Fin Amor and Courtly Love

In Angelique, our heroine’s husband seeks to recreate a medieval Court of Love at his seat in Toulouse. For me, courtly love sounds like the sort of thing that we find at Camelot. (Or, you know, Courtney Love.) But what was courtly love actually? Angelique is set in the late 17th century, and courtly love is already a historical ideal, so I asked my go-to medievalist* for hot tips. Hot tips included: “C.S. Lewis wrote about it in an influential if flawed way” and “Google for fin amors”. Let’s start with fin amor and courtly love, and we’ll get to C.S. Lewis in a minute.

Fin amor and Courtly love: Anglo-French Fusion

Fin amor was a term used in medieval Southern France, a region called Occitania. Over time fin amor has been translated variously as amour courtois (French), die hohe Minne (German), and “courtly love” (English).

Before I get into what the term refers to, I want to point out the first complication, long before C.S. Lewis added anything to the conversation. Courtly love is not the same as fin amor because the English language tradition of courtly love has been evolving for eight centuries on its own.

How did that happen? Another place name from within Occitania is Aquitaine, which you may know as I know it: connected to the name Eleanor of Aquitaine. There are a couple of wonderful podcast episodes I recommend for context here: History Chicks did a two-parter on Queen E (episode 86 and episode 87), and The History of English has good info in Episode 81: Love Songs and Troubadours. But, TL;DL is Aquitaine was Rich. Richer than Northern France, ie Paris where the French king was. I have a vague memory from a college course that this was because they controlled coastal salt lagoons when salt was a luxury good, but that’s tangential to today’s topic.

With wealth comes leisure time, and leisure culture. In Aquitaine and wider Occitania, this expresses as troubadours: poet musicians writing about love, and specifically fin amor. According to a Harvard article on troubadour poetry, in the early 12th century “the corpus of written texts in Occitan was larger than the corpus of texts in Old French.” At this time we also have the man generally identified identified as the first troubadour: Guillaume (William), Duke of Aquitaine and Comte de Poitou. And Guillaume’s granddaughter? Eleanor.

Because politics, young Eleanor is married to the French heir, Louis VII, in 1137. It doesn’t go well, and the marriage is eventually annulled on grounds of consanguinity, which is Latin for “I never would have married my third cousin if I’d known she was only going to produce daughters .” Louis doesn’t get a son until his third wife, but Eleanor immediately turns around and marries Henry of England and they have five sons and three daughters. The sons include King Richard the Lionheart and Prince John, who you may remember from the Robin Hood stories.

We’re deep in Merry Olde England here, but we have a French speaking King (see also Normans) and a French queen from what was, at the time, the most culturally advanced place in France. This is still an echo of the Norman invasion, William the Conqueror, etc, and French language and influence have been infusing into Britain for several generations now. If you’re aware that the English language has a lot of French words from this time, you can add in that English literary traditions are also an Anglo-French fusion. Jumping from a culinary analogy to a scientific one, I invite you to think of Darwin’s finches.

The idea of fin amor which arrived with Eleanor of Aquitaine and her Occitan-speaking children continues to develop in the British Isles.

While we’re legitimizing French aristocracy ruling England, some guy named Geoffrey writes up a story about a Welsh king in Latin, it propagates in French for a couple hundred years and then in the 15th century a dude named Thomas collects and translates the French stories into something he calls “The Whole Book of King Arthur and His Noble Knights of the Round Table”. You may have heard it by the title the publisher used: Le Morte d’Arthur.

And who, I ask you, are the most famous romantic couple in the Arthurian legends?

Lancelot and Guinevere, of course. But they’re not married: Guinevere is married to Arthur. If you’re familiar with Arthurian legends, you have the heart of the English language version of courtly love encapsulated right there: man dedicates himself to woman who social rules have assigned to another and spends his time undertaking heroic tasks to impress her/earn his way into her bed. Michael Bryson and Arpi Movsesian, in their 2017 book Love and Its Critics, open a chapter on fin amor with these words:

Start with adultery. Start, at least, with the idea of adultery. Breaking the rules, doing something you are not supposed to do. Doing someone you are not supposed to do. This is the key idea that allows us to understand a literary tradition that stretches from the troubadours through Petrarch to Shakespeare, Milton, and beyond. Illicit desire—whether celebrated in the passionate poems of medieval Occitania, or sublimated in the poetic tradition of idealized females worshiped by abject males in Dante, Petrarch and Sidney—is central to the energy of Shakespeare and the poetic tradition that follows in his wake.

Bryson and Movsesian go on to critique earlier interpretations of courtly love. I’ll list them here, but the interpretation is that they have all looked to sources other than the Occitanian troubadours to define courtly love, therefore leading to thoughts which do not align with Occitanian fin amor. This is where we finally get to the “flawed but influential” interpretation from C.S. Lewis.

Gaston Paris (1881) invented the term amour courtois, but focused on Northern French poetry, particularly the northern trouvére Chrétien de Troyes and his poem the Knight in the Cart about Lancelot and Guinevere, which isn’t even the most representative of Chrétien’s work.
C.S. Lewis (1936) views courtly love as a feudalization of love, wherein the knight pledges fealty to his lady-love. “As Lewis reads them, each of these sources are fixated on rules, codes, official judgments, and elaborate enactments of dominance and submission that parody the rituals of Catholicism.” Lewis, too, spends little time on the Occitan troubadours, preferring to quote Ovid, Chrétien de Troyes, Andreas Capellanus, and Thomas Aquinas.
Jacques Lacan, mid-century French Freudian psychoanalyst “dismisses the work of the troubadours as anything other than “a poetic exercise, a fashion of playing with a certain number of idealizing and conventional themes, which could have no actual concrete reality”.”
D.W. Roberton (1968) dismisses the idea of courtly love entirely, but does so by insisting that it is cultural concept of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, thereby also erasing the contribution of the medieval Occitanians.

Robertson’s critique is quite entertaining and worth a read.

We are told further that the lady involved should be of much higher station than the lover, that she should be located at a distance, that the lover should tremble in her presence, and that he should obey her slightest wish. He should, moreover, fall sick with love, faint when he sees a lock of the lady’s hair, preserve his chastity, and perform great exploits to attract the attention of the lady. All this seems to me a terrible nuisance, and hardly the kind of thing that Henry II or Edward III would get involved in.

But what do the Occitanian troubadours actually say about love? And how does it connect to genre romance if, being centered around adultery, it breaks the cheating rule? Tune in next week for part two on fin amor!

*My college roommate is now an Ivy League professor of Medieval Music. Which is convenient when I need to be pointed in the right direction on topics which center around medieval love songs.