Courtly love

The argument

The idea of courtly love began as a literary convention rather than as a description of how anyone actually behaved. In it, an unattainable woman was wooed by a noble knight proving his devotion and selflessness — and the unattainability was structural, since the point of the form was the demonstration of constancy rather than its reward. The convention travelled because it was entertainment. These stories were commonly spread by troubadours in poems and became wildly popular, circulating through courts and audiences as songs rather than as doctrine. Nobody was persuaded of a theory of love; people simply heard the same stories repeatedly, in a form built to be remembered and repeated. What followed is the part the argument rests on. The stories depicted in these works then heavily influenced ideas about love in wider society, so that a set of literary conventions became the template through which people understood their own feelings. The conventions supplied the vocabulary — longing, devotion, the beloved as the object of a quest — and the vocabulary settled what counted as love and what was merely appetite or duty. The scale of the shift is what makes the case decisive. Courtly love is credited with bringing ideas about romantic passion to the Christian world, which largely saw marriage as a passionless institution: an arrangement of property, lineage and obligation in which passion was neither expected nor thought relevant. Afterwards, passion was the thing love was supposed to consist of. Courtly love is therefore an integral part of how the cultural understanding of love shifted across Europe — and that it shifted at all is the argument. If what Europeans took love to be could be changed by poems, then notions of love are culture-specific rather than fixed features of human nature.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that courtly love shows culture shaping the expression of love, not that love itself is culturally invented. Cross-cultural anthropological surveys find romantic, passionate attachment in the large majority of human societies, suggesting a universal emotional capacity that different cultures channel and ritualise in their own ways. That a medieval convention reshaped European ideals is fully consistent with a pre-existing universal drive taking a culturally specific form — so the example underdetermines the strong conclusion that notions of love are culture-specific rather than universal.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] That courtly love began as a literary convention shows a culture elaborating the forms of love, not that the emotion itself was invented by that culture. [Rejecting P2] Introducing new ideals of romantic passion to European society is compatible with a pre-existing universal capacity for love being reshaped rather than created. [Rejecting P3] Anthropological surveys find romantic love in the great majority of human cultures, which cuts against the claim that notions of love are fundamentally culture-specific. [Rejecting C] Cultural variation in the expression of love does not establish that love is not universal.