Marriage, courtly literature and the structure of desire in the 12th century

Abstract

The paper revisits the relations between courtly love and social conditions of the Western eleventh and twelfth centuries. It stresses the larger socio-cultural changes that the Church brought about by imposing celibacy on clerics and the principle of consensual marriage on the lay nobility as a framework for the emergence of literary fin’ amors. Courtly songs and romances are thought of as attempts of building new models for the relationship between men and women and a new ethics of the sexual difference.In short I say that the variety of ethical and esthetical choices explored by medieval romances concerning the connexions between desire, marriage, and sublimation strongly challenges the thesis ofDenis de Rougemont about the adulterous tendency of Western loveand the Manichaean background of fin’amors, arguing that the views on sexuality offered byGratien corroborate the Incarnation-tinged love ethics of marital romances.