Aristocratic Love

The writing about love in the later Middle Ages which has survived is remarkably homogeneous and remarkably European. A few songs and folk tales which seem to be a part of an English oral tradition do survive (see pp. 37, 127). But it was in Europe that human love had been ennobled into art, and some of the most striking and sophisti­cated Middle English poetry is written within the European tradi­tion of fin amour or ‘courtly love’, either in texts wholly concerned with love, or as part of the Chivalric Romances I will be discussing in the next chapter. What this tradition provided was an intellectu­ally and imaginatively rich alternative to the strictly Christian valu­ing of passionate human love only when directed towards God or the family. Instead, philosophers, allegorists and poets had built on pagan and semi-pagan sources to build a proto-humanist tradition which honoured human passion for its own sake and as a mirror of a divine (but not specifically Christian) love. This was an approach which would develop into Renaissance humanism in the Italy of the later fifteenth century. I have called this chapter ‘Aristocratic Love’ partly with reference to the lovers within these texts, who are gener­ally (if vaguely) ‘noble’, to distinguish their stories clearly from the sexual comedy associated with the ‘low-life’ characters discussed in chapter 4. But I also want to indicate that these final two chapters will discuss the reading of the highest classes, the wealthy gentry and the aristocrats, which included the men and women who commissioned and purchased lavish manuscripts of Saints’ Lives and Romances and the works of Chaucer, Gower and their followers. This group, as I will be explaining (pp. 239–40 below), was itself diverse, and of course there was no reason why texts about love should not also be enjoyed by people of a lower social status; Absalom the Town Clerk in the Miller’s Tale was clearly modelling his wooing on fin amour. And this sophisticated readership was destined to become vastly more diverse with the bringing of printing to England by Caxton in 1475.