Boase Review

8/2/2019 Boase Review

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Medieval Academy of America

The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love: A Critical Study of European Scholarship by RogerBoaseReview by: H. A. KellySpeculum, Vol. 54, No. 2 (Apr., 1979), pp. 338-342Published by: Medieval Academy of AmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2854981 .

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33838 Reviewseviews"Deudas y pagos del Maestre de Santiago D. Pelay Perez Correa" is an extension ofthe previous monograph. There we learned that this particular maestre,ruler of theorder from 1248 to 1275, had difficulties in paying his debts to Italian bankers. Inthis article we learn that he did not discriminate, as he procrastinated in his paymentsto men, women, Jews, Frenchmen, Castilians, and Catalans.Continuing with Pelay Perez Correa, his next article, "Establecimientos de la Ordende Santiago en el siglo XIII," stresses the importance of the rules and ordinancespassed by the general chapter of the order in the thirteenth century. In "La Ordende Santiago en Asturias," he inventories the Order's property in that area and alsoattempts to identify individual members in charge. Although the author includesuseful tables, maps, and documents, which provide excellent information on prices,wages, population, and income, the data is not fully exploited.The last article "La Orden de Santiago en Francia," follows the same line as the

previous piece. Benito Ruano traces the presence of Santiago in France from the firstprivilege granted by Philip II in 1183 to the sixteenth century, what places the orderheld, and some of the members in charge. Following F. Gutton, La Chevaleriemilitaireen Espagne: L'Ordrede Santiago (Paris, 1972), Benito Ruano points to the relationshipbetween the locations controlled by the Order and the road to Compostella. It is,perhaps, confusing to suggest that the property held by the order north of thePyreenes was in France. Although most of their possessions were located in whattoday is France or in what in the Middle Ages was under theoretical or actualsuzerainty of the French crown, the Normandy of Henry II or the Gascony ofEdward III were hardly French.In this last article as in the previous selections, Benito Ruano's main contributionsreside in his emphasis on the international character of the order, the identificationof individual members, and the always useful edition and publication of most of therelevant documents. This is a book of interest for students of the Military Order ofSantiago, written with love by a scholar who often refers to his topic as "our order."TEOFII.O F. Ruiz

Brooklyn College, CUNY

ROGER BOASE, The Origin and Meaning of CourtlyLove: A Critical Study of EuropeanScholarship. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press; Totowa, N.J.:Rowman and Littlefield, 1977. Pp. xii, 171; 8 plates. $13.50.EVERYONEhas heard of courtly love, and everyone knows that it appears quitesuddenly at the end of the nineteenth century in France. The term amourcourtoiswashit upon by Gaston Paris to characterize the kind of love first found in Chretien'sLancelot. After Paris's time, the phrase came to be widely used to refer to medieval"romantic" love in general, and in particular to the conventions and practices al-legedly discernible in early troubadour poetry. Roger Boase approves of and defendsthis usage in the book under review.His first and longest chapter (pp. 5-61) is a "Chronological Survey of Courtly LoveScholarship," extending basically from the sixteenth century through the 1960s, andincluding American works, despite the book's subtitle. In his second chapter, "Theo-ries on the Origin of Courtly Love" (pp. 62-99), he proceeds thematically rather thanchronologically, and lists characteristics of seven categories of explanations:Hispano-Arabic, Chivalric-Matriarchal, Crypto-Cathar, Neoplatonic, Bernardine-

"Deudas y pagos del Maestre de Santiago D. Pelay Perez Correa" is an extension ofthe previous monograph. There we learned that this particular maestre,ruler of theorder from 1248 to 1275, had difficulties in paying his debts to Italian bankers. Inthis article we learn that he did not discriminate, as he procrastinated in his paymentsto men, women, Jews, Frenchmen, Castilians, and Catalans.Continuing with Pelay Perez Correa, his next article, "Establecimientos de la Ordende Santiago en el siglo XIII," stresses the importance of the rules and ordinancespassed by the general chapter of the order in the thirteenth century. In "La Ordende Santiago en Asturias," he inventories the Order's property in that area and alsoattempts to identify individual members in charge. Although the author includesuseful tables, maps, and documents, which provide excellent information on prices,wages, population, and income, the data is not fully exploited.The last article "La Orden de Santiago en Francia," follows the same line as theprevious piece. Benito Ruano traces the presence of Santiago in France from the firstprivilege granted by Philip II in 1183 to the sixteenth century, what places the orderheld, and some of the members in charge. Following F. Gutton, La Chevaleriemilitaireen Espagne: L'Ordrede Santiago (Paris, 1972), Benito Ruano points to the relationshipbetween the locations controlled by the Order and the road to Compostella. It is,perhaps, confusing to suggest that the property held by the order north of thePyreenes was in France. Although most of their possessions were located in whattoday is France or in what in the Middle Ages was under theoretical or actualsuzerainty of the French crown, the Normandy of Henry II or the Gascony ofEdward III were hardly French.In this last article as in the previous selections, Benito Ruano's main contributionsreside in his emphasis on the international character of the order, the identificationof individual members, and the always useful edition and publication of most of therelevant documents. This is a book of interest for students of the Military Order ofSantiago, written with love by a scholar who often refers to his topic as "our order."

TEOFII.O F. RuizBrooklyn College, CUNY

ROGER BOASE, The Origin and Meaning of CourtlyLove: A Critical Study of EuropeanScholarship. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press; Totowa, N.J.:Rowman and Littlefield, 1977. Pp. xii, 171; 8 plates. $13.50.EVERYONEhas heard of courtly love, and everyone knows that it appears quitesuddenly at the end of the nineteenth century in France. The term amourcourtoiswashit upon by Gaston Paris to characterize the kind of love first found in Chretien'sLancelot. After Paris's time, the phrase came to be widely used to refer to medieval"romantic" love in general, and in particular to the conventions and practices al-legedly discernible in early troubadour poetry. Roger Boase approves of and defendsthis usage in the book under review.His first and longest chapter (pp. 5-61) is a "Chronological Survey of Courtly LoveScholarship," extending basically from the sixteenth century through the 1960s, andincluding American works, despite the book's subtitle. In his second chapter, "Theo-ries on the Origin of Courtly Love" (pp. 62-99), he proceeds thematically rather thanchronologically, and lists characteristics of seven categories of explanations:Hispano-Arabic, Chivalric-Matriarchal, Crypto-Cathar, Neoplatonic, Bernardine-


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Reviews 339Marianist, Spring Folk Ritual, and Feudal-Sociological. He analyzes several aspects orvariants of each theory, and points out strengths and weaknesses. The third chapter,"Theories on the Meaning of Courtly Love" (pp. 100-116), is constructed similarly;here he deals with five categories, namely, Collective Fantasy, Play Phenomenon,Courtly Experience, Stylistic Convention, and Critical Fallacy. There follow a conclu-sion and two appendixes concerning the Arabic theory of origins. The selectedbibliography is ten pages longer than chapter three, and lists a great many works notdealt with in the text.It is as a history of literary criticism that the book is most successful, especially inillustrating changing attitudes towards the troubadours and their poetry. I foundmany of the scholars Boase deals with unfamiliar, and his findings are often surpris-ing. He shows, for instance, that the theory of the Spanish Muslim origins of theProvencal poetic traditions was set forth as early as the sixteenth century. Variationsof the theory were broached in later times, until it went into eclipse in the latter partof the nineteenth century, only to be revived in the second decade of the twentieth.Again, he finds that Gabriele Rossetti in 1832 was the first to suggest a Catharistorigin for some of the medieval notions of love.But because Boase gives the name of Courtly Love to all of the various "codes" ortheories of love that he discusses, he produces ambiguities that constitute a seriousflaw in the work. He does not systematically summarize the studies that he deals with:he does not always give us the "content" or scope of the love conventions or doctrinesunder discussion, or state the literary works (which poems of which poets) or thegeographical regions or particular times that each scholar primarily bases his theoryupon. The result is that Boase often gives the impression of agreement on basicassumptions where in fact no such agreement exists. He tells us, for instance, thatJean Frappier in Romania 1972 clearly demonstrates that "Courtly Love is not animaginary construct which critics have superimposed on medieval literature" (p. 112);but he does not tell us that Frappier discerns several kinds of love in twelfth-centuryFrench literature, and that he dislikes the term amour courtois.At the end of his study, Boase admits that "theories of origin are based onpreconceptions about the meaning of Courtly Love, yet the meaning of the term hasnever been satisfactorily defined" (p. 123). Why then have the chapter on originsbefore the chapter on meaning? And why discuss theories of what the "phenome-non" means without delimiting the meaning of the term in each case? He acknowl-edges on the first page that we are not dealing with an "it" but rather with "lots ofits": "Courtly Love has been subjected to a bewildering variety of uses and defini-tions." But he seems to think that there is a common denominator in all of them, andhe justifies the continued use of the term because "medieval love poets consciouslywrote within a literary tradition, inspired by a particular ideal of 'true love' whichmotivated their conduct," because critics have studied "this literary and social phe-nomenon" well before the time of Gaston Paris, and because most critics agree that"modern European poetry begins in twelfth-century Provence, and that the conceptof love implicit in troubadour poetry is utterly different from that which was ex-pressed by the poets of ancient Rome." It is clear that Boase agrees with this majorityvote of the critics, and that he is usually thinking primarily of early Provencal poetry(in globo), though he also speaks of "the subsequent development of Courtly Love" (p.126), and can use fifteenth-century sources to "prove that Courtly Love was notinvented by Gaston Paris" (pp. 113-114).Boase's treatment of Gaston Paris provides a good example of how he can bemisled by his own presuppositions about what is meant by Courtly Love. After


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340 Reviewssummarizing the four aspects of amour courtois listed by Paris in his 1883 Romaniaarticle, he says that Paris finds this love first appearing in northern French literaturein Chretien's Lancelot (p. 24). By specifying northernFrance, Boase indicates his beliefthat Paris considered Provencal poetry to be included in the same category (thissupposition is shared by many other critics, including Frappier). But in fact Parisheld that the love manifested in the poetry of the south of France was only one of thecontributing factors to amour courtois; troubadour love conventions differed fromamour courtoisprimarily in not being codified and in not emphasizing service throughphysical prowess. The codification, Paris says, was inspired by Ovid, and the "proofof valor" aspect of amour courtois derived principally from the knightly etiquette or"galanterie chevaleresque" that first appeared in the English court of Henry I. All ofthese elements, in Paris's view, were fused under the influence of Marie de Cham-pagne and her circle. (Boase, by the way, reports John Benton's rejection "of thetheory that the court of Champagne acted as a point of literary interchange betweenthe north and south of France" without passing judgment on it [p. 47], but later [p.66] he seems to accept Marie's authorship of the letter of 1 May 1174 cited byAndrew the Chaplain.)One of the features that Paris found in the love celebrated by the troubadours isthat it was illicit, a point that he repeats at the end of his review of Alfred Jeanroy'sLes originesde la poesielyriqueen France au moyenage (1889) in the Journal des savants for1891 and 1892: "La poesie lyrique courtoise ne c&elbre amais l'amour qu'en dehorsdu mariage ou plut6t contre le mariage." But in speaking here of poesiecourtoiseParishas not advanced to the point of identifying troubadour love with the amourcourtoisetchevaleresqueof the Lancelot, as one might suppose from Boase's summary on p. 87:"Courtly Love was extraconjugal, and generally adulterous (Paris 1891-92)"; ratherParis is simply distinguishing aristocratic court poetry from the popular May Daysongs which (he thinks) inspired it.The "morality" of medieval love is one of the most widely discussed and controver-sial aspects of courtly-love theories, but Boase is unaccountably vague and noncom-mittal on this subject. He says that the attractiveness of the Catharist theory of originsis considerably diminished "if, as many critics now agree, Courtly Love was notessentially extraconjugal" (p. 80), but he does not name the critics or tell us theirarguments. It seems that the first opposition to Paris's antimatrimonial assessment ofthe lyrics came in Joseph Bedier's review of Jeanroy in the Revue des deux mondesforMay 1896 (Boase's date of 1892 on p. 25 is a misprint). Boase uses some of hisarguments (though without identifying them as Bedier's) to show that "the antima-trimonial character of May Day has little bearing on Courtly Love"; and he admitsthat "it was by no means always the case" that the poet was addressing a marriedwoman (p. 89). But Boase clearly believes that it was generally the case that she wasmarried or at least unmarriageable (because of her high rank), and he takes no noticeof Bedier's fundamental objection: "Les chansons courtoises sont generalement assezvagues pour se preter a toutes les varietes de situation qu'offre in effet la vie, amourcoupable ou non, heureux ou contrarie, pour un femme libre ou engagee en d'autresliens" (p. 171, n. 1).Boase favors a feudal-sociological theory of origins that presupposes "a need forconventions of love outside marriage" (p. 125). He also assumes the prevalence of "apatron-client relationship" between the lady and her lover. However, William D.Paden, "The Troubadour's Lady: Her Marital Status and Social Rank," Studies inPhilology 72 (1975), 28-50, warns us against being misled by the metaphorof feudalsubservience. Paden and his seminarists find that in only a comparatively few cases


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Reviews 341(6% of the 500 texts studied) is the poet's lady literally portrayed as enjoying highrank; and there are even fewer cases (3%) in which adulterous love is clearly at issueand taken seriously. Furthermore, as Douglas Kelly has pointed out in SPECULUM2(1977), 947, the typical attributes of lover and beloved seem to have been sexuallyinterchangeable, and it is often impossible to tell whether a man or woman isspeaking in a given poem.Boase also favors the Hispano-Arabic theory of origins, which he finds to becomplementary to the feudal-sociological analysis. But though he presents a quiteplausible case for interaction between Christians and Muslims on the level of thecomposers and performers of songs (pp. 69 and 72), the case that he makes forindebtedness to Arabic traditions for specific themes or combinations of themes isunconvincing; and I am moved to agree with the judgment of Samuel Stern whichBoase cites: "There is reason to doubt whether even a single element in the poetry ofthe troubadours is due to the influence of Arabic poetry" (p. 41).In arguing his case, Boase does not allow for the possibility of other explanations.One of the ideas which he thinks the Arabs originated is the affinity between love andhate, and his first example is an excerpt that he found in one of Peter Dronke's booksfrom Richard of St. Victor's Tractatus de quattuor gradibus violentae caritatis (p. 134).But a look at the treatise itself and at Richard's other works on love will reveal that hewas almost totally dependent on biblical sources, especially the passionate love lyricsof the Song of Songs. When we think of Catullus's "Odi et amo" and Ovid's "Odero, sipotero; si non, invitus amabo" (Amores3.11.35), we can also think of the possibility ofclassical influence, or even suspect that such feelings come naturally to the humanspirit (whether "normal" or neurotic). The same is true of other "paradoxical virtues"of love. (I should note that the passages that Boase gathers on pp. 137-139 areexamples not of paradoxes or oxymora, but of love's power to convert a person fromvice to virtue.)Boase sometimes adduces influences under the Hispano-Arabic category that infact bypass the Spanish or even the Arabic world. For instance, the Greco-Arabicdoctrine of the love-malady turns out to be Arabo-Italic in the case of ConstantineAfricanus (pp. 68, 72), or simply Greco-Latin in the case of Oribasius (p. 132). Boasedoes not explain how he knows that medieval Byzantium "inherited the lyricaltradition of the Arabs" (p. 108).

The nature of Boase's enterprise has made him largely dependent on secondarysources, and he is therefore usually better when summarizing than when judging, formany of the questions he wishes to answer require a greater familiarity with primarysources than he has. He is particularly weak on the subject of devotion to the VirginMary. He concludes from St. Bernard's opposition to the feast of the ImmaculateConception, as cited by Denis de Rougemont, that "St. Bernard himself did notapprove of the new cult of Mary" (p. 84). This of the "great doctor of Mary"! Heestablishes the newness of the cult, which reached its height "only after 1230" (p. 85,citing Jeanroy), by pointing out that "the Virgin Mary occupied a secondary positionin early Christianity," for "it was only in the Gnostic Ophite sects that the VirginMary was actually worshipped as a goddess" (p. 98, n. 59, quoting E. O. James). Arewe to conclude that she was more generally worshipped as a goddess in later times?He points to her importance in orthodox circles by referring to the ecumenicalcouncils of 325 and 431 (pp. 98-99). If this is not early enough to qualify as "earlyChristianity," it is surely early enough to give Marian devotion plenty of time todevelop. We can in fact find evidence of a romanticized cult, based largely on theSong of Songs, in the Office of the Assumption in the earliest extant "Roman"


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342 Reviewsantiphonary, that of ninth-century Compiegne. When Boase cites H. P. J. M.Ahsmann, Le Culte de la sainte Viergeet la litteratureranpaise profane du moyenage (ca.1929), p. 110, as his authority for saying that "scarcely any poetry was dedicated tothe Virgin Mary before 1150" (p. 85), he is simply mistaken. What Ahsmann istalking about (on p. 111, not 110) is vernacular Provencal poetry; and he goes on inthe next sentence to say that sometimes these early troubadour poets borrowedepithets from ancient Marian hymns to apply to their ladies.Boase classifies under the rubric of Critical Fallacy those scholars who object to thevarious theories treated elsewhere in his book. But none of them, I think, would wishto hold that there was nothing novel or unique about troubadour love poetry. Thesame, of course, can be said about any body of poetry written at any time, not simplybecause every poem and every poet is unique, but also because every place and everyage is subject to peculiar influences. Everyone must admit that there was a greatemphasis upon love between the sexes among the Provencal poets. But the compo-nents and "specific differences" of their themes and conventions will have to bespelled out with greater care than has usually been done in the past. Peter Dronke,whom Boase places in a separate category (Courtly Experience) for stressing thesimilarities between medieval fine amor and the love conventions of other times andplaces, has recently pointed to the dissimilarities that exist not only among differenttroubadours but also among the different poems of a single troubadour. He con-cludes: "I believe that the more closely one studies any group of poetrically giftedtroubadours (there were of course dull ones, too), the more their artistic and humanindividuality will emerge, and phrases such as 'the courtly code' will be seen as ascholars' construct based not on the lyrics, but rather on some theoretical passages inromances and didactic verse, and most of all perhaps on the jesting Latin treatise ofAndreas Capellanus (which belongs to another tradition entirely). This construct, bysuggesting that troubadours shared a uniform ethic, obscures the individual lyrics farmore than it illuminates them" (Times Literary Supplement, 12 September 1975, p.1023). But if one cannot agree with Boase that theje ne sais quoi of Courtly Love was"a comprehensive cultural phenomenon: a literary movement, an ideology, an ethicalsystem, a style of life," and so on (pp. 129-130), one need not despair completely.Though most lyrics can fit any of a number of narrative scenarios or ethical view-points and therefore cannot be definitively placed in a grand system, we may be ableto arrive at some "lower-case generalities," and speak, for instance, of prevalentmoods of a given group of poets or speakers in certain situations reflecting particularcircumstances of their society. Taken together, such conclusions may serve to charac-terize not only the variety but also the singularity of Provencal love poetry as a whole,and of the love poetry of other generations and cultures.I am sorry to have stressed so many negative features of Boase's study. In manyways he has performed a difficult task well, and his book should be read (withcaution) by everyone interested in the subject. He does not claim to have come to anydefinitive conclusions, and he recommends that dissenting readers form their ownjudgments. He frequently decides that more research is needed, and this is a conclu-sion to which no one can take exception.

H. A. KELLYUniversity of California, Los Angeles

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