Jean de Meun’s thirteenth-century version of theRoman de la Roseopens with a standard clerical condemnation of courtly love as a kind of incurable torment that enflames the hearts of fools and makes them suffer unrequited desire.¹ Jean’s spokesperson, Lady Reason, further condemns the folly of this consuming love when it becomes a form of covetousness, when the love of bodily pleasures becomes confused with the insatiable love of riches.² Different from the reciprocal affection of Ciceronian friendship that Reason condones, the pursuit of physical pleasure and passion more often resembles the obsessive pursuit of tangible material gain, the...

Scholars who have discussed, debated, critiqued, censured, and often maligned the concept of courtly love since its inception in 1883 tend to agree, whatever their other disputes, on two things: that a literary work embodying the ideology of courtly love will necessarily depict, in some way, both a putatively heterosexual love—generally the unrequited or otherwise vexed passion of an aristocratic male suitor for a beautiful lady—and, secondarily, that the problematic passion will be situated within an idealized public sphere of refined court life in the early Middle Ages. Most scholars of courtly love would not readily characterize the...

A remarkable passage in Gautier d’Arras’sIlle et Galeron(ca. 1167–78) provides a particularly cogent example of the way sewing, like female attire itself, balances tenuously on the line between empowering and entrapping medieval heroines. Having fallen helplessly and hopelessly in love with the tale’s hero, Ille, the heroine, Ganor, decries her fate by explaining that she has been sewn into her clothing by the artful stitches of the Goddess of Love. Amours, here figured as a woman, binds the unsuspecting female lover in the trap of courtly garments, carefully laced and woven with dolorous threads that seem at...

In Robert de Blois’s thirteenth-century taleFloris et Lyriope, the standard plot of Narcissus’s demise, in which falling in love means overvaluing one’s own beauty and plunging to a vainglorious and prideful death, provides the frame around another tale of courtly coupling in which clothes, not beauty, make all the difference. To be sure, Narcissus explains the danger of beauty at the end of this text:

C’est la chose que plus m’ocist.

Puis que je l’ain, amer me doit.

Ne cuit pas que ma beautez soit

Tele que lo dongier me face

De moi amer. vv. 1682–86

(It’s the...

Old French tales of courtly coupling typically contain cast-off phrases that situate the medieval act of falling in love as a privileged inheritor of the prelapsarian moment of falling into sin. In these instances, the biblical fall into gendered, sexualized flesh is rewritten as an elevation into pleasurable, heterosexual courtly passion. The thirteenth-centuryRoman de la poire, which provides the most thorough rewriting of the Adam and Eve story, announces that:

Des puis qu’Adan mordi la pome,

ne fumes tel poire trovee;

bien orroiz com s’est puis provee.

En la poire mors sanz congié.

…

Tel force avoit qu’ele pooit...

The first volume of the thirteenth-century Lancelot-Grail Cycle, theEstoire del Saint Graal, contains a curious story of King Mordrain’s doll. It is, at one and the same time, a story of conversion and a love story, both set within a larger tale of the transfer of the relic-like Holy Grail from the Middle East to Great Britain by the Chosen Quester, Galahad. The conversion story of King Mordrain caught the imagination of theEstoire’s anonymous author, who extends the earlier account provided in theQueste del Saint Graal, committing fully one-fifth of theEstoireto chronicling the Saracen king’s...

The mid-twelfth-century tale ofFloire et Blanchefloris a deceptively simple love story. To judge from the protagonists’ names alone, Floire and Blancheflor appear at first to incarnate the quintessential innocent delight and natural simplicity of love’s garden: two flowers, male and female, joined from childhood in sweet embrace. They seem a perfectly balanced metaphor for the flowering of heterosexual desire in the western courtly tradition. But they are not. Blancheflor, born of the kidnapped daughter of a French knight on pilgrimage to Compostela, falls in love with the Muslim king’s son in a hybrid locus both western and pagan:...