The Amorous Heart

by Marilyn Yalom

  By 1200, in both French and German high culture, erotic love rivaled and even surpassed the value it had in Greek and Roman antiquity. Love might still be conceived of as madness, but a madness worth living and dying for. Tristan and Isolde will die for love; German even has a word for their act: liebestod (from liebe, meaning “love,” and tod, meaning “death”). Centuries later this tragic-cum-erotic destiny inspired Wagner’s glorious operatic version of Tristan and Isolde.

  Though the story of Tristan and Isolde was written for members of the nobility, like many other tales it found its way to audiences beyond aristocratic courts. One indication of their popular appeal appears in the names given to French children at the time of baptism: 120 examples of the name “Tristan,” 79 of “Lancelot,” 72 of “Arthur,” 46 of “Gauvain,” 44 of “Perceval,” and 12 of “Galehaut” (Gallahad) have been found on church registries dating from the medieval years before 1500. Lovers in the form of knights and high-status ladies seem to have filtered into the imagination of ordinary folk—bourgeois proprietors, middling artisans and shopkeepers, and perhaps even peasants. The fact that illiteracy was the norm does not seem to have stopped some common folk from imbibing the romance-oriented culture of their “betters.”

  ONE OF THE MAJOR FORMS OF ROMANCE THAT EMERGED IN the thirteenth century was allegory. Like all allegories, whether secular or religious, these presented abstract ideas as characters in a narrative. Many, if not most, were love stories.

  One allegory from the mid-thirteenth century, The Romance of the Pear written by a certain Tibaud, left behind a now-famous manuscript with the first-known illustrations of the amorous heart. Although the text itself does not constitute great literature, the colorful miniatures created in the Parisian workshop of the Master of Bari (Maître de Bari) are minor masterpieces. Eighteen oversized decorative letters signal new sections in the text, and all eighteen show a male lover or his emissary. Two include images of the amorous heart.

  If you look closely at the picture reproduced at the beginning of this chapter in Figure 7, you will see a pinecone-shaped object intended to represent a human heart. Taken from an illuminated manuscript, this miniature presents two figures encased within the swirling letter S. One figure is a kneeling youth who extends his arms upward with a heart clutched in his hands. The other is a standing lady who raises her right hand in a gesture of surprise and places her left hand on her breast, as if she doesn’t quite know what to do with the offering. His simply drawn face expresses humility, hers proud disdain. Her head is encased in a crown-like wimple, her hands in very long gloves, and her body in elegant attire, while he is simply clad in a blue tunic, with a pair of gloves dangling at his waist. Everything fits into the conventional story of a youthful suitor offering his heart to a noble lady.

  The object in his hands does not look much like a heart to us. It is obviously not anatomically correct; rather, it has the shape of a pinecone, eggplant, or pear. Yet medieval viewers would have immediately recognized it as a heart offering, such as they had already encountered in song and story.

  If we had only this image, we would assume that the young man is offering his own heart to the lady. But the text of the allegory tells us otherwise. The kneeling figure called Doux Regard (Sweet Looks) is carrying another man’s heart; the gloves at his waist indicate that Sweet Looks is a messenger. This appealing youth has been sent to convey the author/lover’s heart for safekeeping to the woman in the image—who is not the lady for whom it is ultimately intended.

  Following the courtly conventions of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in the Romance of the Pear the author/lover is condemned to suffer since the day he found himself in a garden with a highborn lady who offered him a pear from which she had already peeled part of the skin and taken a bite. Once he too had bitten into the pear, he was hooked; the pear’s perfume penetrated into his heart and never left. In spite of the obvious connection with the biblical tale of Adam, Eve, and the apple, this story has no moral or religious implications. Instead of the Old Testament God, the reigning deity is the God of Love, who is a character in the story and directs what little action there is. He will test the lover with a series of trials while holding the lover’s heart hostage.

  It’s at this point that Sweet Looks appears. The God of Love chooses him to carry the lover’s heart to the woman pictured above. Meanwhile the lover suffers many a trial as he tries to prove himself worthy of the other lady, the one who had offered him the pear, the one he desires. Reason advises him to renounce such an impossible quest and to court a lady closer to his station. Of course, the author/lover refuses and continues to pursue the lady of his dreams. Finally the God of Love decides that the lover has suffered enough; he shoots an arrow into the highborn lady’s heart, causing her to suffer the pangs of love. Eventually she is persuaded to send her own heart to the author/lover, and all ends well, as readers at the time would have come to expect.

  Surprisingly the second heart illustration in The Romance of the Pear, which is enclosed within the capital letter M, is held by a woman—a lady dressed in pink who is shown extending a heart to a young man. The hearts in both miniatures are more or less identical, yet the first is that of a man and the second that of a woman. The male and female heart look alike!

  Medieval texts and images gave us men and women who were not so different in their heart of hearts. Like men, women had hearts that expanded to encompass love, that experienced desire and longing, and could be riddled with jealousy and despair. Despite the differences and inequalities that clearly existed between medieval men and women, the heart was considered a realm of equal opportunity.

  THE HEART OFFERINGS PICTURED IN THE MASTER OF BARI’S miniatures for The Romance of the Pear would proliferate as artistic and literary emblems for several centuries. The heart was shaped like a pinecone because that is the way medical authorities had described it since the time of the Greek physician Galen in the second century CE. Medieval authorities, including the Persian philosopher Avicenna around 1000, the German Dominican friar Albertus Magnus in the thirteenth century, the French surgeon Henri de Mondeville around 1300, and the Italian anatomist Mundinus in the early fourteenth century, continued to use the word pinecone to describe the human heart.

  FIGURE 8. Artist unknown, A Lady Crowning Her Lover, ca. 1300. Carved elephant ivory mirror case, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England.

  One of the most famous examples of the pinecone-shaped heart was carved in ivory on the back of a French mirror from around 1300, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (Figure 8). Here the man kneels before his lady and offers up his heart while she raises a large hoop above his head with one hand and touches his draped arm with the other. The smiles on each of their faces and the curved slant of her head toward his contribute to an aura of gracious affection.

  Because this heart bears only a distant resemblance to the anatomical heart, viewers today would not necessarily recognize it as such unless they were already familiar with the theme of the heart offering. We in a post-Freudian era have little difficulty seeing it as a phallic symbol, especially in relation to the circular hoop held in the woman’s hand above the man’s head. Medieval artisans, without the benefit of Freud, knew exactly what they were doing.

  THE ROMANCE OF THE PEAR WAS PART OF A GROWING BODY OF allegory that dominated literature during the high and late Middle Ages. The Pear was probably not very popular in its own time, as only three manuscripts of it have survived. By contrast, the extremely popular allegory known as The Romance of the Rose left behind over two hundred manuscripts. Begun around 1225 by one Guillaume de Lorris but left unfinished after 4,000 lines, The Romance of the Rose was so much in demand that, later in the century, a writer named Jean de Meun added another 21,780 lines.

  This elaborate allegory told in the first person starts with a dream supposedly experienced by the narrator four or five years earlier. He had fallen asleep in the month of May, traditionally when love blooms along with the fl
owers. In his dream he sees himself walking along a riverbank and coming upon a high garden wall with paintings of horrible creatures on it: Envy, Avarice, and Old Age. Despite their forbidding faces, a lady named Idleness helps the young man gain entry into the garden. There, welcomed by Pleasure and Courtesy, he dances with a band of young people and explores an idyllic, flower-garden setting.

  At one point he finds a superb rose garden where the sight and fragrance of “roses in profusion, the most beautiful in all the world,” overwhelm him. One rose in particular captures the essence of that peerless flower, commonly associated with girls and women. In the words of the text, “From among these buds I chose one so beautiful that when I had observed it carefully, all the others seemed worthless in comparison.” This is the moment the God of Love chooses to direct his arrow into the young man’s heart. Once again an arrow enters a lover’s eyes and penetrates his heart, leaving him permanently wounded. The text does not spare us the painful physical details, meant to be understood allegorically: “I took hold of the arrow with both hands and began to pull hard, sighing a great deal as I pulled. I pulled so hard that I drew out the flighted shaft, but the barbed point, which was named Beauty was so fixed in my heart that it could not be torn out; it remains there still.”

  As in The Romance of the Pear when the hero bites into the pear, the lover in The Romance of the Rose is irrevocably hooked. Henceforth, he will submit to the God of Love and pursue the lady of his dreams, whatever the obstacles and consequences.

  Characters named Courtesy, Reason, Jealousy, Wealth, and the trio of Rebuff, Fear, and Shame either abet or oppose the Lover’s suit. Of course, he eventually overcomes all obstacles and enjoys the rewards of love. From this simplistic summary you would never guess that such a story could have been a medieval best-seller. It was more than that, in fact, for it provided a vision of love shared by an untold number of men and women—not only the French but also Germans, Italians, and other Europeans who read it in translation.

  The Rose even inspired a major controversy more than a hundred years later at the very beginning of the fifteenth century, pitting the learned poet Christine de Pizan and the chancellor of the University of Paris, Jean Gerson, who jointly condemned the book, against others who lauded it. Christine argued that The Rose was written by a man who knew little about women: Jean de Meun had been a cleric. She fumed against its nasty, misogynistic passages—the book contains several—as well as obscene words used for various parts of the body. In short, Christine denounced The Rose as essentially immoral. Whatever one thinks of it, it’s hard to imagine any book today that would attract a devoted following for two centuries and inspire a heated debate at the highest levels of society.

  Chapter 6

  Exchanging Hearts with Jesus

  FIGURE 9. Henri Van Severen, The Sacred Heart of Jesus, ca. 1900. Embroidery, Saint Nicholas’s Church, Ghent, Belgium.

  FASCINATION WITH THE LOVING HEART WAS BY NO MEANS limited to the secular world. During the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries voices from within the Catholic Church discovered new ways of expressing love for God by focusing on the heart of Jesus. Christians believed that Jesus, the son of God, had a heart that was human as well as divine. Like all human hearts, his heart ached and suffered, and God-like, it sympathized and loved. Visions of his sacred heart, both wounded and compassionate, found their way into monasteries and convents, where monks and nuns addressed their prayers directly to the heart of their savior.

  The religious heart was explicitly hostile to the amorous heart because erotic love was seen as a powerful rival to the love of God. From Saint Paul onward and especially after Saint Augustine, the Church promoted the idea that the sex act was meant solely for the purpose of procreation and should not be accompanied by passionate manifestations of sensual love. Marriage was better than extramarital fornication, but it was still considered a lesser state of grace than virginity and celibacy. But if we look closely at what was said and written by certain monks, friars, nuns, and theologians, it becomes clear that human love and the love of God were often intertwined. Such was the influence of the amorous heart that it penetrated the reclusive confines of monasteries and convents. And such was the force of the religious heart that it brought a spiritual element into the ideals of courtly love.

  Jesus’s wounded heart became the ultimate object of Christian veneration during the Middle Ages. Pious individuals meditated upon the crucifix showing the bloody gash in Jesus’s side and were moved to feel his pain in their own hearts. After Saint Francis suffered the stigmata—wounds on his body replicating those endured by Jesus on the cross—such wounds were seen as marks of divine favor. Other stigmatics, predominantly women, subsequently experienced marks on their hands, feet, chests, wrists, foreheads, or backs, and the Church subsequently honored many of them as saints.

  Consider the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a familiar symbol today throughout the Christian world. Bursting into flame, encircled with a crown of thorns, Jesus’s wounded heart has its roots in the mystical practices of such revered Church figures as Saint Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), who employed a language that was often heart centered. When he was abbot of the French priory of Bec, he wrote to his beloved fellow monk Gudulf, “Everything I feel about you is sweet and joyful to my heart.” In his prayers he begged Jesus to take him into the magnanimous mercy of his divine heart. Saint Anselm set the tone for later monks, including Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) and Saint Bonaventure (1221–1274), who explicitly advised Christians to find their way to Jesus’s heart through meditating upon the wound in his side.

  Readers may be familiar with the names of Saint Anselm and Saint Bernard and possibly even Saint Bonaventure, but who has heard of Saint Gertrude the Great of Helfta (1256–1302)? I hadn’t before I started to research a history of female friendship and found Gertrude hidden away in the fortress-like stacks of the Stanford University library. She is of interest to us here because her spiritual writings contain some of the most intimate visions of Jesus’s heart.

  Gertrude entered the monastery of Helfta in northern Saxony at the age of five and remained there for the rest of her life. Helfta was already a renowned center of culture and mysticism, under the direction of its abbess Gertrude of Hackeborn, and another remarkable nun, Mechtilde of Hackeborn, who was to become Gertrude the Great’s spiritual mentor and closest friend.

  Unlike many other members of the monastery, Gertrude did not come from a noble family. In fact, little is known about her family of origin. What we do know is that she distinguished herself early by her intelligence, love of learning, ability to write in both German and Latin, and competence as a copyist of ancient manuscripts. With her older friend, Mechtild of Hackeborn, she chanted the liturgy, studied scripture, and performed daily tasks like spinning, embroidering, and caring for the sick. In 1291 Mechtild revealed to Gertrude her longstanding revelations and eventually allowed Gertrude to record them in what is now known as The Book of Special Grace (Liber specialis gratiae).

  In time Gertrude had her own visions, which she recorded in the works that have survived under the titles The Herald of Divine Loving-Kindness (Legatus divinae pietatis) and Spiritual Exercises (Exercita spiritualia), both composed in medieval Latin prose. Most of her visions concerned her meetings with Jesus and a few with his mother, Mary, and all are studded with captivating images of the heart. Her intimate encounters with Jesus often sound remarkably like those in medieval romances.

  In Book II of her Herald, the section most assuredly of her own hand, she tells us that when she was in her twenty-sixth year she met an adolescent Jesus at twilight. He stretched out his hand toward her and said, “Come to me and I shall make you drunk with the torrent of my divine voluptuousness.” From that point on, she was imbued with a spiritual joy that made it possible to accept previously unbearable burdens. Gertrude’s language, like that of so many other mystics, is not only spiritual but vividly sensual in her expression of love.

&nb
sp; Seven years later Gertrude engaged an unnamed person to recite for her a daily prayer in front of a hanging image of the crucifixion. This person implored Jesus, on behalf of Gertrude, to “pierce her heart with the stroke of your love.” Inspired by this prayer, Gertrude added an impromptu supplication at Sunday mass: “I beg your Loving-kindness to pierce my heart with the arrow of your love.” Immediately she felt that her words had reached Jesus’s divine heart.

  Returning to her pew after taking communion, she had a second vision, this one inspired by a picture of the crucifixion within her book of worship: “It seemed to me that from the right side of the Crucifix painted on the page, that is to say, from the wound on that side, there issued a ray of light, with the sharp point of an arrow, and, miraculously, this ray spurted out and then withdrew, only to spurt out again, and the effect of this prolonged activity was to tenderly excite my love.” What a strange mixture of scriptural reference and sexual imagery! The blood and water that flowed out from the side of Jesus after he had been pierced by a soldier’s lance, according to the Gospel of Saint John, has been reimagined as a ray of light. And yet it is the spurting and withdrawal and respurting that excite her love. It’s hard for a modern reader not to see erotic longing leaking from the unconscious.

  Over and over again in the Herald, whether a given passage was written by Gertrude herself or reported by those who knew her, she expressed her love for Jesus through images of their two hearts joined together as one. Some of her dialogues with Jesus sound as if they would have been at home in a French romance like Lancelot or Cligès. We hear Jesus speaking about Gertrude: “The beating of her heart is mixed with the beating of my love.” And again: “Under the ardent love that her heart brings me, my entrails melt… as fat melts in the fire, and the sweetness of my divine heart dissolves next to the warmth of her own heart.”