Whether female or male, the troubadour poets celebrated fin’amor, a Provençal word for the pure or perfect love a knight was supposed to feel for his lady, which has in English come to be called “courtly love.” In courtly love poetry, the writer praises his or her love object, idealizing the beloved and promising loyalty and great deeds. Most of these songs are written by, or from the perspective of, a male lover who is socially beneath his female beloved; her higher status makes her unattainable, so the lover’s devotion can remain chaste and pure, rewarded by her handkerchief, or perhaps a kiss, but nothing more.

Scholars generally agree that poetry praising pure and perfect love originated in the Muslim culture of the Iberian Peninsula, where heterosexual romantic love had long been the subject of poems and songs. Spanish Muslim poets sang at the courts of Christian nobles, and Provençal poets picked up their romantic themes.

Other aspects of courtly love are hotly debated. Was it simply a literary convention, or did it shape actual behavior? Did it celebrate adultery, or was true courtly love pure (and unrequited)? How should we interpret medieval physicians’ reports of people (mostly young men) becoming gravely ill from “lovesickness”? Were there actually “courts of love” in which women judged lovers based on a system of rules? Did courtly love lead to greater respect for women or toward greater misogyny, as desire for a beloved so often ended in frustration? It is very difficult to know whether courtly love literature influenced the treatment of real women to any great extent, but it did introduce a new ideal of heterosexual romance into Western literature. Courtly love ideals still shape romantic conventions and often appear in movies, songs, and novels that explore love between people of different social groups.

The following poem was written by Arnaut Daniel, a thirteenth-century troubadour praised by poets from Dante in the thirteenth century to Ezra Pound in the twentieth. Not much is known about him, but his surviving songs capture courtly love conventions perfectly.

I only know the grief that comes to me,

to my love-ridden heart, out of over-loving,

since my will is so firm and whole

that it never parted or grew distant from her

whom I craved at first sight, and afterwards:

and now, in her absence, I tell her burning words;

then, when I see her, I don’t know, so much I have to, what to say.

To the sight of other women I am blind, deaf to hearing them

since her only I see, and hear and heed,

and in that I am surely not a false slanderer,

since heart desires her more than mouth may say;

wherever I may roam through fields and valleys, plains and mountains

I shan’t find in a single person all those qualities

which God wanted to select and place in her.

I have been in many a good court,

but here by her I find much more to praise:

measure and wit and other good virtues,

beauty and youth, worthy deeds and fair disport;

so well kindness taught and instructed her

that it has rooted every ill manner out of her:

I don’t think she lacks anything good.

No joy would be brief or short

coming from her whom I endear to guess [my intentions],

otherwise she won’t know them from me,

if my heart cannot reveal itself without words,

since even the Rhone [River], when rain swells it,

has no such rush that my heart doesn’t stir

a stronger one, weary of love, when I behold her.

Joy and merriment from another woman seems false and ill to me,

since no worthy one can compare with her,

and her company is above the others’.

Ah me, if I don’t have her, alas, so badly she has taken me!

But this grief is amusement, laughter and joy,

since in thinking of her, of her am I gluttonous and greedy:

ah me, God, could I ever enjoy her otherwise!

And never, I swear, I have liked game or ball so much,

or anything has given my heart so much joy

as did the one thing that no false slanderer

made public, which is a treasure for me only.

Do I tell too much? Not I, unless she is displeased:

beautiful one, by God, speech and voice

I’d lose ere I say something to annoy you.

And I pray my song does not displease you

since, if you like the music and lyrics,

little cares Arnaut whether the unpleasant ones like them as well.

Far fewer poems by female trobairitz have survived than by male troubadours, but those that have survived express strong physical and emotional feelings. The following song was written in the twelfth century by the Countess of Dia. She was purportedly the wife of a Provençal nobleman, though biographies of both troubadours and trobairitz were often made up to fit the conventions of courtly love, so we don’t know for sure. The words to at least four of her songs have survived, one of them with the melody, which is very rare.

I’ve suffered great distress

From a knight whom I once owned.

Now, for all time, be it known:

I loved him — yes, to excess. His jilting I’ve regretted,

Yet his love I never really returned. Now for my sin I can only burn:

Dressed, or in my bed.

O if I had that knight to caress

Naked all night in my arms,

He’d be ravished by the charm

Of using, for cushion, my breast. His love I more deeply prize

Than Floris did Blancheor’s

Take that love, my core, My sense, my life, my eyes!

Lovely lover, gracious, kind,

When will I overcome your fight?

O if I could lie with you one night!

Feel those loving lips on mine! Listen, one thing sets me afire:

Here in my husband’s place I want you,

If you’ll just keep your promise true: Give me everything I desire.

Source: First poem: From “Sol sui qui sai lo sobrafan qu’em sortz” by Arnaut Daniel, translated by Leonardo Malcovati, www.trobar.org. Used by permission of Leonardo Malcovati, editor and translator of Prosody in England and Elsewhere: A Comparative Approach (London: Gival Press, 2006) and online at www.trobar.org; second poem: Three verses from lyrics by the Countess of Dia, often called Beatritz, the Sappho of the Rhone, in Lyrics of the Middle Ages: An Anthology, edited and translated by James J. Wilhelm. Routledge, 1990. Used by permission of Taylor and Francis Group.

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