Dante

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Introduction

Tristan and Iseult, Lancelot and Guinevere, Aeneas and Dido, Troilus and Criseyde, Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and Laura... Intense love of man and woman is a central subject in European literature. As the names above indicate, too, there is no clear distinction made between people who had historical existence and those who have only ever existed in imaginary fictions. This paper traces the development of literary portrayals of love during the High Middle Ages, from the 12th to the 14th centuries. Modern European love literature began with crafted lyrics and fictional narratives about power and oppression, identity and difference, but later we find writers who claim to be writing about their personal experiences.

In the middle ages and the renaissance, the male lover is usually the central figure; in many cases the woman does not even realize how much she is loved. In many works, the initial focus is on the conflicts in the male psyche. The ideal of love looked for, if not always found, is a situation where the woman and the man experience identically strong feelings for one another. Once the male has expressed his feelings, the central conflict within the woman centers on how she should respond, given her position in society.

Society is present because the women and men represented in this literature, and for whom it was written, are economically and politically powerful, part of the ruling class usually, and therefore concerned with their fragile reputation. Conflict between the private and the public provokes a demand for secrecy. The lovers find themselves isolated, enclosed in a private world of intense and conflictual feelings; this aspect of romantic love may even be partly responsible for the development of western individualism.

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The Troubadours

It began in southern France when some poets began to wrestle with the Problem of the Feminine. In the following centuries writers in all the European countries began to write about the relationship between men and women. Some produced 'love lyrics' while many others wrote narrative fiction. These fictional narratives about knights, ladies, and love, are usually called 'romances'. It is because love is so important in the romances that any intense and socially troubling form of love came to be called 'romantic love.'

Around 1100, Guilhem IX was Count of Poitiers and Duke of Aquitaine, in south-western France. He was a poet, too, and a vigorous soldier, who was not accustomed to control his sexual appetites; he wrote a number of poems in which he tells how women met along the road become his sexual partners in a very 'unromantic' although sometimes rather exhausting way. But one day he wrote a new poem, Farai chansoneta nueva, and European love literature has not been the same since:

I shall make a new song

before the wind blows and it freezes and rains.

My lady (ma dona) is trying and testing me,

to find out how much I love her.

Well, no matter what quarrel she makes,

she will not loose me from her bond.

Rather I become her servant, surrender to her,

so she can write my name in her contract.

Now don't go thinking I must be drunk

if I love my good lady;

for without her I cannot live...

In another of Guilhem's poems we find almost all the other themes that go to make up what used to be called 'courtly love' (the expression is not used today, it is often called fin'amors instead), and which became 'Petrarchanism' in the renaissance:

Already rejoicing, I begin to love,

(...)

for I am made better by one who is, beyond dispute

the best a man ever saw or heard.

(...)

By her joy a sick man can recover,

by her wrath one well can die,

a wise man turn to childishness,

a fine man see his beauty change,

the most courtly man become a churl,

and any churl become courtly.

In these poems we are struck by the strong conflict and tension between joy and pain, private feelings and social roles. The woman's beauty has such power that it can bring the man life or death, depending on whether her response is kind or cruel, positive or negative. This soon developed into an extended parody of the Christian religion's language about mercy and grace, the medieval Love Religion game.

A few years later the troubadour Cercamon could write paradoxical words of a kind that was going to be repeated for centuries to come:

I neither die, nor live, nor get well,

I do not feel my suffering, and yet it is great suffering,

because I cannot tell the future of her love,

whether I shall have it, or when,

for in her is all the pity

which can raise me up or make me fall.

I am pleased when she maddens me

when she makes me stand with open mouth staring,

I am pleased when she laughs at me,

or makes a fool of me to my face, or my back;

for after this bad the good will come

very quickly, if such is her pleasure.

Finally, between 1150 and about 1180, Bernart de Ventadorn brought this poetic game to its perfection:

In good faith, without deceit,

I love the best and most beautiful.

My heart sighs, my eyes weep,

because