Medieval Lyrics 12th-14th Century
Lyrics
Verses sung to an accompanying tune
Expression of personal emotion
Most common themes: love, especially courtly love (early version of romantic love), religion, nature (often all three intertwined)
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
Love is an overwhelming emotion that promises ecstatic bliss, but also causes painful yearning
The beloved is the embodiment of all virtue and 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
Historically derived from Arabic poetry: love is ardent, chaste, and incapacitating to the point of death
The courtly love lyric became 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
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