Greek manners and Gothic morals

So what does CS Lewis claim about courtly love. Well, he claims this:

Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still. Neither the form nor the sentiment of this old poetry has passed away without leaving indelible traces on our minds. We shall understand our present, and perhaps even our future, the better if we can succeed, by an effort of the historical imagination, in reconstructing that long-lost state of mind for which the allegorical love poem was a natural mode of expression.

Lewis thinks what all academics think; he thinks the period he is studying is a crucial one in the development of modern thought and culture and that studying it will enable us to understand not just this period but the periods that come after. And that, rather than logic or reason, is the principal reason he is so gung ho to claim that an emotion that never existed before was invented in the 11th century in Provence.

Many of the features of this sentiment, as it was known to the Troubadours, have indeed disappeared; but this must not blind us to the fact that the most momentous and the most revolutionary elements in it have made the background of European literature for eight hundred years. French poets, in the eleventh century, discovered or invented, or were the first to express, that romantic species of passion which English poets were still writing about in the nineteenth. They effected a change which has left no corner of our ethics, our imagination, or our daily life untouched, and they erected impassable barriers between us and the classical past or the Oriental present. Compared with this revolution the Renaissance is a mere ripple on the surface of literature.

Well, no. But let's humour him a while. Let's forget the most ludicrous part of his claim—that an actual new emotion was created—and let's consider the possibility that there were a new series of cultural trappings for relationships between men and women created during this period and that these cultural trappings remain very important for some people in our society.

For Lewis is well aware that most people aren't much influenced by it.

As for the matter, what have we to do with these medieval lovers - 'servants' or 'prisoners' they called themselves - who seem to be always weeping and always on their knees before ladies of inflexible cruelty? The popular erotic literature of our own day tends rather to sheikhs and 'Savage Men' and marriage by capture, while that which is in favour with our intellectuals recommends either frank animalism or the free companionship of the sexes. In every way, if we have not outgrown, we have at least grown away from, the Romance of the Rose.

Okay, so most popular and intellectual literature of Lewis's day seems to have dumped this stuff. So who still cares? Lewis thinks someone does, or ought to care. I think a lot of people did and do care and here are some reasons they might.

1. Anyone who does certain kinds of literary criticism will care a whole lot for starters. The Troubadours were a huge influence on Dante and Petrarch and, consequently, on the entire subsequent history of love poetry—most notably, on the love poetry of Shakespeare. In The Allegory of Love Lewis makes just this point but he mentions only Petrarch. Why not Dante?
2. Well, that leads us to the second reason to still care, the understanding of erotic love we find in the Provençal troubadours has an enormous influence on Catholic piety. Lewis talks his way all around this point without ever quite seeing it. And that weird mix of sex and religion has had a huge influence in English literature (Something I have called the English Romantic Catholic Tradition).
3. Finally, the love lyrics of Provence have had an enormous influence on the field of fantasy fiction. It was a  field that began with the Gothic romances of the late 18th century but was undergoing a significant revival in Lewis's day and one of the key figures was a guy named CS Lewis.

And thus it is perhaps not surprising to find two contradictory drives in Lewis. One is a push to prove there was something new and distinctive and deeply influential about this "new" vision of love  that sprung in the 11th century and had never existed before. The second was deep need to differentiate himself and his own deeply romanticized account of love and Christianity from what went before.

Tomorrow, a bit of a  side trip into the peculiarly male aspects of courtly love

This series begins here.
The next post will be here when there is a next post.