Courtly Love—l'amour courtois

Identified an extravagantly artificial and stylized relationship—a forbidden affair that was characterized by five main attributes. Courtly love originated with the so-called troubadours of the late eleventh century. Promoting a suave new form of paganism, these colorful figures sought to redefine traditional Christian ideals of love, marriage, manhood, virtue, and femininity.

1. Aristocratic- courtly love was practiced by noble lords and ladies; took place in the royal palace or court

2. Ritualistic- couples engaged in a courtly relationship conventionally exchanged gifts and tokens of their affair. The lady was wooed according to elaborate conventions of etiquette and was the constant recipient of songs, poems, bouquets, sweet favors, and ceremonial gestures. For all these gentle and painstaking attentions on the part of her lover, she only return a short hint of approval, a mere shadow of affection. After all, she was the “mistress” of the affair, he was but her lowly servant.

3. Secret-Courtly lovers were pledged to strict secrecy. The foundation for their affair—indeed the source of its special aura and electricity—was that the rest of the world was excluded. In effect, the lovers composed a universe unto themselves—a special world with its own places, rules, codes, and commandments.

4. Adulterous- "fine love" was extramarital. Indeed one its principal attractions was that it offered an escape from the dull routines and boring confinements of noble marriage (which was typically little more than a political or economic alliance for the purpose of producing offspring). The troubadours themselves scoffed at marriage, regarding it as glorified religious swindle. In its place they exalted their own ideal of a disciplined and decorous carnal relationship whose ultimate objective was not crude physical satisfaction, but a sublime and sensual intimacy.

5. Literary- Before it established itself as a popular real-life activity, courtly love first gained attention as a subject and them in imaginative literature. Ardent knights, that is to say, and their passionately adored ladies were already popular figures in song and fable before they began spawning a host of imitators in the palace halls and boudoirs of medieval Europe.