Many of today’s Valentine’s Day traditions – trinkets and other tokens of affection, love songs, poetic sentiments – follow a formula developed by medieval poets and musicians, says Stanford historian Jenna Phillips.
These 12th-century creatives, Phillips says, originated much of what we associate with modern courtship by writing verse and singing songs intended to appeal to noble women.
Here, Phillips outlines their blueprint for romance, tracing the symbols of love – from sweets to flattery to the exchange of rings – that continue to shape our contemporary ideas of romance.
Phillips specializes in the medieval history of France and Italy, and this quarter, she is teaching HISTORY 317D: Love, Death and the Afterlife in the Medieval West in the School of Humanities and Sciences.
What are some medieval ideas about love that influence how we think about Valentine’s Day and romantic relationships today?
Valentine’s Day has its roots in the medieval European tradition. The image of two companions stealing away to a walled garden comes from a world with little privacy. Paolo and Francesca, the lovers whom Dante consigned to his Inferno, blamed their adultery on reading French romance. “Time and again our eyes were brought together by the book we read,” says Francesca, “that day we read no further.”
But above all, the medieval imagination traded in symbols, and the tokens we still think of as proof of a lover’s intention – the exchange of rings, a brooch inscribed with poetry, and the gift of other symbolic objects – are inherited from this era.
And what about chocolates?
Chocolate is a New World commodity. The Stanford historian Paula Findlen teaches a class about how the taste for chocolate and coffee reshaped the modern world! The medieval European, never having tasted chocolate, relished exotic sweets like candied ginger, oranges, and sugared almonds. Thirteenth-century records from northern France are full of payments for these delicacies, and they were surely given as gifts to tempt and seduce.
How did the modern concept of romance come about?
When the Old French word “romance” was coined around the year 1200, it had nothing to do with love. To compose a story in “romance” was to write it in your mother tongue, as opposed to writing in Latin. (Contemporary French retains this meaning: un roman refers to fiction, not a love story). But it soon became clear that the kinds of vernacular stories and songs being sung by troubadours and trouvères – the singer-songwriters, or “creatives,” of the High Middle Ages – often had to do with matters of the heart.
The medieval imagination traded in symbols, and the tokens we still think of as proof of a lover’s intention ... are inherited from this era.
The words used for what we think of as “romantic love” were, in Old French, fin'amors, which translates to refined or ennobling love. This was the love associated with the ideals of chivalry and service to a lady.
Why the shift toward these songs and lyrical poems about love?
Much of this rhetoric was calculated to flatter powerful women, whose hand in marriage could bring wealth and land to hard-up aristocratic males. The social reality of feudal northern Europe meant that marriage was not just an emotional or sexual rite of passage; it was a financial opportunity.
The creative outpouring of medieval love lyrics was also influenced by new styles of prayer. Can you imagine listening to a sermon that began, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth”? This was how Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux began the first of his 86 sermons devoted to the Song of Songs, sensuous Old Testament poetry. Bernard wrote these sermons between 1135 and 1153, and French translations of the biblical Song of Songs were being made by the mid-13th century. Bernard interpreted this line as an allegory for the soul of a believer longing for what he calls “divine lips.” Whether or not Bernard’s audience agreed with his pious interpretation, he gave the erotic lyrics of the Old Testament new currency.
What’s one lost medieval love tradition that deserves to be brought back?
My favorite forgotten genre is the jeu-parti, a two-person song that I think of as the premodern equivalent of the rap battle. Records of these songs defy all our stereotypes of how medieval men and women were supposed to speak and think. “What sort of a woman is to your pleasing, one who is reasonably beautiful and endowed with great intelligence, or one who is reasonably smart, and exceptionally beautiful?” Singers traded verses over six stanzas, finally appealing to judges from the audience. Women also sang jeux-partis together, debating what qualities are preferable in a man, for example, is it his ability to make courtly conversation, or his bravery in the tournament? By debating, singers acknowledged that no lover is perfect in every respect, that good attributes are inevitably balanced out by some flaws – much like relationships. We should bring back the jeu-parti.
You teach the course Love, Death and the Afterlife in the Medieval West. What’s something about medieval love that students have found surprising?
In a manuscript containing a love poem by Jean Molinet, a medieval hand wrote in the note: “This poem may be addressed either to the Virgin Mary or by a lover to his lady.” It’s surprising: the idea that lyrics themselves could be promiscuous, first used to honor Mary, queen of heaven, and then repurposed for one’s girlfriend. The writer was winking at his reader. He was recognizing that one must be pragmatic, whether appealing to a divine lady or a lady right here on Earth.
Writer
Melissa De Witte
