“A knight there was, and that a worthy man,
That fro the time that he first bigan
To ridden out, he loved chivalrye,
Trouthe and honour, freedom and curteisye.”
(Chaucer 216)
This is the first taste of what a knight is in the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales. The knight described here is perfect in every way, the picture of esteem and propriety, of chivalry and honor. Knights were a huge part of the romanticism of courtly love when they were portrayed like Chaucer portrays his knight here. Knights are the most prominent historical figure used to imply that courtly love was an ideal that people stove for. They were pious and righteous, and in all the legends they stood up for those who couldn’t do so for themselves. The ideals of the knighthood were church before all else. “From its inception in the Carolingian epoch, knighthood was associated with a common defense of Church and womanhood.” (Taylor 209) What better causes for these noble men to devote themselves to? Love was a central theme in many stories of knights, such as the legends of King Arthur (these normally centered around Lancelot and Guinevere). The Knight’s Tale consisted of a story about two men in a tower pining over a woman neither has ever met except through spying on her from their tower prison. The woman is highly idealized, and the knights are suitably romantic. When one is released but banished, he thinks his situation is worse, because he won’t be able to see the woman any longer, while the one who remains imprisoned will. “As it appears in the courtly literature of the twelfth century, the phenomenon of the knight serving the lady whom he adores with “chivalric love” is certainly a significant departure from the heroic, civic, and feudal codes which had preceded it.” (Miller 336) The point is not that this is how the world worked, but that it was something that knights and other men (usually nobles) should strive for, thus encouraging them into acceptable social boundaries.
These romantic visions of men in shining plate armor riding on gallant steeds is overshadowed in literature, though, but what is probably more realistic: knights being men, just like every other man. They felt lust just like everyone else, even though they were devoted to the church. “Violent amorous pursuits were not infrequent in Chaucer’s day. Groups of young knights perpetrated gang rapes in southeast France which were considered by the ruling class as ‘acceptable amusement for the young men who felt frustrated by their inability to marry before they were sufficiently established.'” (Taylor 211) This doesn’t sound like something that Sir Lancelot would participate in, but it happened in reality. Knights’ relationships toward ladies were quite frequently not what we consider appropriate and courtly. “Chaucer’s knights…are uniform in submitting women to their will. They abuse both image and body of woman to an extent that feminists would be justified in labeling ‘sexual imperialism’. The threat against body is prevalent.” (Taylor 217) Chaucer’s knight (who tells his own tale) would never show any of this, but at the same time, the other knights in The Canterbury Tales do not seem as valiant as the knight who we are introduced to in the General Prologue.
Women, in the courtly love tradition, were idealized. “The salient feature of this phenomenon is a new reverence for women, indeed an idolization, which has been regarded as an important civilizing influence in the painful emergence of the western world from the darkness of the first ages of Christendom.” (Miller 335) Even in Romeo and Juliet, when Romeo first meets Juliet, he declares her hand a shrine: “If I profane with my unworthiest hand This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this: My hands, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.” (Shakespeare) In their first interaction, Romeo has put the girl (and she was only 14 in the play) on a high pedestal and set the scene for a romanticized courtship (until they die, of course). “The Courtly Lover of the twelfth century discovers that woman is a goddess…a creature to be worshipped.” (Miller 336) She is, then, not a partner to have, but an idol, something pretty to respect but pay no actual heed to (since these knights were monotheistic to a god, and not a goddess). She is a creature, and through this, an object, nothing but property passed on from man to man. “A woman, if she have superiority, is contrary to her husband.” (Miller 341) In other words, if a woman is a good woman, then she is subservient to a man. At the same time women were being idealized, though, they were also seen as temptresses, not to be trusted, especially when there was no man ruling over them. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, we are shown two different female views: the old hag and the beautiful temptress. The hag is, of course, Morgan Le Fey, which has a big impact on later parts of the story, and the younger woman is actually the wife of the man Gawain believes is his host. “For that high-born beauty so hummed him about, Made so plain her meaning, the man must needs Either take her tendered love or distastefully refuse.” (Gawain 194) The woman is made the temptress by her inappropriate actions toward the perfect knight, and therefore whatever happens is not the knight’s fault, just as eating the forbidden fruit wasn’t Adam’s fault. The sin belongs to the woman. Woman was also deceiver in this story, through Morgan being the one who cast the spell over the Green Knight so he appeared as he did to the men of Arthur’s court.
Love was simply not of the woman’s sphere of influence, according to some. In the play Twelfth Night, Orsino explains to Cesario, who he believes is a boy but is in reality Viola, that woman do not have the capacity to love as men do. “There is no woman’s sides Can bide the beating of so strong a passion As love doth give my heart; no woman’s heart So big, to hold so much; they lack retention Alas, their love may be call’d appetite, No motion of the liver, but the palate, that suffer surfeit, cloyment, and revolt; But mine is all as hungry as the sea, And can digest as much. Make no compare Between the love a woman can bear me And that I owe Olivia.” (Shakespeare 1068-1069) Viola, of course, is offended that these claims that Orsino makes, especially because she is in love with him. Miller quotes Andreas on the same subject: “The mutual love which you seek in women you cannot find, for no woman ever loved a man or could bind herself to a lover in the mutual bonds of love. For a woman’s desire is to get rich through love, but not to give her lover the solaces that please him.” (Miller 343) These claims are obviously all false, and a way for men to see themselves as greater than women, something that has been happening since ancient time, dating all the way back to “original sin” and Adam being faultless for eating what his wife gave him, even though he knew better.
Courtly love, then, was simply a social device used to make men “civilized” and to keep women in their place. Courtly ladies were now able to temper the despotic barbarism of barons, knights, husbands, clerks, and prelates, whose preoccupation with civil law and the salvation of souls blunted any interest in social graces and the cultivation or refinement of sentiment.” (Miller 335) I don’t think it was the ladies tempering the men as the arbitrary rules of courtly love tempered them. Ladies had their own new rules of society to live by and obey.
Cross-dressing was something that (outside of theater) mostly women did. It was a simple way for them to break out of their prescribed roles in society. To transgress the codes governing dress was to disrupt an official view of the social order in which one’s identity was largely determined by one’s station or degree-and where that station was, in theory, providentially determined and immutable.” (Howard 421) By dressing like men, women were impersonating someone of much higher social standing than themselves, and in a time when order was so important to the formulation of society, this was a problem. Many of the women who were caught doing this were sent to prison or worse, accused of impersonating men and often of prostitution. “The stability of the social order depends as much on maintaining absolute distinctions of male and female as between aristocrat and yeoman.” (Howard 422) In his play Twelfth Knight, Shakespeare addresses this social taboo by having the leading female character impersonate a man for most of the play. The interesting thing about this, though, is that the person playing the character onstage would have been a boy, so it was a boy playing a woman who was pretending to be a boy. She befriends a duke and becomes his confidant, and falls in love with him over time, although the Duke still believes she is male. The woman the Duke is courting falls in love with the woman pretending to be a boy, and wonderful Shakespearean comedy and irony ensue.
Gender wasn’t the only factor in how courtly love worked. Class issues run rampant in anything relating to courtly love. When relating it back to social change, this only makes sense. Those who were concerned with courtly love were, of course, of the court. Knights, Ladies and Lords, and other upper class people were the ones who told the stories and who attempted to follow the traditions. In “The Miller’s Tale” the Miller is disgusted with the chivalrous romance just told me the knight, and throws a ribald fabliau back at the knight with a vengeance. The lower classes had no time to deal in such fancies. The Miller demands his turn out of order to the chagrin of the host: “‘By Goddes soule,’ quod he, ‘that wol nat I, For I wol speke or elles go my way.'” (Chaucer 236) The Miller begins by publicly confessing his drunkenness, which a knight never would have done, then he proceeds to tell a story that one would never expect to hear from the stately knight’s lips. Even in his story, there is courtly love in the form of Absolon, who attempts to woo Alison with courtly love and instead of winning her heart, she laughs at him. Instead, Alison chooses to go with the handsome young clerk, who isn’t a bad person, but he certainly doesn’t adhere to the rules of courtly love to win her. As the wife of Bath tells her tale, we see the same themes. In it, a knight is sentenced to death for committing rape (which in context of the story was completely random). Guinevere interrupts and says he will be forgiven if he can discover what thing women most desire. An old woman finds him in the woods on the last day and gives him the answer in exchange for him to do whatever she wants. He agrees, of course, and she tells him and then demands that he marry her. Being the courtly knight that he is, he agrees to marry her, even though she is old and ugly. In the end, she gives the knight a choice: does he want her ugly and old and true to him, or young and beautiful and he would have to take his chances? He tells her to choose, as his choices have obviously lead him thus far, and she gives him the best of both worlds for it, so in the end, the knight really faces no repercussions for having raped the young woman in the beginning of the tale. The wife finishes with a prayer for meek husbands and for the plague to attack those who are not meek. Her tale is odd because she is not in the upper class, and she is not attached to a man, so for a woman of her standing to be speaking the way she does was unusual for the time.
Courtly Love was often something only the upper classes concerned themselves with. The lower classes had no time to spend thinking and pining over it, as they had to work just to keep themselves clothed and fed. While being a comedy, the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail has a scene that is perfect for the depiction of the lower classes as opposed to the upper classes.
“Arthur: The Lady of the Lake,
Dennis: Listen-strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Arthur: be quiet!
Dennis: Well you can’t expect to weild supreme power because some watery tart threw a sword at you!”
(Grail)
This scene takes place as these peasants are sitting on the ground, moving clumps of mud around, and King Arthur is standing over them in his crown and spotless white tunic. It is a farce, but an amusing way of depicting class separation and romanticism of the relative time period.
Through drawing the attention of everyone with the courtly love that existed in the stories and literature of the time, social standing and gender issues were cemented into place with the courtly love tradition. The used “a schematic description of a ritual of behavior for lords a-courting, a courteous language which was itself a polite “code” which implied amorous meanings, and a cultural history of this new social phenomenon.” (Miller 335)
Works Cited
Chaucer, Geoffery. The Canterbury Tales.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 215-312. W. W. Norton & Co, 2000.
Howard, Jean E. “Crossdressing, The Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England.” Shakespeare Quarterly. 418-440
Miller, Robert P. “The Wounded Heart: Courtly Love and the Medieval Antifeminist Tradition.” Women’s Studies. (1974) Vol. 2. 335-350.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Prod. Roy Forge Smith. Dir. Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones. Perf. Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, Michael Palin. 1975.
Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet.
Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 215-312. W. W. Norton & Co, 2000.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. 158-210. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 215-312. W. W. Norton & Co, 2000.
Taylor, Paul Beekman. The Uncourteous Knights of “The Canterbury Tales””. English Studies; June (1991). Vol. 72 Issue 3. 209-218.
