to pen some love poems in which he argued that love was not a sin but a divine mystery and that women who inspired love were worthy of adoration. (Word has it, Guilhem’s ruse worked brilliantly, countering the preacher’s inflammatory predictions).

This idea of honoring women was certainly a departure from the wholly anti-erotic Christian mind-set and was most likely brought from the East by crusaders and pilgrims who found a tradition of Persian literature in which women were the subject of extravagant devotion. This new movement spread quickly to northern France, England and then later to Germany.

TROUBADOR AND FEMALE DANCE Troubadours represented the antithesis of brutish male warrior culture, and focused instead on the arts and an excessively idealized concept of love. They were the sensitive males of the time.

Medieval art of the time also reflected the intertwining of the sacred and profane. Art historian Michael Camille suggests in his sumptuous book, The Art of Medieval Love, that this radical shift in spirituality occurred even among clerics, such as the 12th-century reformer Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153).

He criticized courtly excess while describing his relationship with God in terms of a lover approaching his beloved. According to Camille, religious iconography of the time takes on a much more intimate and sensual scope, and is often described as man’s mystical union with God. Similarly, it was not uncommon for nuns to characterize their relationship to Christ in terms of “bride” and “bridegroom.”

Clerics were often the most fervent promoters of these new poetic ideas of love. Camille writes that these religious figures were nearly always “…described as refined in manners, wealthy, and generous in giving gifts, compared to rough brutish, military men.”
In this category, the most popular promoter of the time was Andrew Capellanus who as chaplain at the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine penned a bestseller in 1186 — De Amore — detailing the elaborate rules governing the art of courtly love.

LOVER CAPTURED BY LADY
“Courtly love goes so far as the kiss and embrace and the modest contact with the nude lover, omitting the final solace, [read orgasm here] for that is not permitted to those who wish to love purely.”


To wit: “Courtly love goes so far as the kiss and embrace and the modest contact with the nude lover, omitting the final solace, [read orgasm here] for that is not permitted to those who wish to love purely.” Enter the era of the sensitive male.Troubadours, along with these refined clerics like Capellanus, are credited with having created a whole new language of love. They were responsible, at least until the Inquisition kicked in a hundred years or so later, for promoting a revolutionary change in relationships between the sexes. — at least among the nobility.

They represented the antithesis of brutish male warrior culture, and focused instead on the arts and an excessively idealized concept of love. In some cases, they even pressed for social reforms.

It seems little surprise then that many chose the Virgin Mary as their special patron and devoted poems to her. In a sense, the emergence of the progressive, Eros-focused troubadours is all the more interesting in light of the anti-sexual, blood-thirsty, Thanatos-based milieu of the Middle Ages from which they sprang.

That they got away with it is short of amazing. Not long before the advent of the troubadours, addressing a love-song to any married woman would have been punishable by death.

Next: The Conclusion of Troubador Love: If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother

Marianna Beck holds a Ph.D. in Erotology, which essentially is the study of the material culture of sex.