courtly love

courtly love. The term ‘amour courtois’ was coined by Gaston Paris in 1883 in the course of an essay on the Lancelot of Chrétien de Troyes, to describe the conception of love developed by the Provençal troubadours in the 12th cent. Its relation of lover to adored lady is modelled on the dependence of feudal follower on his lord; the love itself was a religious passion, ennobling and ever increasing and unfulfilled, which meant that the love was usually pre-marital or extra-marital. A code of practice for courtly lovers, De Arte Honeste Amandi (c.1185) was written by Andreas Capellanus. From its beginnings in Provence the writing of this kind of poetry had spread to northern France and to the German Minnesingers and epic by 1200; the most influential works in the 13th cent. were the Roman de la rose (Guillaume de Lorris, c.1230, and Jean de Meun, c.1275), and the lyric poems of the dolce stil nuovo in Italy at the end of the century such as those in Dante's Vita Nuova. Though the elements of courtly love are found in many places in medieval and Renaissance English literature, it is never the central theme of medieval English poetry, probably because it only reached England in the period of its decadence, after the mid-13th cent. and mostly as presented through the sceptical satire of writers such as Jean de Meun.