The Amorous Heart

by Marilyn Yalom

  One of the best-known poems from this period, written by an anonymous Minnesinger, offers a charming picture of mutual love that cannot be destroyed because the beloved person is locked within the speaker’s heart.

  You are mine, I am yours,

  Of that you can be certain.

  You are locked

  Within my heart

  The little key is lost:

  You must dwell there forever.

  Locking love into one’s heart quickly became a common literary trope—one that would find visual representation two centuries later in illuminated scripts.

  Another anonymous German poem from the twelfth century also presents a guileless swain with a heart full of love and longing.

  Come, come, my heart’s loved one,

  Full of longing I await you!…

  Sweet, rose-colored mouth,

  Come and restore me to health.

  Soon, however, these naïve expressions of love would be superseded by the works of more sophisticated Minnesingers, such as Wolfram von Eschenbach, Walther von der Vogelweide, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Hartmann von Aue, and Gottfried von Strassburg. German civilization is lucky to have preserved two outstanding medieval codices of Minnesinger verse, Carmina Burana (circa 1230) and the Codex Manesse (1300–1340). The earlier one contains both Latin and German texts, including drinking songs popular with itinerant students. The later contains 137 full-page illustrations as well as a large selection of German poems. These songbooks and others written in French, Italian, and Spanish constituted a new genre during the Middle Ages, one that would have influence for centuries to come.

  The songs preserved in these manuscripts bear testimony to the new vision of love that began to flourish at secular courts in Germany in the twelfth century. Replacing the scholarly Latin of the Church, they were intended for German-speaking audiences thirsty for knowledge of how they should behave according to the new etiquette for lovers. Poets like Walther von der Vogelweide (circa 1170–1230) were eager to instruct them.

  “Saget mir ieman, waz ist minne?” (Can anyone tell me what love is?) Walther asked rhetorically. It was no longer sufficient for a knight to possess a lady physically; he was obliged to conquer her heart. Walther’s poems were miniguides to this high-minded approach.

  Walther began his poetic career by addressing an unattainable high-born lady and sometimes Frau Minne herself, following the conventions of courtly love, but in his mature years he developed a less stilted style and a vision of reciprocal love appealing to people from all stations of life. In one of his most famous poems, “Unter der Linden,” Walther allows a simple country girl to be the speaker. She meets her lover in the woods, where flowers are blooming and the nightingale sings. He has already prepared a “little resting place” for the two of them, and there he kisses and embraces her. In German the verb herzen literally means “to press to one’s heart.” And what happened next is known only to the girl, her lover, and the nightingale. The last line of the poem tells us it is best to pass over all of this in silence.

  Indeed, Walter’s later works, with their rustic ambience, promote a vision of man and woman in harmony with each other and with nature. Walther was foremost among the early German poets in making nature the requisite setting for love. Germans often blended their amorous hearts with flowers, plants, trees, and birds, bringing nature into songs of love as never before. To this day song—perhaps even more than poetry—has become the essential medium for lovers. Think of the countless lyrics from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that evoke love, from folk and blues to rock and rap. What would the music industry do without the theme of love? And what would love do without love songs?

  THOUGH ALMOST ALL THESE HEARTFELT PAEANS WERE written by men, women were not portrayed as helpless or subordinate. According to the ideals of fin’ amor, if a man hoped to “win” the heart of a chosen lady, he was expected to demonstrate the nobility of his own heart through numerous trials, a willingness to suffer, and unswerving fidelity. Ultimate power in matters of the heart, however, resided with the woman. As the primary object of the male quest, she was the one for whom the minstrel sang, and she was the one who decided whether his efforts merited her love.

  This vision of love ran counter to real-life relationships between the sexes. In reality men—fathers, grandfathers, brothers, uncles—had control over girls, and husbands had control over their wives. Male dominance in marriage was reinforced by a notable difference in age between spouses, with a woman of seventeen or eighteen usually marrying a man ten years her senior. Yet the ideal relationship promoted by fin’ amor reversed each gender’s role, with women commanding superior power. Why this reversal occurred in the ethos of twelfth-century feudal courts has intrigued generations of scholars. Some have pointed to the influence of Arabic poetry, which treated the inaccessible lady like a semireligious deity. Some have pointed to the cult of the Virgin Mary as a refining influence upon both men and women. Others have looked to the Crusades, when women assumed greater power at home while the men were away waging war. Certainly the rise of queenship during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with formidable female figures appearing in Christian Spain, Aquitaine, France, England, Tuscany, Sicily, and the parts of Germany under the Holy Roman Empire, suggested that at least some women were meant to be obeyed.

  What, we may ask, made prominent women worthy of such treatment? The man was expected to earn his reward through demonstrating his worth, whereas it was sufficient for her to be beautiful, of high rank, and reasonably articulate. There are few, if any, medieval heroines in literature who can act as role models for women today. And yet in one important respect the Middle Ages provided a lesson in love that is still with us: women, like men, were both encouraged to heed the messages of their amorous hearts—messages they have been struggling to accommodate ever since.

  Chapter 5

  Romances of the Heart

  FIGURE 7. Atelier du Maître de Bari, “La Dame livre son cœur à Doux Regard,” folio 41v, illuminated detail from Le Roman de La Poire (fr. 2186), ca. 1250. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, France.

  MEDIEVAL MINSTRELS SPREAD THE CULT OF THE HEART TO all who would listen. Their songs and stories were sung and recited to rapt audiences from the château to the townhouse and even the barn, where French peasants gathered for after-work evenings known as veillées. In these diverse settings romance overshadowed all other subjects.

  The very word romance comes from the word roman—that is, a narrative written in one of the Romance languages derived from Latin (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian). These tales often followed the adventures of a knight, whose aim was to prove himself in battle and in the bedroom. Over time the French word roman has come to stand for the genre of fiction known in English as the novel. Amorous love, in the Middle Ages and even today, was so bound up in the literature of love that it is difficult to know what came first: Did French medieval stories (romans) create the vision of love we now call romantic, or did romantic love exist prior to the storytellers?

  Certainly the history of Abélard and Héloïse, from the first half of the twelfth century, indicates that the troubadours were not the first medieval Europeans to obsess over passionate love. The story of the cleric Abélard’s seduction of his gifted pupil Héloïse, her pregnancy, their child named Astrolabe, their secret wedding, and Abélard’s subsequent castration at the hands of Héloïse’s vengeful uncle was already widespread during the couple’s lifetime.

  Although Héloïse became a nun at Abélard’s insistence and eventually rose to the position of abbess, she never denied that her first allegiance was to him—not to God. In her words, “I can expect no reward from God, as I have done nothing for love of Him.… My heart was not within me, but with you, and even today, if it is not with you, it is nowhere. It cannot truly exist without you.” Héloïse’s letters are the most extraordinary outpourings of the amorous heart to be found anywhere in the Middle Ages and perhaps any age. When s
he wrote about the heart she had given to her beloved she was not relying on a literary trope but an expression of her lasting ardor and commitment to the man who had been her lover before he was castrated and then devoted his heart exclusively to God.

  It was common for medieval minstrels and storytellers to glorify the man or woman who gave his or her heart away at first sight or who had the good fortune of exchanging his or her heart with the beloved. Take, for example, the twelfth-century poet Chrétien de Troyes (1130–1191) when he was under the patronage of Marie de Champagne, the daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Louis VII of France. At Marie’s court in the bustling little city of Troyes, where love was elevated into an idealized code of conduct, Chrétien became Marie’s resident spokesman for the amorous heart.

  In Cligès, one of Chrétien’s verse romances, a young Greek prince named Alexander, while residing at the court of King Arthur in Britain, falls for Sordamour but is too shy to say so. In a long monologue he takes up an old theory of love’s origin: love has wounded him with its arrow, passing into his heart through the eyes without affecting them but causing his heart to burst into flames.

  It’s not the eye that was hurt

  But the heart…

  … the eye

  Is the heart’s mirror, so the arrow

  Reaches the heart through its mirror,

  Doing no damage to the eye.…

  The heart sits in the body

  Like a candle set inside

  A lantern.

  In medieval literature love experienced by men invariably begins with the sight of a beautiful woman. She enters the heart by route of the eyes in countless songs and poems and even in a few illustrations.

  Sordamour too falls for Alexander at first sight: “Love’s aim was perfect: its arrow / Struck her right in the heart.” And like Alexander, she is intent upon keeping her feelings hidden. It’s only when Queen Guinevere notices their silent love for each other that their reciprocal sentiments are exposed. In the words of the queen,

  I know quite well, from watching

  Both your faces, that here

  Are two hearts beating as one.

  So Alexander and Sordamour allow the Queen to be their matchmaker and King Arthur to seal their love in marriage.

  Yet such is the importance of the heart as the locus of love that the writer feels free to digress for thirty-seven lines to disprove the idea, presented earlier, that two hearts can beat as one. The author explains that when we say, “two hearts become one—/ That’s false and impossible; a single / Body can’t have two hearts.” Two people become one when each feels what the other feels and they both share the same passion: “two hearts / Can share a single desire, / Much as many different / Voices can sing the very / Same song.” The total merging that lovers experience because they share the same feelings is offered as the true meaning of the consecrated expression “two hearts beating as one.”

  Would such a tangent bore the listener or reader? Not at all. Such was the interest in the amorous heart that the audience was expected to be willing to patiently follow the author’s convoluted argument. Suffice it to say that the idea of hearts merging did not disappear. We find it throughout medieval and Renaissance writing as well as in our own times. There is currently a billboard in San Francisco advertising “Two Hearts One Love, Inc.,” a dating service. Or, if you already have a sweetheart, you can buy her a “two hearts in one” necklace for $119 online.

  ALL FIVE OF CHRÉTIEN’S ARTHURIAN ROMANCES MAKE AMPLE use of the word “heart” (cuer in Old French). References to the heart of his heroes, whether Cligès, Lancelot, Erec, Yvain, or Perceval, are frequent throughout their many fabulous adventures. More often than not their hearts are sad, suffering, regretful, and pained by their distance from the beloved. These negative sentiments lodged in the heart spurred the hero to action with the hope that by overcoming a perceived obstacle, the heart would ultimately find joy.

  The heart extolled by twelfth-century storytellers was always faithful to its one true love. As Chrétien de Troyes wrote in his masterful Lancelot, “Love, which rules / All hearts / allows them only / One home.” Similarly the chaplain Andreas Capellanus, who also enjoyed the patronage of Marie de Champagne, wrote in his Latin treatise On Love (De arte honeste amandi), “True love joins the hearts of two people with so great a feeling of love that they cannot long for the embraces of others.” Here and elsewhere Capellanus echoed some of the ideas already expressed by the Muslim philosopher Ibn Hazm a century earlier. Fidelity to the beloved was a given in medieval literature, whatever the truth might be outside the text in the lives of real people.

  The belief in faithfulness applied whether the sought-after woman was a virginal maid or already married. Obviously, when the desired woman was someone else’s wife, love was, to say the least, problematic. The stories of Tristan and Isolde, Lancelot and Guinevere, and other adulterous couples spoke for the appeal of forbidden fruit. Though we can never know the extent to which adultery existed in real life, medieval society seems to have been obsessed with the subject of the adulteress, as reflected in numerous high-culture verse narratives and popular satirical tales known as fabliaux. Given the fear that women would produce bastard offspring, feudal practices made it difficult for them ever to be alone. Women of noble birth were constantly surrounded by other women—relatives and servants commanded by the male head of the house to keep careful watch over his wife or daughters.

  One of the reasons for the popularity of adulterous stories lay in the belief, fashionable at the court of Marie de Champagne, that true love could not thrive within marriage. Indeed, when asked her opinion, she answered unequivocally, “We state and affirm unambiguously that love cannot extend its sway over a married couple.” She reasoned that lovers are free to grant or withhold their love, whereas married people are duty bound to satisfy each other and thus not susceptible to the spontaneous transports of lovers. Echoing his patroness, Capellanus at first defended the view that love can have no place between husband and wife. Yet by the end of On Love he had changed his mind. Reverting to a Christian stance, he claimed that the first rule (of thirty-one) for lovers was, “Marriage does not constitute a proper excuse for not loving.” It is likely that Capellanus—a cleric—was ultimately uncomfortable with the negative stance on marital love taken by Marie de Champagne and others of her rank.

  Chrétien also attempted to reconcile marriage and love. In Cligès he had told the story of two young people whose love led to a happy marriage. In Erec et Enide and Yvain he went even further and portrayed true love within marriage. Yet his most popular romance, then and now, was Lancelot: The Knight of the Cart, a story of adulterous lovers. In this masterly verse narrative Lancelot risks his life in order to free King Arthur’s wife, Guinevere, from captivity, and when she is at last assured of her release, Guinevere receives him in her bed, where both of their hearts find ultimate joy.

  Holding him tight against

  Her breast, making the knight

  As welcome in her bed, and as happy,

  As she possibly could, impelled

  By the power of Love, and her own

  Heart…

  … he

  Loved her a hundred thousand

  Times more, for if other hearts

  Had escaped Love, his

  Had not. His heart was so

  Completely captured that the image

  Of Love in all other hearts

  Was a pale one.

  Lancelot is depicted as the consummate hero not only because he has been victorious in battle and rescued the queen, but because his heart, too, is heroic and filled with more love than any other heart. By the late twelfth century the amorous heart had risen to the top of the list of masculine virtues, alongside physical courage—in French coeur and courage are linguistic relatives. Perhaps the most famous heart-identified male of the age was Richard I of England, better known as Richard the Lionheart, who gained fame during the Third Crusade and his armed struggle a
gainst the sultan Saladin. Not incidentally, he also wrote songs and poems while he was a prisoner.

  THOUGH THE FRENCH INVENTED THE FORM, THE GERMANS quickly took to it. Consider Tristan and Isolde, whose story is best known to us today from the version written by Gottfried von Strassburg (circa 1180–1210) and, six centuries later, Wagner’s world-famous opera. In the course of adventures worthy of a superhero, Tristan proves himself to be a perfect knight, but when he is sent from Cornwall to Ireland to woo Isolde for his uncle, King Mark, his fate is sealed. On the return trip Tristan and Isolde mistakenly drink from a magic potion intended for Mark and Isolde on their wedding night. Henceforth, nothing can weaken the mutual passion that invades the bodies of Tristan and Isolde. Having consummated their love on the boat that brought them back to Cornwall, they will keep their erotic relationship hidden after Isolde is duly wed to Mark.

  One of the most famous scenes in the tale takes place in a grotto within a forest. It is a setting where sexual love reigns naturally among plants and animals, without the artificial constraints of society and religion. Lovemaking within this grotto is elevated to a form of devotion that unites body, heart, and spirit. To quote only a few lines from this paean to love: “They fed in their grotto on nothing but love and desire… pure devotion, love made sweet as balm that consoles body and sense so tenderly, and sustain the heart and spirit… they never considered any food but that from which heart drew desire, the eyes delight, and which body, too, found agreeable.”

  Gottfried exalts eros and does not try to answer the moral questions raised by adultery. He places the heart at the center of the universe and assumes that it should direct human affairs, whatever the obstacles encountered. One modern critic, in commenting on Tristan, concluded that “everything is permitted for those who love.”