Courtly love: the birth and rules of medieval fin'amor

In the courts of southern France, between the late eleventh and the twelfth century, a new way of singing about love took shape. Poets writing in the langue d'oc called it fin'amor, perfect or refined love. The expression courtly love, common today, is by contrast modern: it was introduced by the French philologist Gaston Paris in 1883, in a study devoted to Chrétien de Troyes's Lancelot.

The service of the lady

At the centre of fin'amor stands the domna, a word derived from the Latin domina, lady. The beloved is almost always married and of higher rank than the poet, who places himself in her service like a vassal before his lord. The vocabulary is that of the feudal world: homage, fealty, service, reward. The lover asks for a sign of favour, a greeting, a glance, and waits.

The lady's name is never revealed. Poets use a senhal, a pseudonym, to protect her from the lauzengiers, the slanderers who spy on lovers and malign them at court. Secrecy is a fundamental rule, and with it mezura, the measure that keeps desire from turning into excess. The reward is joi, a joy that is both inner exaltation and fullness of life.

An education of the heart

Fin'amor is not only passion but also discipline. Loving in the right way makes a man better, more generous, more courteous, capable of refined manners. Courtesy, the set of virtues of those who frequented the courts, and love are joined in a single ideal of nobility that depends not only on birth but on the qualities of the heart. It is the idea that in Italy would lead to the gentle heart of the stilnovisti.

Great ladies protected this culture. Eleanor of Aquitaine, granddaughter of the earliest known troubadour, William IX, was queen of France and then of England; her daughter Marie de Champagne welcomed poets such as Chrétien de Troyes at Troyes. The movement of poets between the courts of Aquitaine, Champagne, Catalonia and northern Italy spread fin'amor across much of Europe within a few decades.

The origins, an open question

Where this model came from is still debated. Some scholars have stressed its links with the Arabic poetry of al-Andalus and with treatises such as The Ring of the Dove by Ibn Hazm, written in the first half of the eleventh century. Others insist on the legacy of Ovid, read in the schools, or on the structure of feudal society and the growth of devotion to the Virgin Mary.

A connection with the Cathar heresy, widespread in the same regions, has also been proposed, but most specialists now consider this thesis poorly founded. Courtly love was probably born from the meeting of several traditions in a precise social setting, that of the courts, where young knights without land and powerful ladies shared spaces, festivities and ambitions.

Courtly love has profoundly shaped the Western imagination. Arthurian romance, Sicilian and Tuscan lyric, Dante and Petrarch inherited the figure of the distant and superior lady, love as trial and as elevation, the value of desire rather than possession. Many gestures of modern gallantry preserve, without knowing it, a trace of those medieval courts.