The Twelfth Century Invents Longing

At the beginning of the twelfth century, in the south of France, a kind of poetry appears that had not been written in Europe before. William IX, Duke of Aquitaine, is among the first of the troubadours, and what he and his successors produce is verse in which devotion to a woman is treated as ennobling in itself.

The conventions harden quickly. The beloved is of higher rank, usually married, and unattainable. The lover serves her. The service improves him, makes him braver and more courteous, and the improvement is the justification of the whole arrangement. Fulfilment is deferred indefinitely, and in the strictest version it would spoil everything.

Around 1184, Andreas Capellanus wrote De amore, which sets out the rules as though they were law: who may love, what love does, how it is conducted, what destroys it. Its tone in the later sections is dry enough that scholars have argued for a century about whether it is a manual or a satire of one, and the ambiguity is probably deliberate.

The term courtly love, which sounds medieval, is not. It was coined by the scholar Gaston Paris in the nineteenth century, to name a pattern he saw in material that never named itself. That is worth registering as a general habit: the neat label for a period's behaviour is almost always applied long afterwards by somebody organising it from outside.

The large claim usually attached to this material is that the twelfth century invented romantic love.

It does not survive contact with the evidence. The Udhri poets of Arabia were doing something structurally identical five hundred years earlier, and Latin and Sanskrit poetry contain plenty of passionate love long before that. People did not begin feeling this in Provence.

What did change is the standing of the feeling. Love became something a serious adult could organise a life around and be admired for, rather than a disorder or a private matter of no public interest. That is a smaller claim, it is well supported, and it is quite enough to explain the tradition's influence.

Now the unromantic explanation of the convention's shape, which is also the correct one.

Writing needs an obstacle. A story in which two people want each other and can have each other is over in a paragraph. Marriage removes the obstacle, which is why marriage is where these poems stop rather than where they go. The entire apparatus, the higher rank, the husband, the secrecy, the service, exists to generate and preserve resistance, because the resistance is what produces the poems.

That does not make the feeling false. It means the convention was selected for what it does on a page, and that any account of the tradition which ignores its literary economics is missing the most powerful force acting on it.

Hold this chapter beside the Udhri chapter in the previous book. Two traditions, possibly connected through Andalusia and possibly not, both arrived at a love exalted precisely because it is never fulfilled, and a lover whose qualification is suffering. The last book of this course has a name for that state: passion, with no intimacy and no commitment attached, sustained indefinitely.

It is the component that asks least of anybody, and it is the one that has produced almost all the poetry.