NOTES ON COURTLY LOVE: ANDREAS
History: Courtly love developed in the twelfth century among the troubadours of southern France, but soon spread into the neighboring countries and eventually colored the literature of most of western Europe for centuries. Some phases of it still exist. It originated in the writings of the poet Ovid (b. 43 BCE, Roman who wrote a parody on the technical treatises on loving.) By the 12th and 13th C, courtly love had changed and the medievals wrote that the best love for one man was the wife of another. Thus love must be kept secret. Also love is a form of warfare and a kind of religion. Finally, the lady is the sovereign--she is always considered above the lover. Some of the changes from Ovid were because of the Moorish influence in Spain. The biggest influence was Marie de France about whom little is known except that she frequented the court of Eleanor of Aquitain and Henry II of England. She influenced a circle of poets who produced romances celebrating courtly love.


SUFFERING Love brings with it love melancholy or suffering. This was studied and in fact written on at length during the Renaissance, but it was known and made part of the fictional lover during Chaucer's time. The idea originated with Andreas, it seems, during the 12th C.


GENEROSITY Like good leadership in the Anglo-Saxon period, true love demands liberality on the part of the lover.

Two characteristics of courtly love: It is irresistable and ennobling.
For the troubadours of 12th C France who introduced it into literature, Courtly love had two basic, essential characteristics: Love is irresistible and it is an ennobling force. No one is exempt from the service of the God of love who rules this world and extramarital sexual love, sinful to Christians, is the sole source of worldly worth and excellence. All the other characteristics of love that appear in the Canterbury Tales, for example, are simply trappings--decorations. These belong to the general body of love literature. Yet these trappings, so ludicrous when exaggerated, have caused courtly love to be confused with romantic love and have brought it into disrepute.

Since love is irresistible, nothing done under its compulsion can be immoral; since humans are worthless unless they acts under this compulsion, the necessity of practicing love in incumbent on each person. Courtly love not only approves and encourages whatever fans and provokes sensual desire, it not only condones fornication, adultery, and sacrilege, but it represents them as necessary sources of what it calls virtue.

But: such love must be in accord with human nature (not with the law of horses). Love is a union of heart and mind as well as body. Sensuality for its own sake, the enjoyment of fleshly delights of and for themselves, is contrary to courtly love. Such love is practiced by the wanton and the promiscuous. Hence, in the courtly love code fidelity is its greatest virtue and infidelity its greatest vice.

Yet both principles of courtly love were formally condemned by the Roman Church. The irresistibility of love and love as the sole source of human worth were formally condemned on March 7, 1277 by Archbishop Stephen Tempier at Paris as manifest and execrable errors.

Andreas got the Christian world to accept his concept of love by the device of the "double truth." Although Christian teaching and his De Amore are basically irreconcilable, they may exist side by side each in its own sphere. His main purpose was to provide a pseudo-psychological and logical basis for the ideas and ideals of the troubadours. Reasoning and building on the nature of love and of humanity, he showed that love is the greatest good in this world, that it constitutes earthly happiness, and that it is the place of origin of all earthly good. Andreas proposed logically that if humans are viewed solely as rational and natural creatures, subject only to the laws of nature and reason, then they must enroll in the army of the god of love and seek the pleasures of the flesh so that they may be ennobled and grow in virtue and in worth. Aware of the immoral and heretical implications of his work, Andreas wrote On the Rejection of Love where he condemned Courtly love and implicitly retracted all he had written.

A strong possibility exists that Chaucer knew of the so-called double truth. He would have been aware of the dangers involved in writing romances of Courtly Love, the risk of an accusation of upholding immorality and heresy. He possibly set out to meet these dangers:

1. He is not interested in giving Courtly love a logical and philosophical grounding; he simply uses it as a vehicle for his love stories.

2. Andreas suggests he writes from experience. Chaucer states again and again that he is not writing on love from personal knowledge from experience or from his own feelings on the subject.

Chaucer's status is always as a non-participant in love--a rank outsider. His relationship to love and lovers is to be their clerk, their servant and instrument to gladden them and advance them in their individual cause. He doesn't participate because he is unsuitable. Chaucer did strive for religious orthodoxy when, in the words of the Parson's Tale, he protests that he "will stand for correction."

If his repudiation is not in fear, it might be a salve to a Christian conscience revolted at the utter incompatibility of Courtly Love with the tenets of Christian morality and faith.