Romance Rituals
Courtly Love: How Romance Became a Ritual
All human societies have pairings, marriages, sex, and families. But not all human societies emphasize the kind of wooey-gooey romantic emotions and the rituals of courtship (flowers, notes, gifts, etc.) associated with Valentine's Day.
How'd this happen?
History writer Melissa Snell claims the instinct toward romance had been around for ages, even in cultures where arranged marriages, instead of dating and courtship, were the norm. For one example, she writes, "Poetry devoted with great ardor to a beloved lady had flourished in the Arab culture for centuries."
But it was Medieval-era Europe, Snell insists, where Western traditions of love and courtship took hold to stay.
England had at the time, as Snell writes, "'courts of love,' where suitors would seek advice on matters of the heart from the queen while the king ruled over his courts of law.... Manners were on the rise among the elite.... The cult of the Virgin was rising in popularity. And tales of Arthur and his knights, so inextricably woven into the fabric of chivalry and courtly love, had been circulating for years."
Then in 1168, the duchess Eleanor of Aquitaine left the court of her husband, England's King Henry II, and moved to her ancestors' hometown of Poitiers, France. She turned the feudal court there into an attraction for "vassals paying homage, squires training to be knights, young ladies acquiring their education, future kings and queens... poets, chroniclers, musicians, philosophers, artists, and literati."
Eleanor assigned her daughter (from her previous marriage to King Louis VII of France), Marie de Champagne, to teach the young people at the Poitiers palace about courtly life. Looking for a way to reach these provincial youths with the importance of manners and etiquette, she asked the court clerk, André le Chapelain, to create a "code of behavior concerning love."
Andre based his work on "Ars Amatoria" ("the Art of Loving") by the ancient Roman poet Ovid. That book was a semi-satirical guide for a man who wanted to sexually seduce a woman, by using every skill from dress to manners of speech in order to cynically manipulate her feelings.
But in Andre's guidebook, "Liber de arte honeste amandi et reprobatione inhonesti amoris" ("Book of the Art of Loving Nobly and the Reprobation of Dishonourable Love"), the woman sets the rules and passes judgment on her suitor. "In Ovid's work," Snell writes, "the lover sighs with passion for his pursuit, but [in 'Liber'] the passion is pure and entirely for the love of a lady."
The book, like Marie's etiquette lessons, described life not as the nobility of Poitiers (or of Europe in general) had been living, but as Marie and Eleanor felt it should be lived. They wanted to promote a society where women weren't treated as mere sex-and-baby machines but as objects of adoration; where women held more power over their own destinies; where beauty, taste, and civility were at least as important as war and conquest.
Eleanor's many court visitors spread these ideas throughout Europe and Britain. The result was what historian Larry D. Benson called "courtly love, that strange doctrine of chivalric courtship that fixed the vocabulary and defined the experience of lovers in our culture from the latter Middle Ages until almost our own day."
