Medieval Lyrics 12th-14th Century
Lyrics
Verses sung to an accompanying tune
Expression of personal emotion
Common themes: love, especially courtly love (early version of romantic love), religion, nature
The Development of Courtly Love Poetry in the Middle Ages
11th Century: Arab love poetry: passionate love
12th Century: Troubadour poetry (using Arab poetry as a source)
13th Century: Love and religion
Troubadours
Attached to various courts in the south of France
Wrote almost entirely about sexual love
Developed the concept and practice of courtly love
Central elements of courtly love
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Love is an overwhelming emotion- promises ecstatic bliss, but causes painful yearning
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The beloved is the embodiment of all virtue, yet often remains cool and distant, even
unaware of the lover’s sufferings
Love is an ennobling emotion – it can be fully experienced only by gentlemen and ladies
and it causes them both to behave in exalted and selfless ways
Love is ardent, chaste, and incapacitating to the point of death
Not merely a private statement but an expression of a way of life elegantly mannered
and knowingly sophisticated
Described values that derived from noble society (courtliness) intensity of feeling
matched elevation of social standing – many of the poets from the nobility
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Courtly Love and women
The role of women in the Middle Ages: Eve/Mary dualism
Eve:
Arranged marriages, often while the children were infants
Married woman the ward of her husband – who could punish her physically
Great deal of misogynistic literature: women were inferior and sinful (Eve)
Mary: However, the Virgin Mary embodies ideal feminine traits, immaculate conception (no
sex), interceded between humans and God for salvation
Effect on courtly love poetry: curious mixture of love and religion, sex and purity
Dante and Courtly Love
strong interest in the way in which intense love could lead to religious truth
verbal and metrical virtuosity
Style called by Dante the “dolce stil nuovo” – sweet new manner of writing: poetic
virtuosity expressed the intensity and authenticity of the lover’s feelings and the lady
opened her admirer to a love that was genuinely religious
Some rules of courtly love
Lover cannot control his loving
Lady is in control of her lover
Lady is cold, cruel and ungenerous
He suffers endless desire without consummation
Typical courtly love motifs
Love for a married person
Seeming unattainable
Love strikes like an arrow through the eye
Exquisite behavior by all lovers
Total self-sacrifice of wife
Typical subject matter
The lady is wooed, usually at a distance, by a knight who fights in her honor, calls himself her
“servant” and suffers insomnia, anorexia, chills, fever and other symptoms that he insists will be his
death if he does not obtain her “mercy”
Typical metaphor or conceit
Based on ideal love for a seemingly unattainable object
The lady is a distant star; the lover is the storm-tossed ship that tries to steer by the star
“The Crusader’s Farewell”
by Thibaud, King of Navarre (1201-1253)
Lady, the fates command, and I must go –
Leaving the pleasant land so dear to me;
Here my heart suffered many a heavy blow
But what is left to love, thus leaving thee?
Alas: that cruel land beyond the sea
Why thus dividing many a faithful heart,
Never again from pain and sorrow free
Never again to meet when thus they part?
I see not, when they presence bright I leave
How health, or joy, or peace can be my lot;
Ne’er yet my spirit found such cause to grieve
As now in leaving thee: and if thy thought
Of me in absence should be sorrow fraught
Oft will my heart repentant turn to thee
Dwelling, in fruitless wishes, on this spot,
And all the gracious words here said to me.
O gracious God: to thee I bend my knee
For thy sake yielding all I love and prize;
And O how might must that influence be,
That steals me thus from all my cherished joys!
Here, ready, then, myself surrendering,
Prepared to serve thee; I submit; and ne’er
To one so faithful could I service bring,
So kind a master, so beloved and dear.
And strong my ties – my grief unspeakable!
Grief, all my choicest treasures to resign;
Yet stronger still the affections that impel
My heart toward him the God whose love is mine
That holy love, how beautiful! How strong!
Even wisdom’s favorite sons take refuge there;
‘Tis the redeeming gem that shines among
Man’s darkest thoughts – forever bright and fair.
In Norton Text:
“Love Song” page 1800
“The Wound of Love” page 1807
“The Art of Love” page 1808
“Love and Nobility” page 1813