PART THREE—
IMAGINATIVE TRANSFORMATIONS

Chapter Four—
Troubadours, Trouvères, and Minnesingers

Courtesy and Chivalry in the Occitan Lyric

The relationship of Occitan lyric to its society has long been problematic. For Aurelio Roncaglia, an authoritative critic, the inner inspiration of this poetry escapes definition, and it remains a matter of controversy whether one can posit a general theory of courtly love: “rather, we must recognize a complex dialectic of opposite tendencies and seek the individual place of each poet in this dialectic.”^[1] It is part of my task to underline these inner tensions in the lyric as well as in the epic and the romance. Pierre Bec, among others, has focused on such tensions in his provocative attempts to combine the literary and the sociological, the formal and the thematic: “on the level of the poem's formal construction, the values of courtesy come vigorously forth, becoming ‘semicopoetic’ centers of attraction around which a whole universe of meanings is organized, and this universe's unavoidable tensions constitute the proper dynamism of the message.”^[2] A satisfactory interpretation seems possible in terms of a collective consciousness evolved by a disparate yet cohesive group of men gravitating around the regional courts. Indeed, E. Köhler has convincingly employed a sociological schema to explain the canso's nomenclature, structure, character, and system of values (see below). Another outstanding Romanist, Alberto Vàrvaro, argues that a truly comprehensive critical method must encompass more than formal aspects, and stresses the need to integrate the formal with the referential in a sociohistorical sense in order to see the full meaning of medieval lyric and epic.^[3]

In an illuminating polemic with Roncaglia regarding the interpreta-

tion of Marcabru, Köhler criticized the “history of ideas” approach.^[4] Marcabru could not simply have been trying to solve an intellectual puzzle based on fitting together the logical pieces of different ways of loving, abstractly considered. Even while he was confronting universal questions of love and survival, he was speaking to a real social group in a particular historical situation. The conventional nature of the motifs means that the poets were not being autobiographical, and also that they spoke as members of a group, a recognized and conscious collectivity, rather than as mere individuals.

Understanding the sociocultural parameters of knighthood in its early period is a prerequisite for an interpretation of its peculiar expression in the lyric. Arno Borst (1959: 216) opened a new phase of research into this thorny question by defining knighthood as “a combination of lordship and service.” The corresponding German terms of Herrschaft and Dienst point to the two poles of a significant dialectical contrast that lies at the root of knighthood as a historical institution, and that is the underlying cause for the apparent contradictions in its literary representation and the accompanying ideology. We can begin with the words' semantic fields. French chevalier, like German rîter, ritter, simply denoted the horse-mounted man (at arms). But knights could also be called knechte, “servants,” in Middle High German, which, like the cognate English “knight,” clearly pointed to the bond of service between soldier and master. Thus, in a highly productive paradox, what was to become the paramount linguistic sign of nobility, hence freedom, started out as a mark of servitude: the knight was inherently “unfree” as a liegeman and bond-servant of a master who kept him in his pay and at his orders for military and other services.^[5] The duality of functions for the nascent status of knight, namely being servant to a feudal lord and, at the same time, member of the ruling class endowed with power and lofty privilege, lies at the root of the contradictory nature of the knight's ideology and self-expression. He is proud of his exalted position and seeks his own individual growth to full dignity in the free experience of bravery, skill, and actual personal power (sought and tested through adventures), but at the same time he acknowledges the source of his dignity and power in the court where he must serve (Arthur's, Charlemagne's, or others).

This ambiguous state is part of the personal predicament of medieval man. It is widely held that feudalism froze personal relations. Yet the feudal arrangement of society presupposed individual judgment and responsibility, since individuals were constantly reevaluating their dy-

namic relationship with neighbors and superiors, always using ideological schemas to justify practical decisions. Loyalty meant expectation of protection in exchange for service, and service could be withdrawn when no longer profitable.^[6]

Both troubadour lyric and chivalric romance are tied to the nature of their audiences—chiefly courtly. In the state of quasi-anarchy that followed the break-up of the Carolingian order, the counts saw themselves forced to shape their domains into relatively independent military entities, relying on a new class of horse-mounted soldiers to enforce their claims against their equally independent-minded vassals. Knights had to be fashioned into reliable, loyal followers through a suitable education, personal support, and enfeoffment for the worthiest. Thus the lord's house became a “court,” the home for these new dependents and helpers. Soldiers turned courtiers and, occasionally, noble knights with some feudal status of their own.

The knight's duty toward the lord developed alongside the need for self-assertion as an independent fighting warrior, since fighting was both part of service and a way to acquire one's own fief as due reward. During the lord's frequent absences, his wife acquired a special status carrying great authority: as the lord's substitute (midons < Lat. meus dominus, referring to the lady, meant “my lord”) she became the center of the court and an object of respect, even veneration, on the part of these often unmarried knights. In courtesy and courtly love service to the lady symbolically replaced the service to the real master. If the two goals of service and acquisition were inherently at odds with each other, they still constituted a unified ideology in the imaginary representation of the man who was both adventurous knight and poet in love. The ideology developed naturally over a large front, since the refined forms of civilized behavior represented by the courtois overlay were conspicuously present not only in the lyric and the romance, but also, we shall see, in the epic. The German epic did not develop out of the Carolingian French epic or as a derivation from French courtois sources, yet it contained some of the same courtly and courtois elements as the French romance, which, in turn, was ostensibly imitated in the German romance. This might be the connecting point with the earlier German courtly tradition. Courtliness and courtoisie could develop naturally and independently in different social and cultural environments, as a result of an education that stemmed from the clerics and arose from the spiritual needs of the courts.

We are not interested here in a definition of courtly love or in a dis-

cussion of its various epiphanies, in response to those who object to the term as little more than Gaston Paris's coinage (1883).^[7] Even if this term does not occur in the Middle Ages, the phenomena it is meant to cover show clear distinguishing marks from all other forms of sensual love: it should suffice here to say that, in A. J. Denomy's phrasing (1953: 44), courtly love distinguished itself in “its purpose or motive, its formal object, namely, the lover's progress and growth in natural goodness, merit, and worth.”

Despite repeated assurances of total, unending dedication, the lover's relationship to the lady remains unstable and ambiguous. Hence the puzzling changes of mind, like Walther von der Vogelweide's eloquent “challenge to courtly love.” In Bernart de Ventadorn's canso “Lo tems vai e ven e vire,” one of his famous expressions of incipient, yet repented, revolt against the intolerable demands of fin'amor, we find an early revelation of the inner contradictions of the psyche. After declaring his intention to turn elsewhere, Bernart eventually reiterates his devotion: his “vengut er al partimen” (I shall come to the parting of ways, v. 35) is closely followed (v. 43) by “ja no.m partrai a ma vida” (never in my life shall I leave her).^[8]

The chivalrous code of courtesy became one of respect for the woman and concern for others' needs and feelings, hence for good manners in public behavior. Such a code could not arise by itself from the lords, who neither needed it nor really practiced it, but who in the end gladly adopted it from their subordinates for the sake of order and, as it were, a feeling of comradeship within the comital household. In adopting it, the lords implicitly yielded to a sort of ideological blackmail. In what Leo Spitzer called the paradoxe amoureux of troubadour poetry, we see mirrored the lesser nobility's effort to integrate itself into the higher nobility, an effort which the latter accepted by historical necessity and managed to control.^[9] This effort toward self-legitimization (the proclaimed loyalty, leialtat, etymologically implied legality, legalitas ) embraced a diverse group of court-dwellers who found this ideology to their common interest. Loyalty was a companion of fe or fes, faithfulness.

Courtesy implied a self-restraint that was essential to the knights' survival. Mezura became a key principle of cohabitation, entailing recognition of the limits beyond which one could not go. By its inner logic the court also became the natural place for an art of loving, whose object was the domina/domna, superior by definition and unreachable,

yet desired by all.^[10] Obviously mansuetude and humility (umildat ) were a necessary marker of recognition of the lady's absolute superiority as well as the lover/courtier's readiness to be obedient in all (obediensa ) in order to qualify as fis, a dedicated “faithful of Love”—his loyalty going more to the God of Love than to an individual lord or lady.^[11]

The convention of this erotic relationship caused keen competition among “lovers,” each of whom naturally saw in all others nothing but unworthy rivals to be exposed and denigrated. The term lauzengiers covers all other lovers in the audience, denounced as envious and insincere flatterers. The husband, that is, the lord, accepts this chaste devotion toward his wife and is often reminded not to take on the ridiculous role of gilos, “the jealous one.” He is also reminded that he must reward his vassal's devotion with generous gifts—possibly land, immunities, and positions of power in the household and the domain—this reward being the real, material one adumbrated in the request for merce (Fr. guerdon ) from the lady. The expectation of a benefice was part of the appeal to dreitz, the cardinal virtue of justice the lover proclaimed about himself and demanded of the lord.

Within the literature we are examining, different codes coexist in a state of mutual tension, the contradiction or ambiguity being a source of human and poetic richness. The application of the feudal relationship of lord and vassal to the relationship between lovers, the man becoming, in all humility, the servant, carried with it a high degree of playful ambiguity. Another factor of ambiguity was the introduction of the Christian ideology of mystic love, represented at best by the Marian cult, which became bent to profane love. Ever since it was first postulated by the French literary historian P.-L. Ginguené, it has been argued whether the Marian cult influenced courtly love or, on the contrary, it was in part a by-product of the new literary cult of womanhood. Such complexity is part of the fascination medieval literature exerts to this day, since the tension between contradictory moods results from a degree of (Christian) interiorization that ancient man could not experience.

Eduard Wechssler's and Joachim Bumke's older thesis of the nobleman becoming knight, Ritter (Bumke, Studien zum Ritterbegriff ), has been brought into sharper focus by Duby's and Köhler's distinction between the “young” (jove ) knight—poor, landless, and even non-casé or homeless, hence dependent on the powerful lord as his servant—and the “old” lord he serves but tries to bend to his vital interests. Jean Frappier's “culture du désir érotique freiné et prolongé” (“Vues  . . . ”:

140) is in harmony with Duby's and Köhler's abstraction of the troubadours' code, with a view of the high nobility being “educated” by the low “nobility of spirit,” soldiers of fortune of humble origin and cadets of the smaller nobility.

During the early stages, it seems reasonable to assume a coming together of the clerical educational ideals with the needs of the poor knights' class. Thus the Jaeger and the Duby/Köhler theses can be joined to fill each other's gaps. The former did not explain the survival of the curial mentalité after the end of the imperial bishoprics; the latter did not ask, let alone answer, why the poor knights developed an ideology that reproduced so much of the language and ethos of the curiales. Taken together, the two views help to explain how this unique ideology (absurd, for example, when seen in isolation in Petrarca) could acquire so much vitality as to survive almost intact for several centuries, especially through the realistic and skeptical experiences of the Cinquecento. To this outstanding example of the enduring character of aesthetic forms and themes one could apply György Lukács's argument that, beyond mere sociological relativism or determinism, the superstructure has a dynamic life of its own: as reflection or mirroring of a past reality it can live on in the collective memory for the pleasure of recalling the past.

The ideology of courtly love can be seen as part of a process of social climbing, the poor knights behaving as “marginal men” who sought recognition by the upper social stratum in order to overcome the limitations of the stratum they were trying to leave behind. A more aggressive posture could make the lords the butt of impatient courtiers, who criticized them as the “evil rich” (rics malvatz ), incapable of true love because they were married (molheratz ), illiberal, lustful, part of the different, inferior “others.” Logical and necessary by the very nature of the ideology, these insults risked becoming counterproductive, since the desired advancement depended on the lords' good will. Yet, overlooking such occasional side effects, the lords welcomed the ideology and even joined it because it ensured the knights' loyalty, which the lords needed. A sort of compromise ensued. Some court poets, like Marcabru, remained skeptical and hostile. But some lords, like Raimbaut d'Aurenga and Eble de Ventadorn (whose “school” Marcabru vocally opposed), professed a strain of courtly love, the elitist and exclusive hermetic style of the trobar clus, that implicitly gave them a position of leadership. All this developed only among the second generation of Provençal lyricists:

Guilhelm IX (1071–1127) was the first troubadour only in that he started the lyrical tradition, but without spiritual connection with chivalrous ideology.^[12]

Our sociological perspective may be a good way to tackle the difficult problem of the trobar clus. The gaps written in that style often boast of the poet's cunning in defeating the “folly,” foldats, of “the others” (be these the rivals, the inferiors, or even the lords). It was an interesting bending of the curial quality of shrewdness for the sake of survival in the treacherous environment of the courts. A revealing document of the trobar clus is the tenso “Ara.m plaitz, Giraut de Borneill” between Raimbaut d'Aurenga and Guiraut de Bornelh (variously dated at 1168, 1170, or 1171).^[13] For Raimbaut, the grand seigneur, the trobar clus was a distinctive mark of the aristocrat and a way to keep the message of this lofty poetry within the close circle of the worthy. Guiraut objected that he aimed more at universal appreciation (“qu'es mais amatz / e plus presatz / qui'l fa levet e venarsal,” “it is more loved and better appreciated if you make it easy and of universal appeal,” vv. 12 f.). Elsewhere he contended that the easy style is easy only in appearance, since it results from mastering the difficult art of being comprehensible to the largest possible public (including the populace gathering around the common spring) even while expressing high universal truths, occasionally sublime ones.^[14] Furthermore, clarity and ease of style are the result of happiness in love. Dante was to share that position. It was, after all, the classical principle that hidden art is the best art and that the achievement lies in what Boileau would term l'art caché, and the late eighteenth-century German classicists, überwundene Schwierigkeit, to wit, in overcoming the resistance of the medium, the linguistic difficulty. Raimbaut, however, was expressing the exclusiveness of the true lord who might also want to distance himself from the common jongleurs and the rabble of the court, not to mention the commoners outside.^[15] On their part, the troubadours were all the more interested in keeping the lords from monopolizing, or claiming any special rights over, the style and ideological canons that the lords had adopted but not invented."

With succeeding generations of troubadours, the courts increased in importance as they became the only locus for the poor, landless, and homeless knights. Courtesy was the common bond because of common interests (keeping harmony in the familia ). As, with time, grants of land and property became less likely, reputation and honor (pretz and onor )

no longer depended on property but on public recognition of this ideal of inner perfection. The critique of power and property, noble or bourgeois as the poets might be, was founded on this perception of a superior nobility of spirit.

The virtues invoked in the poems often betray the economic and social background of the ethical ideology, and this is probably nowhere as clear as in Marcabru, who introduces us to the haunting presences of largueza as the virtue of the generous and just lord deserving to be loyally served, its opposite vice being escarsedat, avoleza, or avareza (stinginess from avarice, Lat. avaritia ). For all their transparent economic layers, these concepts embed the poet's implicit theology and metaphysics.^[16] Above all, escarsedat is almost synonymous with malvestat, supreme wickedness and worthlessness, and the ubiquitous enemy of proeza, which in turn is made almost equivalent to largueza. Another undesirable type is the lady's guardian (gardador ), appointed by the lord to make sure that knights do not get dangerously close to his wife. Such guardians might be domestic clerics, acting somewhat in the capacity of the eunuchs of Muslim harems, but the troubadours (like Marcabru and Bernart de Ventadorn) are not impressed with their reliability and accuse them of repaying the trust with treachery, even to the point of giving the lord bastard offspring—one cause of moral and racial degeneracy within the nobility. The troubadours saw such guardians as undeserving favorites who got the merce, both sexual and material, that was their own due. It was all part of the relationship between knight poets and clerics, as the poets, from Marcabru to Peire Cardenal, burdened the clergy with the critiques that were more generally aimed at the degeneracy of the Church as a whole, even though the clerics were partly responsible for the civilizing process of courtly education.^[17]

The coexistence of variant codes could become outright juxtaposition to be expressed in a specific literary form, such as the descort, which is found in Provence, northern France, Germany, and Italy (discordo, contrasto ) as well. For a telling example, compare the trouvère Colin Muset's (fl. 1230) “Quant voi lo douz tens repairier,”^[18] where, as is typical of this form, the metrical difference between the strophes is meant to express the inner “discord” in the heart of the lover, his inharmonious experience of different manners of emotional involvement, constantly swinging between exaltation and alienation. This was formally analogous to Dante's expression of Pier della Vigna's inner moral discord by adopting his tortuous rhetorical style (Inferno 13).

The literary form of the troubadours' compositions reflects the love

situation in a way that joins poetics, economics, and social ethics. The structure of the canso corresponds to the set social relationship.^[19] Of the customary five or six stanzas, the first usually states the poet's intention, framing it in a natural setting of time and place. The second develops the poet's state of mind. The third, the central one, puts forth the praise of the lady, while the fourth stanza often inveighs against the lauzengiers, warning the lady against them. What follows may develop the same motifs or warn of changes of mind or tactics if the lover's worth is not recognized (and the knight's valor is not rewarded by the lord). The envoi usually addresses itself directly to the lady, a protector, or the lord himself. Lover, beloved, and rivals thus fill the roles of types, but in the society of the poet/knight they are, rather than simply literary conventions, real antagonists in the flesh. This analysis of the correspondence between metrical form and message exemplifies the aesthetic potential inherent in a sociological reading. Sociological criticism does not exhaust literary criticism and is only occasionally capable of investing the poetic/aesthetic level of the texts, but this is also true of most other now-current methods.

With all its repetitiveness and generic abstractness, the literary/ethical framework we have been confronting expresses the poet's feeling as a member of his society, and his style, conventional and generic as it is, adequately expresses his adherence to that society and his functioning within it. To borrow Reto R. Bezzola's sensible explanation of the peculiar nature of Occitan lyric, “le style qu'il adopte, auquel il se soumet sans en sentir la contrainte, est l'expression de cet organisme [i.e., that society].”^[20] Since this literature, like most of medieval literature, was chiefly transmitted orally, the relative impersonality of oral transmission—when the message was basically repeated from memory—imposed a large degree of collectivity and “conventionality.”^[21]

So, courtly literature had motives. It had an ideological finality to define and clarify the values of the chivalric class. The socioeconomic basis for the noble life was clearly implied. The German terms are picturesquely effective by their internal rhyme. A knight was said to need not only the proper spirit, muot, but also the material means, guot, since he could not be generous and liberal without having anything to give: see Hartmann, Erec: 2263–2265; Gregorius: 606–620; Iwein: 2905–2908; and Gottfried, Tristan: 5648–5712. Knightly virtues are often listed pithily but emphatically by the troubadours. One detects an interesting “southern moral realism”: contrary to the perfectionism that will be evident in the French romances with their images of ideal

knights, the troubadours are often aware that their possibilities are limited, and thus, since not all virtues are attainable by one individual, only he who is deprived of all courtly virtues is unworthy of knighthood. Arnaut de Maruelh (fl. 1171–1190) expresses in precise terms this moral relativism.^[22] With their unending pleas for liberality on the part of their lords, the troubadours echoed either the hurt feelings of decayed noblemen yearning for their lost “rights,” or the hopes for ascendance on the part of the poor landless nobility. Putting to use both sides of the coin, nobility was, alternatively, claimed either as a birthright or as a matter of personal worth. Consciousness of the changes that were taking place in the first half of the thirteenth century is evident, for example, in the troubadour Folquet de Romans's reference to his contemporary Frederick II, who abandoned his characteristic liberality, reduced his courtiers to bureaucratic functionaries (around 1221), and kept all the land and money for himself: in particular, his southern court came to favor ministerial poets over professional minstrels.^[23]

On the economic plane largueza is true virtue, as avareza is the mother of all vices. But a degree of bourgeois rationality gradually intervenes in the debates on liberality among the late troubadours. The partimen between Albert de Sisteron (Albertet de Sestaro) and Peire (Raimon?) contrasts Albert's improvident knight who dissipates his patrimony to win his lady with Peire's reasonable and constant knight who wins the true esteem of his lady and of society by spending advisedly, as a warranty of future ability to support her. Similarly, and most eloquently, Sordello:

Quar per larguesa amesurada
anc nulz oms larcs non pres baisada,
mas per larguesa franca e folla
destrui.l seu e son pretz afolla.
.      .     .    .    .   .    .    .    .    .    .
Per qu'om deu, qui tot vol salvar,
per la mediana via anar.

(By a measured liberality no liberal man ever lowered his status, whereas by excessive and foolish prodigality a man destroys his patrimony and loses his reputation . . . . He who wants to save everything must keep the middle way.)^[24]

The accent is, then, on mesura, via mediana, to avoid folhor, foldat, “folly.” The dangers of prodigality had appeared in the earlier troubadours, though not the earliest ones. Guiraut de Bornelh says that no lord was ruined by giving too much, yet he could appreciate that foolish

liberality can cause problems.^[25] Italian sources speak of the Este family almost ruining itself for excessive liberality, and of a Malaspina having to turn to highway robbery to keep up his “giving” (donare ).^[26]

On the moral plane, Guiraut de Bornelh voiced an idealistic concern for the reputation of the chivalric estate when he criticized the abuse of power by knights who turn freebooters instead of using military service for legitimate causes. In his sirventes “Per solatz revelhar” we read:

  You saw tourneys proclaimed,
with well-equipped gentry attending,
and then, for a time, you heard
talk of those who fought best;
now there is honor in robbing
and snatching sheep from the flock.
Shame to the knight
who dares court a lady
after touching bleating sheep with his hands
or robbing churches and travelers.^[27]  

On the sentimental plane, the rule is not really love as we would understand it, but desire, an unfulfillable desire that is the root and source of unlimited perfectibility—somewhat like the romantic German Sehnsucht. Unsatisfied desire frustrates but also gives the lover the true nobility to which he aspires.^[28] Satisfaction might not end the infatuation, but would end the progress toward ever increasing perfection. In the course of the thirteenth century, with the weakening of the social structures that had supported the ideology and literature of chivalry and courtly love, the expression of concrete social situations gave way to more universal and abstract schemata, referentiality being turned to broader groups and becoming more collective, as best witnessed in the German and Italian courtly lyric. The fact that political and social changes emptied the courtly motifs of their precise meaning did not make them mere formal conventions. Theme became style, as it did, conclusively, in Petrarca, with a mood of intense spirituality that was no longer socially bound. Hence, the need for allegory and symbolism, as in Ulrich von Lichtenstein and Burkhard von Hohenfels, in lieu of social definitions, however shifting, tense, and dialectically qualified they might have been.^[29]

Yet the social milieu that can be identified as the chief producer and consumer, voice and audience of courtly literature, may appear too narrow for the breadth and scope of the rich poetry that is before us.^[30] The attitudes that inspired such diverse writers as the Provençal

minstrels, the French vagrant goliards, the Sicilian, Bolognese, and Tuscan notaries, and then Dante, Petrarca, and their cosmopolitan imitators of several countries for generations to come, shared something that went beyond their social station, origin, or function. From a functional “ideology” or mentalité it became an abstract one, all the more powerful and lasting.^[31] Consequently, the debate on their “conventionality” or sincerity somehow misses the mark, precisely because we are dealing with an ideology rather than with personal sentiments. Understanding chivalry and courtliness as ideological phenomena places them in a clearer light than a simply social or political explanation ever could.

What the more exalted troubadours show is a state of mind that transcended and even denied the values of feudalism: their newly found sen, “wisdom” or “knowledge,” their gai saber, “gay learning,” became opposed to the warriorlike ardimen, “courage” and “bravery” (Fr. hardiment, G. Tapferkeit, Lat. fortitudo ), and proeza (Fr. proece ) of the feudal vassal and the knight. Whereas physical strength is born with us, our wisdom and knowledge are acquired, like the erudition of the clerical courtier.^[32] Thus, gradually, as the feudal order started weakening, the themes also shifted in relative emphasis, undermining the original ethical system from within and moving from the cavalaria of the loving knight to courtly love without the warrior virtues. The knight's military qualities had been set off against the courtly qualities as valuable assets for winning ladies' favors, but later they began to lose the argument as less important. As we shall see, in the quasi-epic setting of the French and German romances it was the other way around: Erec and Yvain had to leave their ladies to prove their worth by a series of victorious knightly deeds. But in a partimen between Guionet (Gui de Cavaillon?) and Raembaut (Raimbaut de Vaqueiras?),^[33] Raembaut decides that “Cel q'es adregz, plazenz, de bel estatge, / lares e cortes e senes villania,” “he who is correct, pleasing, of good manners, liberal and courtly and without any boorishness,” is worth a hundred times more to his lady than the one who has ardimen, because it is not right that for one virtue alone one should possess a good lady. In another partimen, already mentioned, between Albert de Sisteron and Peire, the latter insinuates with a delightfully ironic touch of bourgeois common sense that military adventure is a dangerous way to win a lady. Better to have the lady without the battle; better to be courtly than to have been brave. A dead emperor is not worth very much.^[34] So courtesy could now even dispense with heroic prowess. Originally proeza had meant military valor, as in Guilhelm IX; it was now becoming synonymous

with cortesia even without ardimen. At the extreme end of such arguments, boorish ardimen could become an obstacle to the cortesia demanded by love, and even a cause of downright vilania when deprived of wisdom and culture (sen ). Sen was originally distinguished from saber or clerical doctrine, shunned by the knight as pedantic bigotry (the Germans called it pfaffisch ), but this distinction later disappeared.

We must therefore pause to ask ourselves whether we may not have to go back to where we started, since the basic meaning of this poetic school still eludes us. For one more paradox keeps staring at us: if these poems express and represent the poets' longing for recognition and reward, they keep saying that they do not attain either. We are then left wondering, as contemporary audiences might have, what is the point of iterating, poem after poem, poet after poet, indeed, from country to country, generation after generation, a message that was familiar before it was restated? It amounted to saying: “I want what I cannot get, I need what I will lack, I ask what must be denied.” We are confronted with a poetry that appears conventional because it “expresses” what does not individually and personally “inspire” the poet—to use Várvaro's appropriate distinction.^[35] The answer could be, this time, that the sociological interpretation must be integrated with the analysis of the forms, as practiced by formalist criticism, to conclude that the peculiar nature of this literature lies precisely in its being, conjointly, a verbal game aimed at the pleasure of listening to itself, as a beautiful courtly show, even while it creates by its message and forms the concrete life and practical salvation of the courtier-poet.^[36] This poetry became an integral part of court ritual not in a trivial sense, but as a high-level expression of cultural and social refinement that operated as a cohesive and stabilizing factor within the individual courts and through a vast cosmopolitan network, thanks to the poets/minstrels' errancy.

We can thus answer the challenges of, say, a Roncaglia about the ambiguity and mystery of troubadour poetry as well as Zumthor's insistence on their “verbal play.” Mutatis mutandis, we can apply to this kind of poetry (of “praise of the lady”) the peculiar predicament that Stanley Fish (1988: 239) has recently extracted from Ben Jonson's poems of praise, read as an involved strategy for dealing with his ambivalent relationship to court life: “a Jonson poem always has the problem of finding something to say, a problem that is solved characteristically when it becomes itself the subject of the poem, which is then enabled at once to have a mode of being (to get written) and to remain empty of representation.”

Great master of “the boast” (gab ), his favorite genre, Peire Vidal (fl. 1180–1206) undoubtedly offers the most brilliant performance in the jocular mode of miles ludens, playing on the juxtaposition or mixture of heroic and courtly.^[37] Even his vidas are a fine texture of his own ironic boasts as an outrageously successful warring knight and lover. More generally, the element of playfulness in courtois poetry is an extension of the games of courtly elegance. Such playfulness generated a high degree of casuistry in the subtle intellectual debates on conventional and abstract “cases of love,” especially in the genres of partimen and tenso.^[38] The chief intent of these debates may be implied in the fact that the decisions usually point to the harder one of the available choices, thus attesting to the principle of fin'amor as an educational process that elevates and refines the lover, spiritually, morally, and socially.^[39] The highest goal is onor, a public, social recognition of true worth. Since, as Köhler has underlined, the term onor originally meant fief, this social and moral honor was a sublimated substitute for feudal benefices.^[40]

To conclude, let us look at the exemplary portrait of the Young King as a paragon of knighthood in Bertran de Born's planh “Mon chan fenis ab dol et ab maltraire” (Pillet-Carstens 80.26—hereafter P.-C.). He was “larc e gen parlan / e gen cavalgan, / de bella faiso / e d'umil senblan / per far grans honors” (generous, noble in speech, apt on horseback, of graceful person and humble in his way of distributing great honors, vv. 5–9). He was “reis dels cortes e dels pros emperaire” (king of the courtly and emperor of the brave, 15). Hence he justly received the name of Young King, since he was the guide and father to all who were truly young: “que ‘reis joves’ aviaz nom agut / e de joven eras capdels e paire,” 17 f. He was the embodiment of joy and love (“jois et amors,” 23); he received his courtiers gently and generously in word and deed: “Gent acuillir e donar ses cor vaire / e bel respos e ‘ben-sias-vengut!’ / e gran hostal pagat e gen tengut / dons e garnirs et estar ses tort faire,” 29–32.^[41] Note the central position of joi, “joy of living.” It went together with the other key term of solas (solaz, sollatz, OFr. soulas, “pleasant company” < Lat. solatium ): court life demanded to be textured with good disposition and graced with good company. Ordericus Vitalis had said of Guilhelm IX that he had surpassed the gayest minstrels in gaity, using that term facetus that we have seen applied to the life of the courts as a curial virtue (facetos etiam histriones facetiis superans ).^[42]

The French Trouvères

As we leave the Occitan area we note the widespread similarity of literary expressions, which involves the immediate diffusion of Occitan themes and formal motifs, with minimal original variations in the contiguous French area. I shall restrict myself to a sampling of expressive devices in northern France, in and out of the lyric. The more distant geographic areas of Germany and Italy will yield broader basic divergences reflecting the different social situations. I shall specifically dwell on samples of formal motifs because their quick and early crystallization manifests the depth of penetration of themes that we have assumed were originally socially-bound.

Alongside the moral predicates,the ideology of courtly love also embodied the topoi inherited from ancient psychology and physiology, transformed into the metaphors of humors and spirits, which could take on a life of their own. The Italian Dolce Stil Nuovo is known for its use of the various spiritelli that stood for emotions and dispositions, but even earlier one could find personifications of parts of the psyche that became separable from the individual. These topical personifications were functional in representing the lover's alienation and his drastic inner conflict. Bernart de Ventadorn (fl. 1150–1180), for example, displayed the ideological framework of Neo-Platonic love in the sophism of the heart and sould leaving the lover. See his canso “Tant ai mo cor ple de joya” (P.-C. 70.44, st. 3 vv. 33–36): “Mo cor ai pres d'Amor, / que l'esperitz lai cor, / mas lo cors es sai, alhor, / lonh de leis, en Fransa” (I have my heart close to Love, and my spirit also runs there,but my body is here, in another place, far away from her, in France).^[43] He ends his long canso “Lancan vei la folha” with this envoy: “Domna, mo coratge, / .1 melhor amic qu'eu ai, / vos man en ostatge / entro qu'eu torn de sai” (Lady, I am sending you my heart, the best friend I have, as hostage until I return from here).^[44]

Similarly, in his poem “Merci clamans de mon fol errement,” Le Châtelain de Coucy (d. 1203) had the following: “Et quant mon cors li toil, mon cuer li rant” (When I take my body away from her, I return my heart to her). For an example from Chrétien's own region of Champagne, the trouvère Gace Brulé (fl. 1180–1213) has literally lost his heart (to the lady): “S'ele ne m'en crois, viegne i guarder; / Vez, n.en a mie dedenz mi!” (If she does not believe me, let her come and look: see, there is none inside me!)^[45] In his “Ahi Amour! com dure departie,” the

French trouvère Conon de Béthune (ca. 1150–1219 or 1220), on the verge of leaving for the Crusade, protests that he is not departing from his beloved at all, since he leaves his heart with her: “Las! c'ai jou dit? Ja ne m'en part jou mie! / Se li cors vait servir nostre Seignour, / li cuers remaint dou tout en sa baillie.”^[46] Compare, too, Thibaut de Champagne's (1201–1253) famous poem “Ausi comme unicorne sui”: “mes cuers aloit si tressaillant / qu'il vous remest, quand je m'en mui” (my heart was startled so, that it remained with you when I moved away).^[47] Shades of Marsilio Ficino!

For even earlier cases of this striking metaphorical way to represent inner conflict we can turn to Chrétien's Chevalier de la charrete. Guenièvre (Guinevere), just saved by Lancelot from a frightening imprisonment, withdraws into a chamber and refuses to speak to her dumbfounded lover. He is said to follow her with his eyes as far as they can go, but “while his eyes remain outside with his body, his heart is able to go further” (vv. 4000 f.). More explicitly still, Lancelot “left but his heart stayed with Guenièvre” (v. 4700).^[48] This clearly shows how the casuistry of love first introduced by the troubadours found parallels not only among their imitators in the lyric but in the other courtly genres, too, and also beyond France. Themes and motifs went together with corresponding stylistic devices. The specific motif we are momentarily pursuing shows that here, too, German poets were not far behind. Gottfried of Strassburg, for one, excelled in the exploitation of this stylistic/ideological mannerism. We may recall Isolt's lengthy monologue when Tristan leaves for a long absence in France: see verses 18,491–600, especially the motif of “the soul in the other” at 18,510 f.: “daz ir min leben vüeret hin / und lazet mir daz iuwer hie” (And you have taken my life along and left your life behind with me). The most striking episode of all is probably the humorous and surprising debate between Hartmann von Aue and Lady Love in Hartmann's Iwein (vv. 2971–3028). The motif was already in Hartmann's source, Chrétien's Yvain (vv. 2639 f.), but simply as the metaphor that Yvain had left his heart behind with his wife, and that it was a wonder how the body could go on living without it. Hartmann turned this into a major argument and, furthermore, in developing the theme there and elsewhere, he always made the exchange mutual: see Erec 2364–2367 and Gregorius 653 f.^[49]

In an analogous vein, within the scope of expressing the contradictions of the lover's predicament, the rhetoric of courtly love developed a set of conventions that could be played as a game—part of what was

then perceived as civilized refinement, the style of the élite man. A sort of initiation ritual imposed a language of seeming irrationality that combined endlessly, in elegant and witty paradox, contradictory positions of love and hate, hope and despair, happiness and sorrow. Petrarca turned all this into an enduring style of oxymora that had a serious side (the discovery of the contradictory nature of the psyche). Admittedly his early ancestors included, beyond the Provençal troubadours and the French trouvères, Ovid's odi et amo and Augustine's video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor. But Petrarca's mark on posterity was part of a general phenomenon involving the drift from live social issues toward set style forms, which eventually led to mannerisms of all sorts: an arsenal of motifs to be used as literary play and social conventions.

In “Quant l'aura doussa s'amarzis,” Cercamon (fl. 1137–1152) said he was pleased when his lady made him mad, when she made a complete fool of him, when she laughed at him. He thoroughly enjoyed being full of worries for her sake, and it was up to her to make him faithful or full of tricks, a rustic peasant or a most refined courtier, and so on: “Bel m'es quant ilh m'enfolhetis / e.m fai badar e.n vau muzan; / et leis m'es bel si m'escarnis. /  . . . . / Totz cossiros m'en esjauzis, / o drechuriers o ples d'enjan,/ o totz vilas o totz cortes.”^[50] In his canso “Non es meravelha s'eu chan,” Bernart de Ventadorn had it thus: “A hundred times a day I die of grief, and I revive of joy a hundred times. My disease has a wonderful appearance, for my pain is worth more than any other good,” “cen vetz mor lo jorn de dolor / e reviu de joi autras cen. / Ben es mos mals de bel semblan, / que mais val mos mals qu'autre bes.”^[51]

For exemplary cases among the trouvères, compare Blondel de Nesle's (second half of the twelfth century) heaping of oxymora in quick succession: “plaisant martire,” “a pleasant martyrdom,” “douce mort,” “a sweet death,” “qu'en ceste amour m'est li tourmenz delis,” “in this love of mine my torment is a delight” (“Mout se feïst bon tenir de chanter”). The obvious stylistic playfulness does not exclude seriousness of purpose. In Le Châtelain de Coucy's “Li nouviauz tanz” we read: “Tanc con fui miens, ne me fist se bien non, / mes or sui suenz, si m'ocit sanz raison; / et c'est pour ce que de cuer l'ai amee!” (As long as I was my own man, she did me nothing but good; But now that I am hers, she kills me without reason; This because I have loved her truly, with all my heart.) Gace Brulè says he wants what harms him most, and dismay makes him rejoice and laugh: “quant je plus vueil ce dont plus sui grevez, / et en l'esmai m'estuet joer et rire” (“Ire d'amors qui en mon

cuer repere,” vv. 38 f.). Also compare Conon de Béthune's “L'an que rose ne fueille”: “einsi me fait vivre melleement / d'ire et de bien” (thus she makes me live in a confusion of grief and joy). Finally, in “Chançon ferais, que talenz m'en est pris,” Thibaut de Champagne raves so: “Dame, por vos vueil aler foloiant / que je en aim mes maus et ma dolor, /  . . .. que mes granz maus por vos si fort m'agree.” (Lady, for you I want to go around like a fool, for I love the grief and pain I have from you,  . . . my great suffering for you pleases me so!)

There is another side to this typical and productive use of antithesis, which in its apparent play of unreality expresses the very predicament of the illusory woman represented and invoked in the lyric. The convention was there from the very beginning, and remained canonical even through the various forms of Petrarchism. For the earliest testimony, see Guilhelm IX: “Amigu'ai ieu, no sai qui s'es, / qu'anc non la vi . . . . / ni'm fes que'm plassa ni que'm pes, / ni no m'en cau . . . . / Anc non la vi et am la fort.” (I have a lady friend but I don't know who she is, since I've never seen her, nor has she done to me anything either pleasing or displeasing, and I couldn't care less . . . . I've never seen her yet I love her heartily.)^[52] The lady may be, but does not have to be, a person: she can be the lover's other self, his better, spiritual self, his ideal of inner perfection, his mirror image—Narcissus.^[53] In other words, in the specific context we are studying, the woman was the knight's chivalric and courteous self.

This possibility is an aspect of the unreality of the woman's presence in medieval literature, even while she is, conversely, the center of attention of much of the literary and artistic discourse. The apparent paradox results from woman having been symbolically invested with functions that did not literally belong to her—like being the real lord—or that were hers on a purely anthropological level—as, typically, in the common phenomenon of equivalence between biological sex and grammatical gender, in bono et in malo: woman as the Church (Ecclesia ), Wisdom (Sophia, Sapientia, Philosophia ), lust (luxuria ), and so on.^[54] It it also part of what made courtly love so exemplary and durable, namely a radical crystallization of that biological/anthropological phenomenon defined by Mircea Eliade as (Platonic) “androgynization,” meaning that in love “chaque sexe acquiert, conquiert les ‘qualités’ du sexe opposé (la grace, la soumission, Ie dévouement acquis par I'homme amoureux, etc.).”^[55] We have a revealing testimony to this phenomenon in the fact that the list of virtues attributed to the courtly woman is more or less

the same as for the man: she is supposed to be doussa, bela, genta, fina, and endowed with cortezia, pretz, sabers, and umildat.

The German Minnesang

On German soil, too, the courtois ethos spilled over into several genres. The virtue of wisdom in the form of modesty or moderation, for example, is in the very title of a popular collection of proverbial sentences or “Sprüche, ” namely Freidank's Bescheidenheit of circa 1230. But it is in the lyric and the romance that we find the most fertile ground for our inquiry.

The Minnesingers were a good match for their Occitan and French peers. The most extended display of obedience at any cost had been, of course, Chrétien's Lancelot, who began by accepting dishonor when he jumped in the condemned man's chariot (and yet would later be spurned by Guenièvre for having hesitated “two steps”), and then carried on in that humiliating predicament until he outdid himself by fighting “cowardly” in the tourney at Noauz, always for the sake of Gueniévre and at her instigation. In lyrical form, after Cercamon (remember the passage quoted above from “Quant l'aura doussa s'amarzis”), the Austrian master Reinmar der Alte (1150/1160, d. before 1210, believed to be the poet praised by Gottfried as “the nightingale of Hagenau”) set up the most radical standard of total mansuetudo vis-à-vis a mistress who behaved as a cruel tyrant:

Of one thing only and no other do I want to be a master as long as I live: I want the whole world to give me praise for having the skill to endure suffering better than anyone. A woman is the cause of this state of mine, whereby I cannot remain silent day or night. But I have such a gentle disposition that I take her hate as joy. Yet, alas, how much it hurts!^[56]

Compare, furthermore, Reinmar's “waz tuon ich, daz mir liebet daz mir leiden solte?” (What am I doing, drawing pleasure from what ought to pain me?, from “Der lange süeze kumber mîn.”) It is particularly significant that such expressions of service to the lady could be voiced by high lords, like the powerful Swiss count Rudolf von Fenis-Neuenburg: “Iemer mêre wil ich dienen mit staete” (I am determined to serve always with constancy).^[57] It is an example of the adoption of the nonfree knights' and ministeriales' ethic of service on the part of the lords who did not need it for survival but were conquered by the image of moral nobility it had projected.

The Minnesingers could go beyond the merely psychological representation of the contradictory nature of strong emotional states: they could use stylistic devices as fitting vehicles to express the conflicts between the competing ideologies that surrounded them. Walther von der Vogelweide is second to none in dramatically shifting between hohe and nidere Minne. His master Reinmar had said that if his lady died he could no longer go on living (“stirbet si, sô bin ich tôt”). Retorts Walther, wittily yet seriously: If he dies she is as good as dead too, since she has received her true life and glory from being loved and sung by him: “ir leben hât mînes lebennes êre; / stirbe ab ich, sô ist si tôt.”^[58] Perhaps even more eloquent is his famous stanza of revolt against Reinmar's unswerving devotion to a lady who is the perfect object of high love, while Walther sets side by side the distant, unreal lady of hohe Minne and the real, full-blooded, and truly human women he now thinks he can love: “Wîp muoz iemer sîn der wîbe hôhste name / und tiuret baz danne frowe, als ichz erkenne.” (Woman will always be the highest name of women, / and is higher praise than lady, I now hold.)^[59]

Close as it remained, all in all, to the troubadour lyric, the Minnesang also showed marked differences from it.^[60] The absence of the concept of joven, “youth,” and joi in the exalted comprehensive sense it had in southern France—Middle High German vröide (G. Freude) is more neutral—reflected a different social situation and resulted in the absence of certain literary forms. The fact that German courts were configured with a predominance of ministeriales over knights of lineage, imposed a greater respect for the lords and less polemical spirit against them, since the often non-free ministeriales, who did not enjoy any mobility, tended to accept their given status. Even a knight of lineage like Walther von der Vogelweide, with all his restlessness, was compelled to place werdekeit, “value,” in a sense of mâze, “measure,” that was equivalent to “loyal” acceptance of one's “stable status” (staete ): see his famous poem “Aller Werdekeit ein füegerinne” to Lady Moderation, Vrouwe Mâze, where he says: “So bîn ich doch, swie nieder ich sî, der werden ein, / genuog in mîner mâze hô” (However low my status is, I still am, with regard to my worth, high enough within my status).^[61]

The traditional explanation has been that the Minnesang was the creation of the higher nobility, hence not possibly polemical against it, but once again, as with regard to the origins of troubadour poetry, this hypothesis is contradicted by documented fact. The reason for the difference is the greater stability of court life and family relations as well as the infrequency of knights errant (vagantes ) in German lands. Hence

senhals, the pseudonyms for the beloved, or the practice of “ladies of the screen,” as seen in Italy, including Dante's Vita nuova, were also not needed: they would simply have made the husbands unnecessarily suspicious. Likewise, the Minnesingers were not inclined to break a spear in favor of inner nobility, nor were they so much interested in combating jealousy: the married lord's trust in his wife was his own business and the German courtier was not about to advise him on how to deal with it. They were content to emphasize envy, nît.^[62]

Accepting one's state, however, poses another paradox in the practice of courtiership and courtly love, since staying put is not only unproductive, but defeats the very premise of the knight's progress: as courtier or lover he must either aspire to a higher state or decay. Despite the courtly love pretensions of pure love outside matrimony, both hereditary knights and ministeriales aspired to profitable marriages above their state or with moneyed ladies. The moment of utility was repressed and transferred in the literature, but the fact was not removed on the level of praxis. After an initial stage of alliance between knights and ministeriales, Walther's “revolt” showed that the former could learn how to part ways with the latter, protesting their freedom of choice, as Walther did, and threatening to leave the service of the vrouwe if she refused to behave as a wîp, that is, as a woman rather than as a mistress. Like Walther, the noble poets could go as far as to claim that she owed them as much as they owed her, or more: since they could make her, she could repay by making them—or lose them.^[63] In the meantime, this bold but just claim constitutes an important chapter in the history of poets' self-consciousness concerning the value and power of poetry to grant status and glory to the powerful.

Many key terms of the Minnesang are equivalent to those of the troubadours: gemüete, sin, tumpheit, kumber, elende, übermuot, senen, sorge, biderbe, wert, leide, and mâze correspond, respectively, to corage, “valor”; sen, “wisdom”; foldat, “folly”; ira, “sadness”; caitiu, “wretched”; orguelh, “pride”; dezirar, “to desire”; cuidar, “worry”; pro, “advantage”; valor, “worth”; sofrir, “suffering”; and mezura, “moderation.” But there were new and different terms also. Vröide corresponds to joi but with an ulterior sublimation into saelde, completely lacking in the troubadours. Despite the mystical overtone of sanctity (saelde/saelic, like sâlig and sâlida, is the etymology of G. selig, “blessed”), this concept is unlike the troubadours' assimilation of love for the lady to love for the Virgin Mary, as they did when they became affected by the religious involution after the Albigensian Crusade. It

meant, rather fatalistically, “happy through good fortune.” Similarly, the rendering of merce with lôn and gnâde (benefice, grace) stressed the unexpected character of the reward, coming as a gratuitous, rare act of favor. This further proves a lower social origin, since lords would not expect grace: they could only grant it, not receive it—and they performed neither dienst, “service,” nor arebeit, “work,” as the courtiers insisted they did.^[64]

The Minnesang remained productive, if no longer original, through the next century until, in the fifteenth century, it flowed into the art of the Meistersingers. One latter-day Minnesinger was Hugo von Montfort (1357–1423), a great nobleman from the Vorarlberg who served as intendant of the Austrian Duke Leopold III and governor in Swiss and Austrian provinces. His poetry combines the duties of the Christian knight with the canons of Ritterdienst and Minnedienst, chivalry and courtly love, and praises, instead of an unreachable lady, the three women to whom he was successively happily married. The process of Christianization is somewhat analogous to that which we can observe in Spain in the same century, but it is interesting to catch a German high aristocrat in the act of transcending the original social functions of courtly love.

The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries witnessed a fashion of erotic allegory (Minneallegorie ) which did not tire of reproducing a set progress of the knight riding through a forest where he meets a beautiful lady: she leads him to a castle where he makes the acquaintance of a series of female allegorical figures that reproduce such familiar chivalric virtues as Love, Joy, Honor, Chastity, Constancy, and Honesty.^[65]Die Jagd (ca. 1335) of the knight Hadamar von Laber from the High Palatinate is regarded as the high point in the genre for the early period. It was often imitated both in subject matter and in its way of using the “Titurel-stanza.” In the flowery style that often characterizes such compositions, Hadamar has an allegorical hunter pursue a deer with the help of his spiritual forces, the hounds Triuwe, Staete, Fröude, Liebe, Leide, Trûren, Sene, Harre, and more, but to no avail, since this kind of hunt can have no end (Ende ) except in death.

A related, not always distinguishable subgenre was the Minnerede, which established itself in the first quarter of the fourteenth century. After reaching a definite form in the second quarter, it lived on through the remainder of the century and, in newly adapted form, even through the sixteenth century. It was an aristocratic diversion (Heinrich Niewöhner, its most outstanding student, declared it composed exclusively

for the nobility, at least in the early stage).^[66] In the form of a set rhetorical speech the Minnerede discussed the specific virtues (sometimes personified and allegorized) that preside over the exercise of true love, namely Treue, Staete, Ehre, Wahrhaftigkeit, and Verschwiegenheit, together with the classic obstacles interposed by the lady's indifference. It also debated the choice between high love or mere friendship, romantic love or sexual gratification, a married lady or a virgin, and the question whether the lady ought to prefer a knight or a cleric. The medieval court of love and its attendant games and judgments found a new garb which replaced the Minnesang' s lyrical expression of personal feeling and experience with abstract theoretical debate on set themes in rhymed oratorical form.

The three discrete codes (the courtly, the chivalric/heroic, and the chivalric/courtois or, more simply, the courtly, the chivalrous, and the courtois ) do not correspond to separate genres. All in all, however, the third code was the staple of the medieval love lyric, whereas the romance, to which I shall turn next, incorporated all three in different stages, often wavering in its uneasy relationship with the second and the third.

Chapter Five—
Courtesy in the French Romance

From Epic to Romance:
The First Generation

The world view of the lyric bears a closer relation to that of the courtly romance than has been commonly recognized in historical expositions.^[1] We have seen how the former reflects our theme: let us now look at the latter. We will find there the perfect knight who joins in his exemplary person the leading qualities of arma, amor, and litterae —the valor of the fighter, the refinement of the true lover, and the sophistication of the educated man of society.

The French epics or chansons de geste have been amply analyzed for incipient elements of chivalry and courtesy. I shall therefore start with an example outside the main French cycles and single out a Provençal epic of circa 1150, the ten-thousand-line Girart de Roussillon, celebrating the struggle between the French King Charles Martel and his vassal Girart. We encounter there the striking portrait of a chivalrous knight readying for battle whom Maurice Keen has found to be of the same mold as the Arnold of Ardres and William the Marshal of somewhat later chronicles.^[2]

Folcon was in the battle lines, with a fine hauberk, seated on an excellently trained horse . . . . He was most graciously armed . . . . And when the king saw him he stopped, and went to join the Count of Auvergne, and said to the French: “Lords, look at the best knight that you have ever seen . . . . He is brave and courtly and skilful, and noble and of a good lineage and eloquent, handsomely experienced in hunting and falconry; he knows how to play chess and backgammon, gaming and dicing. And his wealth was never

denied to any, but each has as much as he wants . . . . And he has never been slow to perform honorable deeds. He dearly loves God and the Trinity. And since the day he was born he has never entered a court of law where any wrong was done or discussed without grieving if he could do nothing about it . . . . And he always loved a good knight; he has honored the poor and lowly; and he judges each according to his worth.”^[3]

The 114 lines dedicated to him present Folcon as an ideal knight thanks to courtly virtues (he is cortes in the sense of “having the manners of the court,” according to Hackett) that, outside the lyric, are perhaps here for the first time attributed to a knight rather than a nobleman. He hates war but enters the field of battle with fierce bravery when loyalty calls. He shows good breeding, liberality, and eloquence as well as skill in the courtly pastimes of hunting and social games. His humanity and sense of justice toward the needy also make him the sort of knight that the Peace of God had been preaching.^[4]

Another significant episode in the early epic deserves our attention. The French Coronement Looïs is part of the cycle of Guillaume d'Orange, the hero of this poem, within the vast geste of Garin de Monglane, which goes back to historic characters of the late eighth century. The high nobility's duty to uphold justice (typically, defend orphans and widows) makes a dramatic entrance in this poem when, at the solemn ceremony prepared in the chapel of Aachen for the crowning of his own son, Charlemagne declares that he will veto the investiture unless the candidate king swears to uphold these high ideals:

If you must, dear son, allow yourself to be corrupted, put on and exalt arrogance (démesure ), indulge in lustfulness and breed sin, take his fief away from an orphan, subtract even four deniers from a widow, in the name of Jesus, son Louis, I deny this crown to you and forbid you to take it.^[5]

As Louis hesitates to come forward and take the oath, Charlemagne, in front of all the high nobility of France, declares him unfit to rule and orders him sent to a convent. The action proceeds with the attempt by Arneïs d'Orléans to take over the throne by offering to save Louis and act as his regent until he shows to be worthy of the succession. Guillaume of Orange, however, intervenes, unmasks Arneïs as an impostor, kills him, and puts the crown on Louis's head. Charlemagne accepts Guillaume's warrant that his son deserves the crown.

This surprising plot illustrates how the epic, though of noble origin within the feudal structures, could transcend a class perspective. Arneïs represents the real interests of the high nobility, namely to limit the

monarch's hereditary power, whereas Guillaume (regardless of his historic position) becomes a sympathetic hero by acting in a manner that contradicted his class interests and was consonant with popular sentiment—briefly, the growing spirit of national solidarity under and around the king and his family. The king stands for the nation precisely insofar as he is inherently opposed to the interests of the great lords. Consequently, even while stressing the close connection of this literature with the noble spheres that bred it, as historians we cannot interpret it as a direct expression of class interests.^[6] The epic became popular precisely because it elicited sympathy over a broad social spectrum. Its generic “horizon of expectations” was collective to the point of encompassing a wide range of “national” consciousness. It is this broad appeal that made the French legends popular even outside France. In Italy they were recited both in noble circles (as in the Venetia under the Ghibelline lords) and in the streets and public squares of free mercantile communes (as in Florence down to the late fifteenth century, the days of Luigi Pulci). At the same time the rich ideological texture of the early epics reflects a tension between the ideal of the monarchic sovereign and the interests of the great lords, who, as typically in the Guillaume of Orange cycle, can overshadow an occasional undeserving king like Louis. Charlemagne himself could be forced by his rebellious lords to recognize his own impotence. In Huon de Bordeaux he ends up having to admit himself unworthy of drinking at the cup of “the pure.”^[7]

The epics put forth the growing conflict between the image of the king as supreme embodiment of the collectivity, the “nation,” and the lords' resistance to the process whereby that higher authority imposed limitations on their own sovereign rights. This kind of internal opposition is also found in the Arthurian romances. With the Plantagenets' either tacit or explicit endorsement, the creators of the Arthurian legend upheld the claims of the feudal lords against the centralizing monarchy embodied in the Plantagenets' enemies, the Capetian kings.^[8] Arthur became a sort of anti-Charlemagne. He was an ideal feudal king because he behaved as a primus inter pares; his peers' identity and dignity derived from their individual adventures away from the court.

Resistance was a matter of survival. Originally, the epic could be used as a functional form of ecclesiastical propaganda to promote the Crusades as well as those cooperative monarchs who led the marches against the infidels. Now other clerics at feudal courts came to the aid of the threatened lords in much the same way, providing them, through the Arthurian mythology, with an ideological means to resist their an-

nihilation.^[9] The romance stepped in to assert in coherent terms the great vassals' resistance against those among the French kings (signally Charles VI, Charles VII, and Philip Augustus) who had become conscious of their antifeudal function. The progress of royalty was to mark the evolutionary parable from feudalism to absolute monarchy, culminating with the triumph of centralized absolutism under Louis XIV, whereas elsewhere, as in Germany and, with the long parenthesis of the Elizabethan period, England, the lords held their ground and kept the kings in check.

The medieval romance (Fr. roman ) is a hard-to-define genre that stems from early French texts already embodying aspects of chivalry and courtliness, namely the “classical romances”—the various romans d'Alexandre, d'Énéas, de Troie, and de Thèbes, the first of them (the first version of the Alexandre composed around 1100, the others around 1150/1160.^[10] These texts continued to enjoy great popularity even outside France: Heinrich von Veldeke, for example, produced a German version of the Énéas in his Eneit of circa 1170–1189. As the romances grew, their courtly elements became clearer. The anonymous Picard version of the Alexandre (ca. 1270), perhaps the best-known version today, starts with the author's polemical allusion to his inept predecessors who “strive to be prized at court,” and with his address to an audience of people who “wish to soften their hearts toward good manners” by reading the story of a great hero who inherited from his mother Olympias “such virtues that he was sweet and humble and full of generosity.”^[11] In the story, Aristotle is made to advise his pupil Alexander on how to win loyal service through largesse —generous giving.^[12] Similarly, in their chansons de geste Garin le Lorrain and Guillaume of Orange, among others, are shown winning the loyal services of knights by promising lavish gifts.^[13] A prolific subgenre commonly labeled roman d'aventure (G. Schicksalroman ) is characterized by a sense of fate, fortuna, or chance—qualities which dominate the interminable strings of adventures the heroes and heroines have to go through before attaining their goal, a happy reunion. The label differentiates these often lively texts from the Arthurian variety, where the adventure follows ethical and aesthetic rules that are part of the chivalric code. A particularly interesting example is the successful Partonopeus de Blois (ca. 1170?, anonymous though sometimes attributed to a Denis Piramus), which mixes with great verve antique elements, Arthurian ones, and contemporary historical events within a geographic setting that goes from France to the Byzantine East.^[14]

The romances of “ancient” matter borrowed some Arthurian lore and also some features from the courtois lyric. The more literate or “clerical” milieus enlarged the ancestral vision of the world of chivalry by including not only ancient Trojan and Roman heroes—duly interpreted as early knights and regularly represented in knightly garb as in medieval iconography, according to a practice that endured through the Renaissance—but also some military biblical figures. The ambitious knightly ideal was thus given an illustrious ancestry that harmonized the Christian with classical and biblical ascendants: Charlemagne, Arthur, and then the Crusading leader Godfrey of Bouillon found themselves flanked by such monumental personages as Hector, Alexander, and Julius Caesar, plus the hallowed Old Testament figures of Joshua, King David, and Judas Maccabaeus. This impressive sequence, or variant thereof, constitutes the canonical series of the Nine Worthies that we see represented from the late-thirteenth-century Vulgate version of the Queste del Graal (Bodmer MS)^[15] on through Renaissance literature as well as in popular castle frescoes, tapestries, and manuscript illuminations from France to Germany and northern Italy. The Nine Worthies were often paired with the Nine Heroines, who, however, did not symmetrically parallel the male series since they tended to be mostly ancient figures. Nevertheless the idea could show its enduring vitality through the addition of modern characters in later times: Christine de Pisan (1364—after 1429), for one, placed Joan of Arc among the canonical knightly Heroines.^[16]

The apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus was also inserted into this grand repertory of knightly heroes through the story of Joseph of Arimathea, the guardian of the Grail (conceived as Christ's eucharistic cup), whose lineage led directly to Perceval and Lancelot's son Galahad in Robert de Boron's Joseph d'Arimathie.^[17] Keen (120) recalls that the introduction to a French translation of the Books of Judges, Kings, and Maccabees done for the Knights Templar between 1151 and 1171 points to the principles of “chivalry” to be learned from those sacred books. That Christine de Pisan did not hesitate to configure Paris and Helen as courtly lovers (Épître d'Othéa )^[18] was only one example of that alluring chivalric disguise of ancient heroes which endured in literature and art well into the Renaissance, and not only in France.^[19]

Paul Zumthor (1987: 299–311) has forcefully underlined the “uniquely literary” nature of the medieval romance as opposed to the basic “orality” of the lyric, the epic, and other narrative forms. The epic,

in particular, was originally oral or, if written down, so done only as a textual basis for a fully oral performance, hence to be recited by a minstrel who was, in the concrete act of delivery and performance, indistinguishable from an author/narrator. The lai, contemporary to the romance, also expressly declares its oral derivation, while the conte was written down only after an oral tradition (ibid. 301). In clear opposition to the other forms, the roman was written as a text with a relatively fixed and independent status, to be read before a live audience, presumably at a court, as the work of an individual, self-conscious author. The possibility was open for works of mixed status, as exemplified by Gautier d'Arras's Éracle.^[20] Gautier (fl. 1170–1185), also a cleric, was probably a compain of Chrétien at the court of Champagne, and may be the butt of Chrétien's critiques in the prologue of the Chevalier de la charrete.

Reviewing the genesis of the Breton romance, Jean Frappier has argued for Celtic origin and for the Welsh and Cornish minstrels as channels of transmission through the Norman court in England, then on to the Continent.^[21] Whatever may have been the role of Celtic traditions in the shaping of the French courtois ideology, no doubt they contributed significantly to notions that coincided with those independently developed earlier at German courts. However, while German courtliness had been decisively centered on loyal service to the emperor, the French romance served the specific function of vindicating the autonomous, antimonarchic claims of the great feudal vassals.

Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae (1136) is the major source of the Arthurian cycle and the “matter of Brittany,” and this “Énéide bretonne en prose” (Frappier 1978: 189) already contained clear chivalric and courtois elements, including the all-important coupling of love and valor, amor et militia. This, at least thirty years before Chrétien and about twenty years before the romans de Thèbes, d'Enéas, and de Troie. King Arthur's knights regularly proved their mettle at tourneys in the presence of ladies with whom they were in love. No lady worth her honor would think of granting her love to a knight who had not tested himself successfully three times: this kept the courtly ladies “chaste” and the knights more noble through their love for them:

facetae enim mulieres  . . . nullius amorem habere dignabant nisi tertio in militia probatus esset. Efficiebantur ergo castae quaeque mulieres et milites pro amore illarum nobiliores. (chap. 157, vv. 41–44)^[22]

Arthur's court is represented as the most splendid ever and much given to lavish displays and games and is said to have become the envy of the world also for being the realm of facetia: “copia divitiarum, luxu ornamentorum, facetia incolarum cetera regna excellebat,” “it excelled all other realms in riches, luxury, and the ingeniousness of its inhabitants.”^[23] This rather uncommon meaning for facetia can be rendered with “wit,” but Frappier does not hesitate to translate it as courtois. Interestingly enough Wace translated facetia and facetae mulieres in the passage just quoted from Geoffrey's chapter 157 precisely with curtesie and curteise dame.^[24] This term's semantic field will appear all the clearer if we think of the mid-twelfth-century didactic poem Facetus de moribus et vita by an anonymous cleric (see my chap. 2 above).

Geoffrey's ample narrative, perhaps a way to impress the Normans with the native dignity of the British Celts, victorious fighters against both Anglo-Saxons and Romans, covered the whole of Arthur's fantastic parable, from triumph to final ruin through the disintegration of the realm on account of infighting between the feudal lordships and the potentially anarchic elements of courtesy, including Lancelot's tryst with Guinevere. The twelfth-century poets picked up only the adventures of the happy period, leaving the Götterdämmerung to the thirteenth-century compilers of cyclical prose romances, who felt in tune with this part and carried it on until it reached the capable hands of Sir Thomas Malory. Around 1230 the prose romances would thus seal Arthur's tragic fate, and “l'enchantement finira par devenir désenchantement” (Frappier 1978: 211).

Wace's Roman de Brut (dated at 1155, labeled as romans at the end of the text, and dedicated to Henry II's wife Alienor of Aquitaine) portrays Arthur thus:

Servir se fist cortoisement
Et mult se maintint noblement.
Tant com il vesqui et raina,
Tos autres princes surmonta
De cortoisie et de proesce
Et de valor et de largesce.

(He had himself served with courtoisie and held himself most nobly. As long as he lived and reigned, he surpassed all other princes in courtoisie, bravery, valor, and generosity.)^[25]

At verse 9655 Wace praises Queen Guinevere as very liberal and eloquent, “mult fu large et buene parliere,” besides being the most beautiful lady on the island. After the episode from Geoffrey of Monmouth

where Duke Cador welcomes the Roman procurator Lucius's challenge to Arthur by extolling warfare as the way to keep knights from going soft and lazy, Wace adds this illuminating answer from Gawain to Cador:

Sire cuens, dist Walwein, par fei,
De neient estes en effrei.
Bone est la pais emprés la guerre,
Plus bele et mieldre en est la terre;
Mult sunt bones les gaberies
E bones sunt les drüeries.
Pur amistié e pur amies
Funt chevaliers chevaleries.^[26]  

(Sir Count, said Gawain, truly, you have no cause to fear. Good is peace after a war, the land becomes all the more beautiful and better; there is good in pleasant conversations and in love affairs. It is for love and their beloveds that knights perform their chivalrous deeds. Vv. 10,765–772.)

Uther Pendragon, too, is vividly depicted as being madly in love with Ygerne (vv. 8549–8665).^[27] If his behavior on this occasion cannot be labeled as courtois or chivalrous, other particulars could not be described otherwise. It is tempting to conjecture that such ideas might have traveled from southern to northern France and England with Alienor having a firm hand in the translatio —unless it was a spontaneous generation, with or without Celtic imports.

It is interesting to compare the Brut with the Roman de Horn (early 1170s), that has been judged as “the most typically English” among the Anglo-Norman romances. Whereas Brut presents an idealistic and courtly view of knighthood, with sharp differentiation between chevalers and such gent menue as pouners, sergans, gelduners, esquiers, garcuns, and archers, in Horn the emphasis is on moral probity, religious faith, and traditional military virtues: “courtesy” is replaced by the adverb vassalment, stressing duty toward the lord. Horn, a landless knight who wonders who he is, since he has not yet been tested (“Joe ne sai ke joe sui, ne fui onc espruvez,” v. 1167), successfully tests his valur by feats of arms while still a bacheler deprived of adobement. He thus finds his identity and is recognized as a true knight: “Or estes chevalier” (v. 1780).^[28]

The Age of Chrétien

As already stated, the romance was far from a well-defined genre. Most striking in this large production are the differences among authors and

texts. Despite appearances at this chronological remove, the evolution of themes and forms was quick and intense. The same episodes, plots, and motifs could assume different, contrasting meanings in contemporary or immediately subsequent authors, as is so apparent in the Lancelot and Tristan legends.^[29] Plots and myths were props or literary pretexts for the treatment of vital moral, psychological, social, and even metaphysical and religious issues, since the often fanciful and mysterious-sounding motifs, including ogres, fairies, and magic implements, were essentially metaphors —as was even the relationship between lovers.^[30] Chrétien de Troyes (fl. ca. 1165–1190) tackled not only diverse themes in different poems (love and marriage, love and knighthood, love and loyalty to the liege, knighthood and service to God), but changed his mind on these interrelated values, since he was constantly trying to offer a harmonious solution that kept evading him and his society. Hence the textual features we will observe can seldom be taken as definitions of their works' general import. In his attitude toward his subject matter, Chrétien can even be viewed as a cleric who ultimately rejected both courtly love and chivalry.^[31] This may sound like a radical conclusion about the man who more than anyone contributed to the crystallization of both sides of that ideological phenomenon. But the main point is that Chrétien appears to us as a cleric who strove to understand and resolve the contradictions inherent in his subject matter while remaining bound by the ethical imperatives consistently raised by the anticourt critics. Combining the anthropological and the aesthetic, we could say that in these and other romances the narrative art provides an illusion of order within a perception of reality that is so fraught with uncertainties as to border on chaos.

The writers of romances were aware that their novel compositions did not fit the canonical narrative forms. This is evidenced by the lack of a set generic style of the kinds inherited from antiquity. From Auerbach to Daniel Poirion, literary critics have studied Chrétien's undefined style, always stressing its “median” quality that hovered somehow in a no-man's land between the high style traditional for the epic, including the Chanson de Roland, and the low style of both popular and religious narrative.^[32] Despite strongly “class-determined” restrictions in subject matter, Auerbach saw this as an abstract and “absolute” genre that excluded the representation of a social and political reality, since the authors had adopted an ideal fairy-tale world consisting entirely of deeds of arma et amor, “arms and love,” the latter often as motivation for the former.^[33] Nevertheless, all its abstract principles and outward

ritual notwithstanding, the chivalric ethos was an operative one that created “a community of the elect, a circle of solidarity.”^[34] Auerbach's characterization must be further qualified with the remark that both Chrétien and his German imitators, mainly Hartmann and Gottfried, were aware of this fairy world's limitations, and reacted to them in a productive way. The lingering popularity of these literarily “abstract” tales can only be explained by their disguising a concrete social predicament. Once again, without being a mirror of society, good literature reveals and expresses society's deeper structural truths.

The mysterious quality of characters who do not behave like real people is part of the poetic charm of these literary texts, yet their characters' deviations from the norm clamor for explanation: we cannot assume that they act as they do simply to be “artistically” odd. Arbitrary oddity is not likely to produce the enduring charm of finished poetry, and contemporary readers must have sensed that there was a concrete meaning to such strange stories. Chrétien, for one, alerted them to his hidden san.^[35]

Auerbach (119) found the ideal of graduated perfectibility through courtly love and knightly adventure analogous to the experiences of mystic love among the Victorines and the Cistercians in the same century—allowing for the difference of the theological setting as well as the absence of class restrictions in the religious experiences of those monastic movements. Chrétien praised a socially oriented code of courtly behavior combined with love as a powerful inspiration enhancing, not impeding the heroic virtues of knightly valor.^[36] From the vantage point of its psychological content, the peculiarity of courtly love stands out more clearly when set against the background of ancient erotic literature. The continuous popularity of Ovid even in the lower schools testifies that pagan sexuality remained very much alive in the Middle Ages. Ovid is conspicuously present in many medieval literary texts on love, even when they are marked by a strong courtois and chivalric flavor. Suffice it to mention in passing such thirteenth-century French texts—from a period when courtly love had already reached full bloom—as Maître Élie's rendering of the Ars amatoria, the anonymous Norman Clef d'amour, Guiart's Art d'amors, the anonymous Anglo-Norman De courtoisie, Robert de Blois's Le chastoiement des dames, Drouart de la Vache's Livres d'amours, and Richard de Fournival's Consaus d'amours.^[37] But the need for self-sacrifice, the devotion to a distant ideal, and the satisfaction in chastity and frustration that are such striking features of courtly love were the direct counterpart of the

Ovidian Ars amatoria, with its overtly cynical strategies for winning the lady's sensual favors quickly and without afterthoughts.

We can assume that, whereas the French chansons de geste must have been close to anticourt clerical milieus, the matière de Bretagne, instead, issued from curial clerics, prone to invest knighthood with the ways of curialitas. The two mentalities still coexisted in Saxo Grammaticus' Gesta Danorum (1186-ca. 1218). With striking contradiction this author extolled the savagery of Starcatherus, who slew the effeminate husband of King Ingellus's sister, yet he also praised King Canute's (Knud, d. 1035) decision to have his wise counselor Opo of Seeland impose the courtly code on the unruly knights who made political order impossible at court.^[38] Just as royal chaplains and imperial bishops had been constrained by standards of conduct imposed as conditions for obtaining their offices, so did King Canute need to polish the warriors at court if they were to be turned into a wieldy instrument of government. There was a conspicuous difference between the lesser nobility at court (Canute's court nobles), who needed restraint of the “courtly” type, and the free higher lords (like Starcatherus), who did not, since they survived by remaining aggressively self-sufficient and independent of the king (the French fronde could go on even under the heavy hand of Mazarin). The novelty of twelfth-century France was the cultural (not yet the social) adoption of chivalry by the higher nobility—that is to say, in idea and feeling, not in actual behavior. The new standards originally imposed by real life conditions became ideals and mental models.

Among the key narrative themes of the romances that narratology and semiotics have tried to single out, there is the ever-present aventure, definable in sociological terms as “an invention of the poor or lower nobleman”^[39] who, like the members of a maisne, imagines himself striking out for success (a good marriage, eventually, or a stroke of good fortune) in order to (re-)enter Arthur's court with full rights.^[40] Since the Arthurian world of chivalry was inadequate to satisfy the lofty needs of the perfect knight, he might have to seek his perfection in an individual experience—possibly, as with Perceval, of a mystical nature. Typically, Chrétien represented Arthur's court as a counterpart of the Capetian attempt to build a truly sovereign centralized monarchy by stifling out the “anarchic” independence of the feudal nobility and its acolytes, even if this meant raising up the ministerial bourgeoisie. Arthur's “weakness” makes him the ideal feudal king, with his court acting like a chivalric switchyard or, as Köhler wittily put it, “a welfare institute for

knights.”^[41] Arthur's Round Table (made to seat 1500 knights!), first introduced by Wace in the Roman de Brut, picturesquely symbolized this aristocratic egalitarianism as a palatable alternative to monarchic sovereignty.^[42] Working at the court of Alienor's daughter Marie de Champagne, and her husband Philip of Flanders, another count of exemplary feudal background, Chrétien carried on and raised to the sublime level of art the heritage of Provençal courtesy and knighthood that Alienor had probably brought from Aquitaine to Paris and then to England, and which could be identified with the public image of the anti-French Angevin lords.^[43]

This propaganda element, as it were, could then work back on reality, as it did when it fostered the fusion of nobility and knighthood and then again when it inculcated the hopeful ideology in the rural nobility resisting central control down through the Fronde (see my chap. 11 on the case of d'Urfé's Astrée ). But resisting the victorious march of monarchism—in both France and, with healthy compromises, England—was partly utopian, hence subject to fears and occasional despair. It was not without a degree of desolation that Chrétien's epigones down to Sir Thomas Malory perceived the Götterdämmerung of Arthur's court.

If somewhat extreme, Chrétien is exemplary in displaying the attitudes of the chivalric class. His world was reserved for the knights, and the despised vilain, also identified with the rising bourgeoisie so prominent in the regions of Champagne and Flanders, was its antithesis. Listen to Guiganbresil's sister insulting the burghers of the city: “Vilenaille, / chien anragé, pute servaille” (boors, rabid dogs, despicable slaves—Perceval: 5955 f.). In his encounter with a free town's burghers, Gauvain refuses to use his shield as too noble a piece of armor for such rabble (ibid. 5894 f.). He considers it the greatest insult to be taken for a merchant (5091 ff.).^[44] In five of the dialogues of book 1 of his De amore or De arte honeste amandi (1180s), Chrétien's contemporary, Andreas Capellanus, shows awareness of the alliance between the monarchy and the bourgeoisie by introducing burghers as possible rivals of knights in a lady's love, and by stressing that true nobility is a spiritual matter rather than one of rank, since we all have a common origin from Adam.^[45] The chanson de geste Guillaume d'Angleterre strongly underlines these class contrasts, presenting with a sense of horror the attempt of some merchants to teach the trade of tannery to the king's sons they have adopted (vv. 1342 ff., 3205 ff.).^[46] What alarms the poet is the

unthinkable association of a nobleman with a manual art—it does not occur to him that those merchants acted more responsibly than the king toward his sons.

All this is typical of northern France;^[47] in the south the relationship between the nobility and the merchant class was much less strident. Especially in Toulouse and southwest France, the towns, much like the Italian communes, teemed with urban knights who constituted the bulk of the city's defense even against the local lords (in the late 1170s, for instance, knights commissioned by the city consuls barred Count Raimon V of Toulouse from the city). More important still, these knights were actively engaged in the town's main business as outright traders and speculators in land rents and mortgages. As they did in Italy, they lived in fortified houses and built towers within the city walls—an irritating and surprising sight to the northern invaders at the time of the Albigensian Crusade.^[48] Accordingly, in the Midi the merchant was not, as he was in the north, the nobleman's natural political enemy, actively allied with the monarchy in trying to curtail feudal privileges.

Chrétien's way of embedding into his works the exclusivism of the high nobility can be profitably compared with the mentality of contemporary chroniclers on the one hand and troubadours on the other.^[49] The reader will remember the encounter between Geoffrey the Handsome and the peasant in Jean de Marmoutier's chronicle (my chap. 3). In Chrétien's Yvain, when Calogrenant meets a savage, subhuman-looking, monstrously ugly shepherd and asks him whether he is “boene chose ou non,” the answer he gets is that “il ert uns hom.” He probes further: “Quiex hom ies tu?” And the new answer is: “Tex con tu voiz; si ne sui autres nule foiz  . . . sui de mes bestes sire.” (Such as you see, I am lord of my beasts, never anything else.) When, in his turn, the shep-herd asks Calogrenant “quiex hom tu ies, et que tu quiers,” the knight defines himself as “un chevaliers qui quier ce que trover ne puis; assez ai quis, et rien ne truis.” (I am a knight who seeks what I cannot find: much have I searched and nothing do I find.)^[50] The vilain is nothing but a man, and being is doing: a man is what he does—his work—so he is precisely a vilain, more specifically, a tamer of wild beasts. Calogrenant, instead, is a man searching for something, but since his search is so far unsuccessful (and will remain so—only Yvain will succeed in the test of the magic fountain), he is, in a way, nothing, as a poor nobleman who has not found his place in the world.^[51] A successful knight, however, will be something special, noble, worth fighting and enduring for, higher than the simple, base humanity of the rustic who is identified

with his work and no more. Calogrenant's “adventure” has thus explicitly turned into what the knight errant's adventure is supposed to produce: a finding of one's identity by becoming worthy of the court after proving one's capacity to overcome the lower and inferior world of wild nature and quasi-bestial humanity. The search for individual identity is part of a search for the meaning of the world, which, in turn, is the very nature of the adventure as the core of the roman, as expressly stated in another similar episode in the prose Tristan. There Dinadan answers Agravain so: “I am a knight errant who every day goes in search of adventures and of the sense of the world; but I cannot find any, nor can I retain any of it for my useful service.”^[52]

In Marcabru's landmark pastorela “L'autrier jost'una sebissa,” the bold knight confronted a sharp-tongued shepherdess who managed to put him in his place by turning his knightly logic against him. The knight feels it is natural for him to use a lower human being for his pleasure, but the shepherdess retorts that it is natural for her to find her pleasure with her peers. Inferior though they might be, the rustics had their own place and even rights and dignity, which Marcabru, for one, was ready to acknowledge, perhaps with tongue in cheek.^[53] Chrétien's social distinctions were sharper and less compromising.

Nevertheless, a closer look shows that a crack in the exclusiveness of Chrétien's socioethical perspective allowed a disturbing but fertile infiltration. For in the Champagne region the bourgeois point of view could be scorned but not ignored. Thanks to its fairs and through Henry the Liberal's enlightened policy, Champagne had become prosperous as a key international center of commerce and finance, a clearinghouse where Henry's gardes des foires guaranteed that the merchants could move about and do their business safely, with officially recognized and enforced contracts. Auerbach (120 f.) already speculated that Chretien must have felt a nagging awareness of the abstractness of chivalry because of concrete conditions at the courts of Champagne and Flanders where he was writing: he must have sensed that the real forces embodied in the fairs of Champagne and the burghers' guilds of the Flemish communes limited, indeed threatened the dominance of feudal structures.

Yet an open recognition of the mercatores could only come gradually: if they could not be assimilated to the agricolae as one of the three divinely established social orders, another term for the laboring class, laboratores, could well include them, even if some moralists balked at crediting them with productive work and chose to look down on them

as exploiters of opportunity, mere “usurers.” But the influential educator Hugh of St. Victor (ca. 1096–1141), for one, had written a sort of epic hymn to the industriousness of this daring new class: “Commerce penetrates the secret places of the world, approaches shores unseen, explores fearful wildernesses, and in tongues unknown and with barbaric peoples carries on the trade of mankind. The pursuit of commerce reconciles nations, calms wars, strengthens peace, and commutes the private good of individuals into the common benefit of all.”^[54] It was enough to fill a merchant's heart with pride at being as honorable as the best knight errant, and probably more useful.

In direct contrast with the warrior's view of marriage as a form of conquest or acquisition by force, the mercantile ethic of contractual bond through mutual consent of the participating parties may have contributed to a change in the ecclesiastical definition of the marriage contract. Perhaps these profound changes affected Chrétien's representation of the moral issues involved in the relationship between courtly lovers. If we read the romances in this light, their socioethical dimensions will appear as a counterpart of the ethical world of the epic, where, at least tendentially, the warrior mentality reigned supreme.^[55]

In Erec et Enide (Chrétien's first Arthurian romance, dated by Anthime Fourrier as not earlier than 1170),^[56] despite the mistaken assumption that Erec is dead, Enide does not consent to the Count of Oringle's attempt to assert his rights as a bellator by conquering her by force (vv. 4770–4782). Chrétien insinuates that Enide was entitled to posit mutual consent as the only acceptable and fair ground for marriage. In Yvain recent critics have seized on the episode of the “Château de Pesme Aventure” for its striking socioeconomic overtones. Yvain frees three hundred maidens who were enslaved as hard-laboring textile workers by two brothers born of the devil and a woman (vv. 5107–5810).^[57] The episode may sound like a critique of textile sweatshops in Chrétien's Champagne. But it would be incorrect to read into this famous episode an expression of real sympathy for workers as against their bourgeois oppressors. Rather, Chrétien's social horizon is once again exclusively limited by his allegiance to the feudal nobility. What moves him in the invention of this episode may be a horror of the alliance, imposed by the realities of the growing monetary economy, between high nobility (and monarchy itself) and bourgeois capitalists exploiting cheap labor. Chrétien's fantasy sounds a stern, resentful warning. He neither understands nor appreciates what he sees around him: cities, enfranchised by kings and princes, serve the long-range financial goals of the monarchs,

even against the interests of the landed nobility. The ideal of Arthur as a king of largesce who associated with none but brave knights contrasted with a world of acquisitive guile where both Capetians and Plantagenets surrounded themselves with low-class clerics, especially school teachers, magistri, and burgher-merchants, who replaced the knights as court administrators and public officials. The clerics at court naturally espoused the doctrine of guile and calculation against the knights' ethic of frankness, bravery, and generosity: the courtliness they taught was the nonknightly kind. In the face of these threatening changes, the romances acted as a literature “qui n'est pas une littérature d'évasion, mais de combat,” where chivalry could oppose courtliness.^[58]

More important for Yvain' s central plot is the hero's conversion from the victorious warrior aiming to conquer Laudine, whose husband he has slain, to the loving husband who must earn his wife's affection by proving his love for her. When he fails by forgetting their anniversary, the “liberated” Laudine demands his atonement and compensation, refusing to recognize him as her husband until she is satisfied. Acknowledging his unforgivable “breach of contract,” Yvain loses his mind and turns to a wild life in the forest, hunting and eating raw game. A hermit engages him in an intriguing game of progressive barter exchanges, leading him back to a quasi-civilized state. At first the hermit feeds him moldy bread in exchange for the wild game Yvain hunts; next he cooks the game for Yvain; finally he purchases even better food for Yvain in town with the proceeds from Yvain's hunt. A useful mercantile relationship is established between the holy man and the fallen knight.^[59] But in this adventure Yvain tests the dangers of abandoning the court for the world of nature and the open forest. Being reduced to eating raw meat is symbolic of his having fallen back into a naturally savage state. His madness consists of being reduced to the life of a brute. Thus the “adventure,” which is the test of conquering the anticourtly forces symbolized by monsters and evil magic together with the wild nature of forests and vilains, the subhuman peasants and shepherds, is at the same time the quest for identity and self-recognition, as perceived earlier in Calogrenant's dialogue with the shepherd.

The plot of Yvain may also confirm Chrétien's overarching concern for the knights' chivalrous duties toward society as a higher moral commitment than love itself, somehow pitching chivalry against courtly love. In this tale helping the helpless gives more significance to chivalric adventure than love does: whereas Laudine remains a rather marginal figure, there is a powerful moral bond between Yvain and Lunete and

also between Yvain and the lion. Lunete, out of gratitude for his kindness toward her when others had spurned her at court, saves Yvain and is then saved by him when she is in dire need, just as in an equally symbolic context the lion saves Yvain in gratitude for having been saved by him. Yet the destiny of the knight is an unending quest. When Yvain conquers Laudine's love a second time, he returns to where he had started. He is no longer a great active knight: conquest ends both love and chivalric value.^[60]

Chrétien's Perceval is the culmination of the synthesis of chevalerie and clergie that the poet had first announced in his early Cligès. The famous lines 30–35 of the prologue of Cligès (“puis vint chevalerie a Rome / Et de la clergie la some, / Qui or est en France venue”) proclaimed the transmission of truth and wisdom (translatio studii ) together with knighthood or chivalry from ancient Greece to Rome and now to France.^[61] The role and function of chivalry had been ennobled, historically authorized, and universalized by identifying it with the virtues of the ancient heroes. But the anticourt objections of the moral rigorists like John of Salisbury and Bernard of Clairvaux had to be answered and neutralized by a clear, programmatic wedding of warrior ethic with Christian mission. The potentially sinful and even heretical quality of courtesy had to be overcome in a way that took it to higher metaphysical and theological levels. The Quest for the Grail attempted to perform this very act of supreme harmonization with the clerics' highest wishes. It was the alliance of fortitudo and sapientia, Christian chivalry and classical wisdom, nourished by both moral heroism and intellectual refinement. The good and the true were now one and the same.^[62] In medieval Germany the imperial heritage of antiquity could be perceived as translatio imperii, but the French Arthurian romancers saw the centralizing authority of emperor or monarch as the enemy, and the individual knights, perilously replacing the impersonal state and taking over its functions, as the true heirs of ancient wisdom and heroism. The only superior institution those knights were prepared to acknowledge was the universal Church, and even the Church held a tenuous edge. Gornemanz's dubbing of Perceval makes him a member of the highest divine order, but such secular orders were suspicious to the Church, since they could feel superior to the established Church. Indeed, Perceval's quest could be seen as entailing heretical overtones. The dubbing episode emphasizes the superior moral and social quality of knighthood in a way that seems to imply the superiority of the milites over the other two ordines:

Et li prodom l'espee a prise,
se li ceint et si le beisa,
Et dit que donee li a
la plus haute ordre avoec l'espee
que Dex a fete et comandee,
c'est l'ordre de chevalerie,
qui doit estre sanz vilenie.

(And the wise man took the sword, girded him with it and then kissed him. And said that with that sword he had given him the highest order created and commanded by God. This is the order of knighthood, which must be without baseness. Vv. 1630–1636.)

The Vulgate Lancelot carried this message further in the elaborate speech by the Lady of the Lake who explains to Lancelot that the hallowed institution of chivalry is society's only hope against wickedness and violence. The knight is the sole protector of the church, widows, orphans, and all the unjustly oppressed.^[63] The exalted view of chivalry that entered Chrétien's oeuvre in its last phase around 1180 responded to a situation of acute tension that saw the great lords, including Chrétien's new patron, Philip of Alsace, count of Flanders, pitched against both the monarchy and the high clergy.^[64] Like the feudal lords, the knights attempted to claim for themselves a superior type of clergie which was different from that of the clerics but equal to it in dignity: a clergie which valued a Ciceronian view of rhetoric for the training of the public man and which taught the virtues and good manners of courtliness. It was to be the result of a sacramental initiation and courtly training, an education akin to that of the priests but no longer imparted directly by them.^[65]

All in all, courtoisie could perform a metaphysical function analogous to the theological one of divine grace. For Thomas Aquinas the social estates were part of a fixed natural law which mirrors divine law, yet the estates could be transcended through grace. Similarly, the opposition courtoisie/vilenie (originally meaning the aristocracy versus both bourgeois and peasant estates) acquired a transsocial value implying secular transcendence of social limitations: thus the poor or landless knights, even when nonnoble by feudal standards, could be redeemed and ennobled by courtesy alone, the domna replacing God. This is the meaning of “true nobility” in the debates already contained in certain Provençal partimens.^[66] The search for perfection had entered a metaphysical, mystical, neo-Platonic sphere that, for all its connection with religious experiences, was thoroughly immanent and secular. The ideal

knight could be at the same time—to use the German terms—gottes ritter, “God's knight,” and a vrouwen ritter, “a lady's knight.”

Students of Chrétien are familiar with the conjectural theses on his moral goals ever since the lively polemic between Gaston Paris and Wendelin Foerster, centered on the role of marriage in Erec and Cligès and on Chrétien's position vis-à-vis the Tristan legend as stated in Cligès. This “marriage question” is not unlike the marriage question in the Canterbury Tales, but the impossibility of settling it convincingly on the sole basis of philological or psychological analysis proves the limitations of any hermeneutical approach that does not bring in the objective social background. Like Chaucer, Chrétien was not simply a psychologist or moralist trying out a formula to reconcile courtly love with the sacrament of marriage. He was a member of a court society that saw literature as a functional part of its cultural self-image. In Cligès, Fenice, married to Alis, refuses to be like Iseut by sharing herself with both lover and husband. She wants to belong loyally and truly to one man only, body and soul (or ceur et cors, as she puts it: vostre est mes cuers, vostre est mes cors, she tells Cligès: vv. 3145–3164, 5250–5263, 5310–5329).^[67] But she achieves her end by serving her husband a magic philter that gives him, every night, the mere illusion of possessing her, and agrees to marry Cligès only after Alis's convenient death. The charge of hypocrisy, for the casuistic solution and for adducing scruples that had less to do with morality than with reputation, is really out of place in this context, since in Chrétien's court society there was no separation between morality and social duties: ethical questions could not be independent of courtly mores.^[68]Cligès is, indeed, an Anti-Tristan in the sense that it refuses to recognize the rights of the individual against society on the basis of the inescapable bonds of high passion. Courtly love demands control of irrational forces and animal instincts, rationally channeled toward social ends. Appearances and reputation are not external matters but the essence of social living. The Tristan story as interpreted by Thomas was uncourtly and subversive insofar as it was eminently antisocial.

A passage from Le chevalier de la charrete contains an exemplary stroke of the psychological finesse that could enter the representation of courtesy as a civilizing force—even to the point of subtle personal diplomacy in everyday behavior. Lancelot has swooned at the sight of a comb he recognized as belonging to the kidnapped Guenièvre. A maiden tries to help him but, when he comes to, she tells him a “white lie” in order to avoid embarrassing him. The author interjects:

Do not suppose that the girl would reveal the true reason [for her approaching Lancelot to help him]. He would be ashamed and troubled, and it would cause him pain and anguish were she to reveal the truth [to wit, that she thought he needed help for his fainting spell]. Therefore she hid the truth and said with the utmost tact, “Sir, I come to get this comb. That's why I dismounted. I wanted it so much I couldn't wait any longer.” (vv. 1446–1456)^[69]

All the courtly and knightly virtues were necessary in love, too, and in a harmonious combination. Contrary to appearances based mostly on an excessive exemplarity attributed to the first two books of Andreas Capellanus's De amore, the lack of self-restraint made happiness impossible and tragedy inevitable, as was the case with Lancelot and Tristan. It showed lack of self-restraint to pursue the total gratification of sensual attraction, since the courtly lady was perceived as eminently virtuous. The lyric, specifically, portrayed the lady as infinitely attractive but necessarily unreachable, as Petrarca understood and promulgated well after the heroic age of “courtly love.” Capellanus's emphasis on adultery is, at best, symbolic of the difference between the freedom of choice in pure love and the practical, contractual nature of marital relations. But Chrétien's Erec, Yvain, and Perceval, like their German imitations Erek, Iwein, and Parzival, all found happiness and true love in marriage. Even Boccaccio's heroes and heroines, it bears noting, would aim at marriage, often with success. In both the romance and the lyric, courtly love demanded this hard degree of self-denial and self-control, even “frustration.” The French fin' amor and Gottfried's hohe Minne were, after the first French romances, a necessary companion of the knight's prowess, its motivating force and purposeful center of inspiration.

Cyclical Prose Romances and Later Developments

Since courtly love was conceived chiefly for courtly circles, its appeal was at the same time powerful and narrow. This narrowness is brought into focus not only by the moralistic objections of responsible ecclesiastical circles but also by the satirical insouciance of such an apparently marginal genre as the fabliau. Recent research has emphasized the importance of this genre as the expression of a naturalistic ethos or “materialistic hedonism.” In sharp contrast with the asceticism preached by the Church as well as the rarefied and spiritualized tenets of courtoisie,

it included a dose of ridicule heaped on the dainty manners and strained style that courtoisie imposed. It is remarkable that, lasting from approximately 1190 to 1330, the fabliau coincided with the most creative period of chivalric literature. One can isolate within it a first generation that vigorously, uninhibitedly expressed that hedonistic naturalism, a second generation characterized by bitter and hateful cynicism, and a third that gave in to moral indifference and disillusionment.^[70] Other critics have interpreted many of the fabliaux as “courtly productions designed to mock the bourgeoisie, neutralizing its economic strength by emphasizing the vilanie of its moeurs. ”^[71]

The form of Arthurian literature that enjoyed the widest circulation was that of the cyclical prose romance, especially the group of texts traditionally referred to as the Vulgate Cycle or Prose Lancelot/Graal, probably composed between 1215 and 1230 and constituted chiefly by the Lancelot del Lac, the Queste del Saint Graal, and the Mort Artu.^[72] In the first of these three main texts the Dame du Lac crowns the education of her foster son Lancelot by imparting to him solemn lessons on the meaning of chivalry, the origins of knighthood, the symbolic significance of arms and the horse, and especially the moral obligations to defend the needy and the Church. After Lancelot's first adventures the author starts using the narrative technique of interlacing (entrelacement, so named by its first analyst, Ferdinand Lot) more intensively than had been practiced before, and that set an example destined to be carried on with much success by Sir Thomas Malory and especially by Boiardo and Ariosto.^[73] He does so with a skill that the modern critics have been slow to recognize, just as the classicistic-minded critics of the Cinquecento would be hard put to accept it from their Italian contemporaries. It is most likely that by referring to “Arturi regis ambages pulcerrime,” “the fascinating meanderings of King Arthur's tales,” Dante had specifically in mind the interlacing narrative technique of the Prose Lancelot.^{[ 74]}

In the Queste critics have detected the intervention of a pious monastic spirit of Cistercian hue, which they have tried to relate to the mysticism of St. Bernard of Clairvaux or, alternatively, to the more rationalistic views of William of Saint-Thierry, St. Bernard's friend though not his disciple. “When a hermit expounds the hierarchy of the virtues, he places highest virginity and below it in descending order humility, patience, justice, and last, strangely enough, charity.”^[75] Among the knights who achieve the conquest of the Grail the only perfect one is Galaad, who was foreshadowed, as we shall see, in Wolfram von Es-

chenbach's Lohengrin (Loherangrîn). Galaad, Lancelot's son, is a foreordained saint untroubled by human frailties and exempt from temptation, a savior whose name derives from the Gilead of the Vulgate Bible, one of Christ's mystic appellations. The knight has become the true man of God, and chivalry a supreme ideal of moral nobility.

Tempting as it might be, we must forego an analysis of the foremost “best-seller” of medieval literature, the Roman de la rose (1225–1240 for Guillaume de Lorris's portion, 1275–1280 for Jean de Meung's), since in that rich masterpiece the assessment of the role of the courtly and chivalric elements remains subject to the still very controversial interpretation of the authors' central theses.^[76] Arthurian matter continued to show great vitality long after Chrétien in France and elsewhere. For the sake of its author, it deserves at least a passing mention that the chronicler and poet Jean Froissart also composed, around 1388, the Meliador, which has the distinction of being not only the last French romance of strictly Arthurian matter, but also the longest one in verse (30,771 octosyllables). Since we are not engaged in a diachronic survey of our subject matter in all genres and forms, it should suffice to add here, because of their peculiar experimentalism on social, literary, and rhetorical levels, the fifteenth-century “grands rhétoriqueurs” of the Burgundian domains. These court poets served the duke or other great lords by celebrating their patrons' supposedly incomparable achievements, from their invariably just wars to every private or public event in their lives: births, marriages, deaths, and all splendid appearances at banquets and pageants. The critical reader is challenged to look behind and beyond the practical and stylistic constraints of this highly “programmed” literary activity, seeking in the text an hors-texte that contains the poet's original and personal inner message.^[77]

Caxton's Preface to the most splendid swan song of chivalry, Malory's Le Morte Darthur (Westminster, 1485), said plainly that chivalry teaches both the good, to be imitated, and the evil, to be eschewed. The literature of chivalry taught quite a little evil to a host of knights errant who meandered in and out of the princely courts of Europe, breaking spears, challenging, and maiming one another in earnest imitation of the Lancelots and Gawains. Martín de Riquer (1970) has published and studied a number of the many documents, literary and historical, that testify to this lingering popularity of the romantic knight, perhaps more so in Spain and Burgundy than elsewhere. The fifteenth century is full of characters who left thousands of letters of challenge and executions of private wars or personal duels, with minute contestation of fine legal

points of honor—what Spaniards called letras de batalla. The historian of literature and the historian of social customs share a common interest in literary works that are based on real events and “adventures” as well as in daily behavior that is inspired by direct imitation of literary patterns. The Spanish Amadís de Gaula was a fictional derivation from the French romances, but, despite the apparent similarities, Antoine de la Sale's Petit Jehan de Saintré and the anonymous Roman de Jehan de Paris, like the Catalan Tirant lo Blanch (whose principal author was the Valencian novelist Johanot Martorell, 1413 or 1414–1468) and the anonymous Curial e Güelfa (note the names, and that the plot was curiously set in Italy), were based in good part on real events, recorded and narrated without exaggeration or distortion and with considerable artistic verve. In this sense, it is hard to tell the difference between these “novels” and the factual chronicles of the lives of historical military figures in knightly garb, like the Livre des faits du bon messire Jehan le Maingre, dit Bouciquaut, the Livre des faits de Jacques de Lalaing, or the Spanish El Victorial by Pero Niño. All these books told fantastic stories, yet the story of Jean de Saintré is invented whereas those of Lalaing and Boucicaut are rigorous historical records of living knights who acted in imitation of heroes from the books of chivalry.^[78] Cervantes's Don Quijote was far from unique, except for being laughable.

These more or less “literary” biographies of chivalrous characters constitute a real subgenre in the fifteenth century. All in all, they presented to an eager public exemplary portraits of knightly universals: when the models derived from real historical figures, they had been idealized and generalized. The mixture of fact and fiction that distinguishes the genre also brought together discrete class modes or codes. In Curial e Güelfa, for example, the knight errant Curial starts on his adventure trail by leaving his court, or “curia,” for Marseille well provided with money and letters of exchange, like a regular Catalan merchant. In the fifteenth century, Burgundian biographies of ruling princes also carried on the twelfth-century mode of assimilation of the nobleman to the knight: they portrayed their subjects by patterning them after fictional paladins mixed with historic knights who had become abstract romantic models. Thus Gawain and Lancelot were coupled with Du Guesclin and Boucicaut in the chronicles of Enguerrand de Monstrelet, Mathieu d'Escouchy, Pierre Chastellain, Olivier de La Marche, and Jean Molinet. Furthermore, such biographies were packed with highly decorative visual elements through theatrical spectacles of tournaments, pageants, feasts, and mock or real battles—in Chastellain's terms, the emphasis

was on voyables, to enable the audience to assoir l'oeil sur les choses.^[79] In the romances as well as in the reality of court life, the exquisite though dangerously serious games of frequent tourneys and hunting parties were part of the chivalric contest.^[80]

Some English Texts

Courtly love and courtly conduct became bound together through the psychological, literary, and social process of amalgamation of behavioral ideas. The bond proved durable. A shining example is Sir Orfeo, the charming Middle English poetic text preserved in the Auchinleck manuscript of Edinburgh from 1330–1340, probably composed not many years earlier by an anonymous poet without much culture but with great imagination.^[81] The Orpheus of ancient mythology has become an English king who recovers (for good) his lost Euridice (Queen Heurodis in the text) by playing his inimitable harp before the King of the Fairies, who had taken her from the world of the living. This arresting idea of stealing one's dead beloved away from a fairyland afterworld may not be the invention of Sir Orfeo' s poet, since it appears in Walter Map's story of the Breton knight (ca. 1182). The charming fairy tale atmosphere does not prevent the characters from behaving according to the most idealized rules of the world of courtesy and chivalry. When he decides he cannot go on living without his beloved wife, the king leaves the throne in care of his steward, but when he returns, made unrecognizable by ten years in the wilderness, the steward professes his loyal devotion to the king he hopes to see again. When Orfeo reveals his true identity, the steward is so overjoyed that he knocks the table over, and all the lords shout their joy, too. The King of the Fairies is also a chivalrous lord who knows how to keep his word against all logic: having promised to grant the minstrel any reward he desires for his inspiring music, he hands Orfeo back his (dead) wife. All behave like members of the best of all possible loving and loyal worlds, according to rules and patterns unthinkable before the age of chivalry and courtesy.

By contrast, a “realistic” representation of court life stands out clearly in such contemporaneous “epic” texts as, for example, Havelok the Dane, where the temporary trustees of the kingdoms of England and Denmark betray their oaths and become unscrupulous usurpers.^[82] In the end the rightful heirs triumph and the traitors pay dearly for their perfidy. The courtly code prevails and the reader is conscious of the criminality of its violation.

Sir Orfeo and, in its way, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (ca. 1360/1370, commonly characterized as a most “courtly” English poem) may be further exceptions to Jauss's “test of commutation,”^[83] proving my contention that social constants (that is, motifs with a heavy, if obscure, social content) can be stronger than literary ones and, at times, can unexpectedly overcome the latter. Those two gems of Middle English poetry are textured with elements from incommutable genres: Arthurian knights become fairy figures in the former case, or epic ones in the latter. The pagan motif of the head-cutting challenge in Sir Gawain may derive from a ninth-century Irish narrative, Bricriu's Feast, where myth and fairy tale mixed: it then became a heroic-chivalric contest. In Sir Orfeo the king's total devotion to his wife, to the point of being unable to govern or even remain in society without her, is emphatically courtly.

One extraordinary merit of Sir Gawain is to have concentrated in such a short space the most essential and complex issues of chivalric morality. Morgan le Fay schemes to humiliate Arthur's court by subjecting its most valiant and proud knight to a supreme test of chastity, loyalty to an absurd promise, and humility. She does so by sending the enchanted Green Knight to deliver an awesome challenge: he will allow a rival to strike his head off with an ax while he is unarmed, on condition that a year hence he will have his chance to return the blow. Indeed, his head is cut off by Gawain, but he picks it up and leaves, waiting for Gawain to come after him the next Christmas and receive his own stroke, equally without resistance. Gawain dutifully shows up and is welcomed with the utmost courtesy in three days of magnificent courtly festivities where his chastity is severely tempted by the Green Knight's wife. He is asked to promise that he will yield to his host all he gains in hunting or otherwise during his visit: his host promises to do likewise. But while Gawain receives all the prey from the Green Knight's three days of successful hunt, he returns to him only the kisses he has received from his wife, not the silk sash or girdle she gave him with the assurance it would make him invulnerable. Bertilak de Hautdesert (the Green Knight is only now so named) feigns to strike him three times, then ends by disclosing the purpose of the test, which Gawain has won only partly, since he has not kept his promise to the point of yielding up the girdle. The conclusive lesson is one of humility: no one is perfect, and chivalric pride can be misplaced.

Yet, we must interject, pride was of the essence, since without it there would be no chivalry. In the end, Sir Gawain appears as a sort of meta-

text, a test of chivalry as an impossibility, a proud velleitas asking to be proved absurd. The knight cannot be true to his calling without destroying himself by turning over to his enemy the girdle that would make him invincible. On the other hand the Green Knight is not being fair, that is, chivalrous: he is really cheating since he is asking Gawain to risk everything while he himself risks nothing, thanks to Morgan le Fay's backing him with her magic art. In Chrétien's Chevalier de la charrete both Gauvain and, more importantly, Lancelot were in a similar predicament, since their open and fair ways could not win out against the ruthlessly treacherous schemes of Meleaganz without the chance help of intervening admirers, like the maid who freed Lancelot from the prison tower.

Sir Gawain clearly marks a high point in the history of the civilizing process we have been following: the curial virtue of humility, a Christian element inspired by the clerical psyche at court, intervenes to check the knight's inherent pride. The ideal knight's basic virtues and their opposite vices are neatly defined where Gawain confesses to his opponent:

I cringed at your cuts, and my cowardice induced me
To make an accord with avarice, abandoning my nature,
Which always leaned toward loyalty and knightly largess.
Now I am false and flawed.
                                                     (Part Three, vv. 2379–2382)

Yet the hard lesson, with the humbling outcome, has revealed his humanity, and his challenger generously recognizes it in the triumphantly conclusive lines:

But you have a small flaw, my friend: you lack some faithfulness.
It didn't arise for an artful object or amorous fling—
No! you just loved your life, and I blame you the less for it.
                                                              (Part Three, vv. 2366–2368)^[84]  

Then again, while confessing that he has learned his lesson, Gawain will define the vices of “avarice, excess, the frailty of the flesh, and, above all, pride” as the destruction of chivalry (stanza 19 of Part Four, vv. 2439–2455). Gawain, nevertheless, is the paragon of knightly virtues: the pentangle emblazoned on his shield and coat involves, in “an endless knot,” five sets of virtues, the last of which was made up of: “Free-giving, Good Fellowship, Chastity, Courtesy, and Pity” (Part Two, stanza 9, vv. 651–654). He is welcomed at the castle of the Green Knight as one who brings with him “virtue and valor and the very finest

manners,” and everybody rejoices at the prospect of watching an incomparable display of

 . . . the most subtle behavior,
The most sophisticated standards of civilized speech,
 . . .the lore of effortless language,
 . . .the paragon of perfect manners.
An education in etiquette
This knight shall surely bring;
And those who listen well
May gain love's mastering.
(Part Two, stanza 17, vv. 912–927)

The Lady of Belcirak weaves her tempting tryst with her guest by engaging in polite flirting with that art of gallant conversation that will become the pride of French Classical literature. In affairs of chivalry, she says, the chief thing is the game of love (v. 1512). And so it was, including this supremely sophisticated gem of late medieval poetry, where not only love but chivalry itself becomes an elegant game to be played in earnest for honor, self-esteem, and survival. The ludic element in the acting out of noble ideals had never found a subtler statement, nor had it ever been taken to more dizzying heights.

Chapter Six—
Epic and Romance in Germany

Intergeneric Dominants

The preceding analysis provides the tools to discriminate among the three codes of behavior addressed to the ruling class in both narrative literature and literature of behavior, the latter eventually resulting in generalized public standards. Once again, the three codes (courtly, chivalric/heroic, and chivalric/courtois ), all in full bloom around 1200, were seldom isolated from one another, although their degree of mixture varied with time and place. In the south of France, for example, with Guilhelm IX, Bertran de Born, and Peire Vidal, the lively feeling for the rapacious warrior who obtains vital satisfaction at the sight of strife, broken arms, and split heads was still a norm which coexisted with the refinements of love, though without much need for sublimation. I shall now try to gauge how the codes interacted in German literature.

German lyric forms were fragmented into a number of metrical frameworks which had more to do with musical patterns than with ancient examples. In turn the new epic forms, without deriving directly from ancient models, sprang out of a conflation of classical genres and new popular ones. In other words, they grew directly out of indigenous oral narratives, with some limited background of mediated Homeric and Virgilian features and materials. Just as significant, the “dominants” or constants that we see weaving their way in and out of each group of texts were literary phenomena whose genesis was not strictly literary,

but moral and social. As a way to gauge their vitality and autonomy, as it were, H.-R. Jauss has proposed “the test of commutation.”^[1] He asserts that in a synchronic perspective the delimitation of genres “cannot be decided according to one-sided formal or thematic characteristics.” The “test of commutation” reveals the true “dominant” that establishes “constitutive genre distinctions.” Just as, for example, “if one puts a princess in a fairy tale next to a princess in a novella, one notices the difference,” so characters are not interchangeable (they are “non-commutable”) between the chanson de geste and the romance. So far, so good. Yet the codes we are pursuing cut across genres: they are, should we say, “non-generic dominants.” If it is true that Arthurian knights would not fit in a chanson de geste or, vice versa, that the paladins of Charlemagne would be out of place around the Round Table (at least before Boiardo and Ariosto), what do we make, for example, of Siegfried and Brunhild in the Nibelungenlied? They are certainly heroic characters, but do they not incorporate strong courtly / courtois / chivalric elements, as well as fairy tale magic elements?

On the basis of degrees of reality, John of Garlandia's Poetria had differentiated the medieval genres as “res gesta or historia, res ficta or fabula, and res ficta quae tamen fieri potuit ”—historic fact, fanciful fable, and imagined possibility.^[2] But let us think of the magic Cloak of Darkness that Siegfried uses to win the fateful test imposed by Brunhild, and then again to subjugate her for her husband King Gunther. Was this delivered by the poet as fact, fanciful fiction, or realistic fiction? How far does the distinction reach in the body of the actual texts, beyond the realization of the different origins of single features: some epic, some mytho-religious, some from the folklore of fairy tales? Narrative constituents do become commutable between genres by virtue of the way they serve the deeper dominant constituent of, for example, courtly conventions. Since knights are both subservient to the code of their court society and rebellious against, or transcendent to, it—and more so in Germany than in France: witness Tristan, Iwein, and Parzival—their behavior responds to the ethical point to be made.^[3]

Jauss has integrated the educational dimension of literary artifacts into his proposed description of “the fundamental model that the medieval genres of epic, romance, and novella have in common.” His “Mode of Construction and Levels of Significance” include the presence of an “exclusively aristocratic” social status in the epic and romance (the novella being essentially bourgeois), with opposition, in the ro-

mance, between the nobility and the vilain on the one hand, and, on the other, the “inactive ideal king” and “the knight who alone takes the field and whose adventure stands in relation to the winning of his lady.” Next, his “Mode of Reception” includes, for the romance, the communication of “the doctrine of courtly education [Bildung ] through its ethics of the event.” Finally, his “Mode of Social Function” includes, again for the romance, that “the later function as an entertainment for the private reader is preceded by the original function as the initiation into courtly life and courtly love: the legitimate quest for a terrestrial happiness regulated by a social discipline and a life-style.”^[4] Such characterizations should clearly confirm the points I am trying to make.

True enough, through the twelfth century the code of courtly conduct could not be regarded as a coherent whole except for the basic notion of dienst und lon, service and reward.^[5] The qualities we encounter in so many texts are the traditional ones of ere (honor), milte (generosity), triuwe (loyalty), staete (constancy), maze (measure), zuht (good conduct), and tapferheit (bravery), but the specific role they play varies with authors and contexts.^[6] Similarly, for some scholars the notion of courtly love implies a collective ideology which does not correspond to the idiosyncrasies of individual poets and texts. One authoritative skeptic was W. T. H. Jackson, whose admirable familiarity with the texts does not seem to me to vouchsafe his efforts to “deconstruct” (avantla-lettre ) the poets' adherence to a common mythology.^[7] For him Chrétien de Troyes's chief purpose was to display the failure of the Arthurian code of conduct (e.g. 27: Hartmann, in his Iwein, “believed in the courtly mystique,” whereas his source Chrétien did not, so that Hartmann “failed to appreciate his predecessor's irony”). The only woman with a human face in Chrétien's poems, Jackson claims, is Enide, who was no Arthurian lady, and every one of his heroes learns at great expense that the Arthurian code, superficial and shallow as it had become, failed to lead to harmony, greatness, and happiness. Erec, in that poem about love in marriage—a most un-Arthurian and uncourtly notion—learns to love Enide above concupiscentia, with trust and appreciation for her personal qualities (23–34).

Granted that Chrétien must have had a long and rich oral tradition behind him, it seems excessive to assume that at his time the Arthurian code was already worn out and conventionalized to the point of decay. Yvain's memorable opening lines (1–41) depict Arthur's court in a context where the irony appears aimed less at that court than, trenchantly,

at the inadequacy of Chrétien's villainous contemporaries, who are worth less alive than are the dead knights of Arthur's memory: “Artus  . . . / la cui proesce nos enseigne / que nos soiens preu et cortois”; “car molt valt mialz, ce m'est a vis, / un cortois morz c'uns vilains vis.” In any event, Jackson maintains that passion was generally considered morally wrong in the Middle Ages, which caused a conflict between the needs of society and the needs of pure Christianity.^[8] The sacrament of marriage sanctified sex, but only as the means to obey the commandment to grow and multiply; passionate love had no place within marriage, since desire and enjoyment of sex were inherently and inescapably sinful, the fall's tragic mark, as St. Augustine had so eloquently preached. Duby's recent researches basically agree with this definition of the place of love and sex in marriage.^[9] A consequence was the apparent impossibility of finding a logical moral place for love literature. The following discussion should help to focus Jackson's strictures and answer some of them.

Chivalry and the German Epic

One reason for the relative dearth of German chivalric literature in the twelfth century is that education, according to customs inherited from the earliest times, was still regarded with a certain contempt among the German nobility. The Ostrogoths had forbidden noblemen to entrust their sons to teachers, who would turn their minds away from the pursuits of the warrior class. Procopius of Caesarea (The Gothic War, sixth century) relates such an edict by Theodoric the Great. Thereafter the Goths sought a “barbaric education” for their sons, who should grow up in the company of their peers and accustom themselves to the use of arms and the exercise of force over their subjects, away from the influence of old, effeminate wise men.^[10]

Raoul Glaber of Cluny (Historiae sui temporis 2.12, written in the 1030s) tells the story of the grammarian Vilgardus of Ravenna around A.D. 1000 as a moral exemplum of the danger of falling into heresy from excessive love of letters:

He nourished for grammar a passion more insane than prudent, as is typical of the Italians, who, for the sake of it, will neglect all the other arts. Filled with pride for his knowledge he came close to madness. So much so that one night the devils appeared to him in the shape of Virgil, Juvenal, and Horace, and thanked him for his enthusiasm in studying their books and extolling their authority among posterity. Thereafter, seduced by the devils' delusion,

he started to teach their dogmas, asserting that the poets' words carry authority on all matters. At last he was judged to be a heretic and condemned by the bishop of the city, Peter. Everywhere in Italy there were found people who embraced this pestiferous belief: they too died from the iron and the fire.^[11]

Historians have often referred to the Burgundian cleric Wipo, preceptor of the future Emperor Henry III (1039–1056), for his regretful observation that Germans regarded it as frivolous and shameful (vacuum et turpe ) for nonclerics to submit themselves to tutors.^[12] Nevertheless, no matter how limited and qualified, the appreciation of classical culture had been growing: Wipo held up the example of Italy, where Roman boys rushed to school as soon as they had passed the age of playing with childish toys.

If Italians differed from Germans in their appreciation of schooling, so did the French. In his biography of Count Burchard, Vita domni Burcardi (1058), Odo of St. Maur (Eudes de Saint-Maur) registered the French custom of sending the sons of high noblemen to the king's court for education.^[13] Marbod of Rennes (ca. 1035–1123) repeatedly pointed out that it was customary for French noblemen to send their sons to grammar school as soon as they reached the right age.^[14] As we saw above (chap. 3), at Henry II's English court Gerald of Wales had praised the great princes of the past for joining “toga and armor,” literacy and valor.

In Germany, the epic genre had combined the heathen martial spirit with chivalrous civility without the Christian element so prominent in the French epic, although the specifically chivalric brand of piety that the historian Adolf Waas labelled Ritterfrömmigkeit was conspicuously present in the religious epics of biblical inspiration, for example, the Heliand.^[15] Historians have somewhat confused the picture by distinguishing too sharply between a Volksepos, or popular national epic (Nibelungenlied, Gudrun ), and a höfisches Epos (the romance), presumably related to the noble class.^[16] But both the epic and the romance thrived within the higher classes and may well have been produced mostly by clerics (as seems to be the case with the extant version of the Nibelungenlied ), even while minstrels and rhapsodes could perform both kinds before receptive popular audiences. It might be more meaningful to distinguish between a heroic/knightly inspiration in the Volksepos, based on the ethic of the warrior class, and an essentially clerically-based inspiration in the romance. The chivalric values of bravery, loyalty, and generosity—the French prouesse, loyauté, and

largesse —were already present in the early pagan epics, signally Beowulf and the Hildebrantslied (both composed around A.D. 800 or even somewhat earlier), and then appeared in the tenth-century Waltharius and eleventh-century Ruodlieb,^[17] together with the ritual testing of the young hero (who even in Beowulf fights monsters rather than heathens, in a way that is characteristic of the French romance vis-à-vis the French epic). The coexistence of martial ethos and Christian piety, with the early forms of courtesy eventually acting as a catalyst between the two, is not a paradox but a natural response to conditions in the earlier Middle Ages, when such late pagan invaders as Magyars, Arabs, Turks, and Vikings threatened the survival of monasteries and the surrounding Christian communities. Germanic bellicosity had a positive side when harnessed for defense from outside dangers: the early epic forms grew in and around the monasteries, most often by the hand of clerical rhapsodes, reflecting this genuine need. Messages of this type resounded in Beowulf and the Hildebrantslied, and a similar sense of mission was carried in the later Ruodlieb and the proliferating songs inspired by the crusading spirit of the eleventh and later centuries.^[18] Chroniclers represented family conflicts in terms that echoed the poetic myths in spirit and narrative detail.^[19] Both the chronology and geography of such literary and historical documents appear to undermine Jaeger's claim that Germany originated these ethical motifs, since they go further back than his quoted sources and are common to both Germany and France.

Ever since Georges Dumézil (1940),^[20] cultural anthropologists have attempted to identify the primeval forms of the epic through such binary oppositions as that of the terrible (Varuna) and the enlightened (Mitra), as between Achilles and Odysseus or Nestor. The Greek, Roman, and Germanic epos starts with tragic anger (see Curtius 170)—a heroic but uncourtly moral trait, by our frame of reference. Achilles' anger sets the theme of the Iliad, and Hagen's and Kriemhild's frightening anger fills the stanzas of the Nibelungenlied. But the hero can be, and most commonly is, either a youthfully impetuous, emotional, and violent warrior, like Achilles, or a wise, prudent, learned, and self-controlled senior sage, like Nestor. Ideally the hero combines the two, thus creating a more complex and somewhat ambiguous, Janus-like figure, like Odysseus, although the emphasis on wisdom was more characteristic of Hesiod than of Homer. The Homeric epic also flanks these types with the educators of warriors and princes, such as Cheiron and Phoenix. Dares Phrygius transmitted to the Middle Ages an Odysseus who was witty, eloquent, and wise,^[21] while Fulgentius (ca. 467–532)

and Isidore (d. 636) canonized the two ingredients of the perfect hero, namely courage and wisdom, fortitudo and sapientia (see Fulgentius's interpretation of the Virgilian arma virumque and Isidore, Etimologiae 1.39.9, where the definition of the hero worthy of heaven prepared the type for Christian treatment). The soldier fortis et proelio doctus became a common topos. In Stoic terms fortitudo and sapientia corresponded to the cardinal virtues of fortitudo and prudentia, while justice and temperance appeared later as heroic dedication to the service of high causes and as measure or self-control; these, too, were “courtly” elements that entered the chivalric romance. All these schemata were then transferred to rulers and statesmen, starting with the emperors (Curtius 1963: 167–182).

Education and instruction—character formation and training in “rules”—are undoubtedly at the base of the höfisches Epos as its courtly element: this is the novel ingredient that stems from social transformations harking back to the early German courts, coupled with the French poets' mediating contributions.^[22] The civilizing process of courtly ideology and sensibility acted gradually in capillary ways. Courtliness rested on consciously chosen social roles and notions of personal responsibility induced by education. When it came in contact with such collective archetypes as the epic and the imaginative romance (including the lyrical eroticism of “courtly love”), it set up a tension between contradictory, incompatible elements that forced profound revisions in form and matter alike.

The most “definitive” text of the Germanic epics, the Nibelungenlied (probably composed near Passau, ca. 1203–1205) deserves our attention for its paradigmatic value.^[23] Of course the poem is of the heroic type. Three words with the highest frequency of recurrence in its vocabulary are recke, helt, and degen (warrior, hero).^[24] The conclusive episode, climaxing in Kriemhild's beheading of Hagen with Siegfried's sword, is clearly an excess of savage revenge: it entails the planned destruction of the house of Burgundy including Kriemhild's own brothers, who were treacherously invited to Etzel's court for that precise purpose.^[25] Kriemhild too will die, however, cut down by Hildebrand's sword in punishment for her criminal anger.

Because of the relative closeness of the two ruling classes of feudal nobility and high clergy, there was a certain convergence of ideals all along. Even within a truly heroic context, the Hildebrantslied already showed the sort of feudal casuistry about the fine points of loyalty to lord and kin that both a high aristocrat and a sophisticated cleric could

nurture and appreciate.^[26] This short, powerful poem revolves around the conflict between loyalty to king and loyalty to family. After a long separation, father and son meet on the field of battle at the heads of opposite armies. Since he owes it to his king to fight with all his might, Hildebrant hesitates to reveal his identity to his son Hadubrant. Conversely, Hadubrant is so completely engrossed in performing his duty as warrior that he rejects all hints that he is facing his father, who, he insists, must have died in distant lands. Hildebrant's behavior expresses the heroic notion of identification with the tribe, to which the individual owes unconditional allegiance—even to the point of killing his son. The poem has lost its ending, but critics agree that the likely outcome was Hadubrant's death by Hildebrant's hand, possibly followed by the latter's lament and suicide over the son's body.^[27]

Somewhat similar to Hildebrant's is Rüdeger's predicament in the Nibelungenlied. When he is sent to the Burgundian court with the mission of persuading Kriemhild to marry Etzel, he sways Kriemhild by a momentous offer that puts his own life on the line. As a courtier who is fully dedicated to the service of master and state, he promises her revenge against all wrongdoers and “swears for himself and all his vassals” to “serve her to the death” in achieving “whatever her honor demands.” On this condition she marries Etzel. Then, when the Burgundians arrive at Etzel's court—invited by Kriemhild to carry out her revenge against them—Rüdeger must choose between fighting the Burgundians out of loyalty to his king and queen, Etzel and Kriemhild, or refusing to fight because he had promised his help to the Burgundians when they were his house guests (37.11-32).^[28] He begs Etzel to release him from his obligation, to no avail. This type of feudal casuistry was the epic background to the subtle “questions of love” in the “courts of love.”

Some of the text's apparent contradictions are probably to be explained by the poet's gloomy sense of tragedy, rather than by his treating courtliness only as a somewhat confused court-critic.^[29] A good example of the poet's view of his story as determined by an iron necessity is the grimly humorous episode of Hagen putting the mermaids' prophecy to the test. When the mermaids predict that only the chaplain will survive the trip to Hunland, Hagen tries to drown the chaplain (who survives, thus confirming the prophecy). The poet is so confident in his fatalism that he can play it for powerful effects. Furthermore, everything being preordained, he does not hesitate to anticipate the issue of each of his narrative threads. The suspense is made not of surprise, but of the haunting realization that what must happen is happening step by step

before our own eyes. This feature was not uncommon in medieval narrative, where the reader is often apprised beforehand of a story's outcome. In the Italian Tristano Riccardiano (ca. 1300) the narrator warns the reader that Tristan's decision to marry Isotta dalle Bianche Mani in order to forget Isotta la Bionda will not turn out the way he planned it.^[30] In contrast, of all medieval narrators Chrétien de Troyes was probably the one who played most methodically with a calculated element of surprise by surrounding his characters and events with an atmosphere of dense mystery as to reasons and circumstances.

In the French romances, courtliness subdued the heroic need for proud self-assertion and revenge of personal offense. The failure of courtliness to achieve this triumph of “measure” is part of the tragic element in the Nibelungenlied, even though some of its key figures do appear conditioned by courtliness. Siegfried and his parents, Kriemhild herself, Gunther and his brothers, even the pagan Etzel and his surrounding vassals, chiefly Dietrich von Bern, Hildebrand, and especially Rüdeger, are guided by a sense of humanity, good breeding (zuht ), and measure or self-restraint (mâze ). The numerous hôchgezîte or festival banquets are marked by liberality (milte ), hospitality, and knightly contests. The three contests Brunhild imposes on Gunther and Siegfried (Bartsch/de Boor ed.: 7.37 [425]) are tests of manhood of the type that the chivalrous knight would undergo to prove himself as deserving of his lady's guerdon. Even in the Old Norse saga (the one drawn upon by Wagner) Siegfried's freeing of Brunhild from the ring of fire served the same purpose.

Siegfried, in particular, has been interpreted as a chivalric hero: he is knighted in a formal ceremony, his relationship with Kriemhild involves deliberate courtly wooing, and he is seeking hohe Minne (e.g., 3.4 [47]: “Do gedâht uf hôhe minne daz Siglinde kint”). It is not unwarranted to assume that the ladies' dominant role in determining the course and fate of the knights' heroic adventures had antecedents beyond the chivalric romances. An outstanding example is Brunhild's behaving as the amazon who would submit only to a victorious hero. Before the right of the stronger man to possess the woman of his choice started to be questioned (perhaps under the influence of the mercantile ethic, as we have observed), the woman could only assert her dignity by fighting on man's own terms, sword at hand, ready to be subdued by force in a fair, manly contest. The code of the French romances, where the woman was not allowed to handle manly weapons, excluded this “heroic” Germanic way.

The reader is struck by an aspect of the narrative that sounds more

like a bourgeois way of looking at chivalry than a genuinely heroic one: that is the emphatic element of pompous ceremony, show, and display. Note, for example, in the third âventiure, the apprehensive fuss about Siegfried's departure for Worms, which must be impressively planned with all the trappings of knightly honor: finely embroidered suits of sumptuous fabrics, richly laden beasts in the sumpter-train, and so on. When he arrives in Worms the plain folk keep staring at the party, their mouths agape. An irreverent modern reader might almost be reminded of a Disneyland-like spectacle where the shiny armor is tinfoil. Could this be a sign that the poet, a cleric, was awed by the grandeur of courts to which he did not really belong? The aesthetic element of show was an integral part of curialitas from very early times; it has continued to surround the life of the mighty down to our own day. Court ceremony was destined to become more and more elaborate as a show of worth among both secular princes and princes of the Church, bishops and, later, cardinals. But we must conclude that this pervasive feature of the poem is part of its being, rather than a realistic representation of the life of the nobility, a courtly reflection on it.^[31]

The legends' original versions having been lost in the mist of time, we can only guess as to how and when such elements entered the German sagas. To be sure, we do not find them in earlier texts of French chansons de geste. The German poet is clearly no part of that monastic world that would have disdained the conspicuous display of worldly riches and flashy ornaments. Moreover, such elements are related to the epic poet's habit of hyperbole: he overcharges visual details and over-does the elements that will awe his audience. When we find this marked relish in pomp and display in later poets, it may be part of a gothique flamboyant sense of décor —as in the masterful representations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which surpassed anything previously known in fond descriptions of the luxuries of courtly living. The growing force of the mercantile ethic may also have been a factor. This factor is clearly present in an Italian version of the Arthurian cycle, the well known Tavola Ritonda or Tavola Polidori (early fourteenth century), and it is interesting to observe that the appreciation of worldly luxury, common to both epic and romance, could take on an overt bourgeois coloring in the land of merchant communes. At one point Queen Isotta's (Isolde) garments and personal ornaments are not only described in great detail, but precisely apprised one by one for their monetary value.^[32] In a general sense, this taste for the rich display of wealth, refinement, and comfort is a feature that the German epos shares with the

romance, and which clearly reflects not the original epic sense of severe and austere devotion to warlike ideals but the courtly ways acquired by the new, “courtified” nobility. The sumptuous court festivals, often accompanied by hunting parties and tournaments, had become in actual practice keen models of self-image. The poets appreciated them as the best setting for their live performances and consequent reward.

Similarly, the reader is taken by surprise by rather intimate scenes within the privacy of palace chambers, wherein otherwise savage warriors behave politely and exquisitely, according to the best etiquette of educated society. Here again the poet may introduce elements that were not part of the social reality of the class he portrayed. His occasional irony, another possibly “bourgeois” trait, also reveals his personal distance from that class. Think of the humorous touch of the fierce Brunhild's maidens curiously peeking through the windows at the unknown men in Gunther's party (7.7 [395]). Or consider, in the Eighth Adventure, the poet's explaining Siegfried's financial ability to raise an army of one thousand Nibelungs. Again, remember the scene when Hagen's brother gets the key to Brunhild's treasury to spread presents all around, much to Brunhild's horror. The very episode of the taming of Brunhild on her nuptial bed could be read as sheer, snickering comedy.

This discourse of bourgeois distance from the original world of heroic legend should also apply to the element of the marvelous, which plays a diminishing role as it passes from the earlier, mythologicallygrounded sagas to the hands of the Nibelungenlied poet. The poet reduces the fairy element of the Hoard and Brunhild's enchantment by Odin to mere backgroud, preserving only the magic stratagem of the Cloak of Darkness—a device Siegfried needs in order to trick Brunhild both in the three contests and on her wedding night—and Siegfried's raising of the army of Nibelungs in order to help Gunther get out of Iceland with his hostile bride-to-be Brunhild.

Insofar as they mark departures from earlier epic forms and, particularly, the more austere French epic, all these elements can be viewed as part and parcel of the courtly/chivalric culture. Even the artistic element that is so striking in the personal formation of Tristan and Isolt is far from belonging uniquely to those characters, since it is also found in the epic, including the Nibelungenlied, where it did not appear dissonant with the character of a warrior. Volker, who side by side with the unbending Hagen plays a major role in the final battle at Etzel's court, is a minstrel, a poet-musician, and a great warrior. We are reminded of the famous minstrel Taillefer who, reportedly singing the (still unwrit-

ten) Chanson de Roland, led William the Conqueror's army to battle at Hastings in 1066.^[33] Minstrels and musicians are also employed in diplomatic missions, as in the embassy led by Rüdeger and sent by Etzel to extend the fateful invitation to the Burgundians. Other humane (we could even say humanistic) qualities are found among the fighting heroes, who all along indulge in effective displays of oratory. Hagen himself is a persuasive orator, but Rüdeger, in particular, is a master courtier/diplomat/orator in the sense of active practical politics, as he shows in the way he handles his difficult mission to Kriemhild: it is from that act of “diplomacy” that stems the catastrophe of the fall of the house of Burgundy, the poem's tragic resolution.

Though driven by hateful arrogance, the warriors always behave in a formally courteous manner toward one another, both friends and foes (we may recall Ordericus Vitalis's description of King William Rufus's respect for his prisoners). Out of mutual appreciation and regard for their valor, the opposing armies, which will utterly destroy each other in the end, meet with eager mutual courtesy before the fray (beginning of âventiure 28). Dietrich's and Hildebrand's troops “welcome” the Burgundians arriving in Hunland even while they expect great trouble from them. Courtesy reaches a climax in the great battle between Rüdeger and the Burgundians, where, in exchange for Rüdeger's gracious gift of his own shield to Hagen, Hagen and Volker refuse to fight him even if he slew all the other Burgundians (âventiure 37).

Courtliness accorded with the principles of Christian personal responsibility, which replaced the pagan fatalism of old. God-willed necessity, the basic predicament in the primitive epic, negated personal choice, but now the hero had to be judged as a good or bad person. The poet had abandoned the psychological frame of the heroic, noble heroes, who though savage, had the aura of divinity about them. The negative view of courtly vices pierces through the Nibelungenlied in a way that alters the heroic nature of the original (or at least earlier, Nordic) saga. Thus Gunther's court came to harbor characters who possessed the chief canonical virtues of courtliness, that is, bravery and loyalty, but had few scruples in exerting them for ignoble “political” causes. Hagen kills Siegfried treacherously and out of hateful envy; Gunther backs him in his repeated thievery at the expense of a woman, his own sister Kriemhild. One is reminded of the medieval chroniclers who extolled rulers as noble and admirable even while exposing their horrible crimes, apparently without perceiving the glaring moral contradiction.^[34]

Indeed, one can find so many parallels and analogies between the heroes of the sagas and those of the romances that we could easily believe they shared common origins, despite the clear genre distinctions. Tristan and Siegfried go through similar stages of apprenticeship. They both arrive at court as little known guests and manage to obtain general favor with their amazing talents and prowess. Both will tragically succumb to the envy their excellence has aroused against them. Both are used by their kings to win wives for them. In their adventures to win brides for their lieges they use force as well as cunning. The suggestion that the hero be sent to win a bride for the king is made by Mark's envious courtiers just as Hagen originates the same idea in Gunther's mind, at Siegfried's expense.^[35] On a more general level, the heroic single combat that characterizes the individualism of the chivalric romance is an epic feature that goes back to the Homeric beginnings of the epic genre.

Gottfried's Tristan

Knowledge of the Arthurian world must have developed rather early in Germany, since the way Eilhart von Oberge's Tristrant und Isalde (ca. 1170) introduced Arthurian characters assumed on the part of the readers some familiarity with the role of the court (e.g., vv. 5046–5058). Eilhart apparently imported the Tristan legend to Germany, having perhaps received it through the intermediary of Alienor of Aquitaine or her daughter Mathilde, who in 1168 married Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony: in 1182/1186 the poet followed them into exile in Normandy or England.^[36]

For W. T. H. Jackson (1971: 35–48) the Tristan cycle entailed a moralizing condemnation of the lovers as socially subversive sinners, with the exception of Thomas and Gottfried, who alone adopted a sympathetic view, Gottfried even declaring himself one of the noble lovers' followers. Tristan's and Isolt's mutual passion thus became, quite exceptionally, an equal union of noble souls: “ein man ein wîp, ein wîp ein man; / Tristan Isolt, Isolt Tristan,” “a man a woman, a woman a man, Tristan Isolde, Isolde Tristan” (vv. 129 f.).^[37]

The following interpretation of the Tristan story varies from Jaeger's assessment of the role of German romances within the courtly tradition. For Jaeger, the French romances of the twelfth century offered two basic approaches to courtliness: the courtier narrative and the chivalric narrative. In Germany, he sees Gottfried von Strassburg and Wolfram von

Eschenbach (b. ca. 1170, d. ca. 1220, about ten years after Gottfried) as typically representing these two complementary poles. Gottfried's Tristan would be a hero of courtliness as the art of success and survival, whereas Wolfram's Parzival (ca. 1195–1210, contemporary with Gottfried's unfinished Tristan und Isolt ) postulated an ideal of perfect knighthood which Parzival strove to reach but which only his son Loherangrîn, whose sublime chivalry was pure and uncontaminated inner humanity, was destined to achieve. This distinction between the courtly and the chivalric stresses the latter as God-oriented, the former as more thoroughly immanent. To be sure, God is as absent from the more worldly context of Gottfried's poem as He is ever-present in Wolfram's version of the Parzival story, more so than in Chrétien's Perceval. But the following analysis may show such a distinction to be neither fundamental nor always clear.^[38] Jaeger (chap. 12) sees the Verhöflichung der Krieger^[39] in the two great knight poets, Hartmann von Aue and Wolfram von Eschenbach, signally through their respective adaptations of Chrétien de Troyes' Yvain (Iwein, ca. 1202) and Perceval.

Critics have commented on Gottfried's apparent disagreement with Wolfram. Indeed the two poets embody the opposing classes of clerics and knights: Gottfried, not exactly a cleric but probably educated in a monastery school (meister he was called, not nobleman, hêr ), aimed to uphold the worldly, courtly qualities of the civil servant, as distinct from the knightly virtues extolled by hêr Wolfram. Gottfried's Tristan is not, by and large, a “knightly” statement. We can agree with W. T. H. Jackson (1971) that Gottfried believed neither in the Arthurian world of chivalrous conventions nor in “courtly love,” hence he picked up the romance as a matter of opportunity, because it was there, asking, as it were, to be handled “correctly.” The thesis that interested him could neither be understood nor accepted as viable in an Arthurian court: it was “Tristan-love,” hohe minne for the edele herzen, the few elect. He believed that the practice of true love as well as the reading of good love stories (i.e., love literature) went together with the noblest virtues: “liebe, triuwe, staeter muot, / ere und ander manic guot” (amiability, faithfulness, constancy, honor, and many other good dispositions, vv. 181–186).^[40] Since love produces a richer way of life, we must strive to love (191–200). Only love can assure true honor, praise, and fame: “ere unde lop erwerben / oder ane si verderben” (207–210). Tristan's impassioned example proved that courtly qualities were not necessarily good, and could be downright bad. At Mark's court, envy (nît ), suspicion (arcwan, ), indecision (zwivel ), hate (haz ), cowardice, intrigue, and selfishness prevailed, becoming obstacles to the superior hero like Tristan.^[41]

Envy was a particularly powerful obstacle to courtesy. In Chrétien de Troyes's Chevalier de la charrete, Meleaganz, one of the most disloyal and treacherous villains of Arthurian literature, was said to be driven by envy. Later on, Dante presented the tragic case of Pier della Vigna as an exemplary victim of this scourge of the courts. Tristan could not survive without yielding to the ways of the world, thus becoming a deceitful, contradictory, and cunning liar.^[42] The blame fell on that court society which crushed our heroes because they could not observe its tenets, whereas the romances had presented the court as an ideal milieu in which love provided the motive for the highest and most refined deeds. Thus, for Gottfried, either the education of the knight had failed in its purpose, or the society that harbored that ideal of education fell short of rewarding its own pupils.

Rual li Foitenant, perhaps the most virtuous character in the poem, is a sort of anticourtier. Jackson (1971: 160 f.) sees this as proof that Gottfried did not believe in courtliness, which is part of this scholar's persuasive “deconstruction” of the poem. He reads it as a radical subversion of everything the readership of this literary genre wanted to believe in. Another interpretation may be more plausible. Gottfried had to put Mark's court under an unfavorable light but Rual is measured by no other virtues than the courtly ones, such as loyalty above all (he is even so named) and total dedication to a superior cause (his lord Riwalin's future through his son Tristan).^[43] Gottfried's theme is not the representation of courtliness but of the conflict between love and society—specifically, courtly society. He replaces the knight-hero with the artist-hero. Tristan/Tantris in Ireland is ein höfischer spilmann, a courtly minstrel, and is received by Isolt's tutor who is also a musically skilled priest. We move in a world of art appreciators. Just the same, it is a world of knighthood, defined according to the basic traditional virtues we have seen—for example, by King Mark at the lavish ceremony of Tristan's dubbing (vv. 5022–5040). Gottfried's ironic attitude toward the warlike side of the chivalric world comes out typically in such episodes as Tristan's gruesome duel with Morolt (see especially vv. 6871–6905: each rival is four men in one, and so on), almost worthy of Ariosto in its humorous way of quoting alleged sources for textual hyperbole.

Just as other texts justify and extol the active virtues of political agents (for example, Peter of Blois's justification of the role of governors and courtiers, Dudo of St. Quentin's and William of Jumièges's stories of the abbot Martin of Jumièges dissuading William Long-Sword from becoming a monk, John of Limoges's story of Joseph and the Pharaoh),

so does King Mark warn Tristan not to let the court discourage him from service to his king: “Virtue and envy are to each other like a mother to her child,” Mark advises. “Virtue incessantly gives birth to envy and nourishes it . . . . Bliss and fortune are contemptible when they have never faced hatred.”^[44] Like Joseph in John of Limoges's text, Tristan is won by King Mark's advice to fight back bravely rather than yield to the attacks of envy and hatred. Not only does Tristan overcome his paralyzing fears of his scheming enemies and decide to remain at court, he even outdoes his detractors by shrewdly returning their own devices against them. He thus becomes a triumphant hero of political courtiership by accepting his enemies' scheme to go and win a bride for Mark, but he tricks his enemies by asking them to go with him on that dangerous adventure. They cannot refuse what was their own idea; hence they must exert themselves for a successful expedition by saving Tristan from Isolt's revenge for the slaying of her uncle Morolt.

As we have seen, in consequence of the prerequisites advertised in the doctrine of curiality, the courtier had became a master of disguise. Similarly, in Gottfried's Tristan “what was a virtue has become a stratagem” (Jaeger: 42), as in Castiglione's courtier, who will disguise his art as a second nature under the practice of sprezzatura: “true art is what does not seem to be art, and the most important thing is to conceal it” (Cortegiano: 1.26).

Gottfried had begun his psychological portrait of Tristan from the outside: “In gestures and beautiful manners nature had been so good to him that he was a pleasure to look at.”^[45] This was a comprehensive presentation of good manners, coupling mores with gestures or outward comportment. But serious moral substance underlies this doctrine, since it is said that, when Tristan became a tutor to Isolt, he taught her site through its true source, to wit, moraliteit. While instructing her thoroughly in music, languages, and the reading of formative books,

besides all his instruction, he also taught her a discipline which we call moraliteit, the art which teaches fine behavior. All women ought to practice it in their youth. Moraliteit, that sweet pursuit, is delightful and pure. Its study is in harmony with the world and with God. In its commandment it teaches us to please both God and the world. It is given to all lofty spirits as a nurse.^[46]

Commenting on these famous lines, W. T. H. Jackson (1971: 76 f.) pointed out that this German neologism, “probably” from Latin moralitas (but what else could it come from?), could only have the meaning of the Latin term, to wit, not exactly “morality,” but state of mind,

character, and habit of praxis. Jackson further suggested that this beautifully moving passage on the power of music (most becoming to the inner circle of edele herzen ) echoed closely Boethius's De re musica, where the moralitas of the singer/performer was said to determine the effect of music, precisely as in Gottfried's context. Musical skill was to be part of the education of the courtier down to Castiglione and beyond, and Gottfried played this motif with unusual subtlety. By his musical talent, Tristan casts a truly magic spell on the court (vv. 3588–3597), and Isolt will learn from him the same art (9036–9131).

Tristan appears in Gottfried as a knight with all the courtly trappings in his education, but he was already so in Eilhart von Oberge and, in part, in the Anglo-Norman Thomas.^[47] It is worth noting that Tristan's courtly career shows striking parallels with that of Apollonius of Tyre, the hero of a Latin novel of the fifth to sixth century A.D . that enjoyed remarkable popularity in the Middle Ages. Apollonius, abandoned as a youth in a foreign land, managed to attract the king's attention through his athletic skills, thus becoming a favorite at the palace through his unsurpassed talent at playing the lyre. The princess made him her tutor in music and fell in love with him.^[48] The peculiar courtierly twist in the vernacular romances is the element of clever calculation. The result of this educated display of liberal arts is that Isolt, before falling in love with Tristan and when she still knew him only as her tutor and a wandering minstrel called Tantris, concluded that such a man deserved wealth and honor: “der solte guot und ere han” (v. 11,129). She reached this conclusion as she watched him bathe and mused about the great worth of this lowly minstrel. Wealth and honor were the just reward for such a master of the humane arts and moraliteit. Furthermore, Tantris had also slayed the dragon, thus proving himself a worthy knight while winning Isolt for his uncle Mark and saving her from the hated seneschal. She thought he deserved a kingdom.

Gottfried called Tristan a hoveman ( = Hofman, courtier), while King Mark calls Tristan's modest pose (the modestia of the curial ethos) “cunning” or “craftiness” (kündekeit, 3576–3583), very close indeed to Castiglione's sprezzatura, wherein the secret of success lies in a cleverly calculated underplay of talent which blunts envy and intrigue at court. It is exquisitely “political” and “diplomatic” and it arouses admiration, not disapproval, even though the sharp-eyed among the audience, including the king, do not fail to see it as a mask. Jaeger (239) compares this situation with Alain de Lille's very “moral” allegorical figure of Honestas (to be placed alongside Cicero's concept of

honestas ), who advises the New Man to learn the rare art of leading two lives, “living his interior life for himself and his exterior life for the many; to  . . . show himself all things to all men” (“intus sibi vivens, pluribus extra; /  . . . ut omnibus omnis / pareat”: Anticlaudianus 7: 215–218; the advice is loosely adapted from Seneca, ad Lucilium 5: 2–3: “Intus omnia dissimilia sint, frons populo nostra conveniat”). This positive dissimulation, which the critics called hypocrisy, was found in Thomas Becket, vir geminus (double man), whereas Thomas More, still very much “a man for all seasons,” “omnia omnibus factus” in St. Paul's picturesque metaphor, was equally doomed even without being so ready to adopt duplicity.^[49] If duplicity could be regarded as a morally debasing form of hypocrisy, Paul's and Seneca's contexts referred to a manner of duplicity that could well be morally exalting and prudently endowed with saving grace.

Höfische minne thrives on deceit, says Gottfried (Jackson: 93), whereas hohe minne transcends deceit and cunning, valsche und akust (v. 12,239). Yet courtly society breeds precisely these qualities which can be good or bad, according to circumstances. They are good when they allow Tristan to survive envy, bad when Tristan and Isolt use them to serve their love in a struggle against society. So the very qualities that have made Tristan a hero turn negative and pave his path to self-destruction. These have become the same predicaments of adulterous triangles, covered up elegantly and skillfully in the history of courtly societies from King Arthur to Versailles and the Parisian salons, down to the eighteenth-century cicisbei, fashionable young dandies who publicly courted and escorted married ladies as surrogate husbands. Society will destroy the true lovers, whom it casts out because they flaunt its rules overtly and dangerously, whereas it will accept, admire, and honor the courtly, prudent, dissimulating, and “diplomatic” lovers and sinners who play the games of elegant society. The high nobility as well as the high clergy would show the way at all times. Gottfried seems to accuse literature of hypocrisy (Jackson: 94) because it produces mere fiction, divorced from reality, whereas he advocates literary myths that should be our guides in action. In other words, the code that at the start was educational and formative, once established becomes a rule of conformity and success at any cost.

Jaeger (237–241) overdoes it when he singles out the element of cunning in the Tristan story as a distinguishing trait of courtly romance—of German curial origin—if this is meant in any exclusive sense. Indeed, that element was strong in German epic literature, too, and we may

wonder which genre has chronological priority in this sense. Cunning plays a prominent role in Siegfried's way of helping King Gunther conquer the invincible Brunhild. His deceitful courtship is quite analogous to Mark's courting of Isolt with the help of Tristan. Gottfried's sources were French, but could he not also have learned such stratagems from earlier German sagas? In any event, it seems fair to conclude that Tristan is courtly only on the surface: the author is interested in a deeper search for ethical and behavioral values that go beyond courtliness and chivalry. When all is said and done Gottfried's (and Thomas's) Tristan is neither courtly nor courtois, and this conclusion contradicts Jaeger's interpretation of Gottfried's place in the ideology of courtesy. The most striking absence is that of the essential quality of restraint or measure—all versions of the Tristan story in verse (i.e., before Tristan en prose of ca. 1230) are characterized by elements of exasperated, unrestrained violence and passion.^[50] The conflict of the codes is extreme there (hence tragic), because each one of them is pushed to radical statement. Gottfried radicalizes the tragic story of the two lovers united against the world and the court. Hence the court can neither understand nor accept them and will act toward them with mean hostility, while they will use all sorts of courtly ruses to survive. Likewise, Tristan is not courtois in that its pessimism denies the optimistic faith of courtois literature (including Chrétien). Tristan's love doubtless civilizes and sublimates, but it also destroys.^[51] The naturalism of Gottfried's hohe Minne and Thomas's fin'amour, unlike and against the socially conditioned amour courtois, raises love above human law and social norms to the exalted dignity of a law of nature. The true origin of this phenomenon, admittedly preexisting Thomas, is ostensibly neither courtly nor chivalric. It is an anthropological/psychological fact that seems part of the subgenre and logically and chronologically transcends the birth of chivalry. The court, however, behaves in it not so much as a microcosm of society at large but as a realm of special groups, the rising bourgeoisie and perhaps also the clerical functionaries, who could not hope to achieve chivalric status.^[52] It does not seem unwarranted to assume that in the way both Thomas and Gottfried (together with Eilhart) handled their controversial story, and in direct contrast to the way other narrators had handled it (especially Béroul), we see the traces of clerics at work, addressing themselves to a sophisticated audience of noblemen, with their problematic attitudes toward passion, loyalty, and faithfulness.

The place and role of the various codes in the story of Tristan is hard

to assess, chiefly on account of the extant versions' fragmentary state, but it seems clear that, though always present, the Christian ethic there plays a secondary role. In Béroul the two lovers consider themselves sinners and recognize their faults of treachery and disloyalty vis-à-vis King Mark, uncle, benefactor, lord, and husband respectively, but impute to the philter their lack of free choice. When the three years of the philter's effectiveness are up, without really repenting, the lovers accept the hermit Ogrin's attempt to reconcile them to society, in the hope that their violations of the social code will be forgiven for the sake of minimizing the damage and restoring harmony. The moral imperative is reduced to the wisdom of saving what can be saved. It is wise to lie (“por honte oster et mal covrir / doit on un poi par bel mentir,” “one must lie in order to erase the dishonor and cancel the evil”—ll. 2353 f.); wisdom lies in being “diplomatic” and making the best of a difficult situation, without jeopardizing social order and welfare for the sake of absolute or abstract principles. Which is, within our discourse, the essence of “courtliness.”^[53]

Wolfram's Parzival

Chivalry in Wolfram's Parzival has been extensively discussed and does not need much comment here beyond the excellent use Jaeger (esp. 247–253) has made of this poem, often judged the most poetic of German medieval literature.^[54] Suffice it to mention the qualities that Gurnemanz (Chrétien's Gornemanz) lists as essential to the good knight—keeping in mind that in this Bildungsroman Parzival is chiefly guided by Gurnemanz's advice (and, later, Trevrizent's). The qualities that are most pertinent to the image we are pursuing of the courtier knight are: courtesy, compassion, shame (schame, i.e., as noted before, reverence for others' rights and needs), generosity (milte ), humility, beauty, nobility, moderation (mâze ), good breeding, leadership, a coupling of manliness and cheerful disposition (sît manlich und wol gemuot ), and mastery of arms.^[55] Somewhat ironically, one of the canonical curial virtues, reticence (blûkeit, a form of discretion and respect), turns out to be the cause of Parzival's major mistake: he fails to ask the decisive question that would have saved the Fisher King because, he will repeatedly explain, Gurnemanz had taught him to refrain from speaking when not asked.^[56]

To understand Wolfram's attitude toward his subject matter we must first face the problem of his irony. Irony was quite common in the ro-

mances, starting with Chrétien, who probably bequeathed it to his imitators as part of the “median” style that characterized the genre. Yet Wolfram uses it so pervasively and personally as to make himself not only the most memorable master of it, but, indeed, even a precursor of such a supreme ironist as Ariosto. Wolfram's being a member of the knightly class is pertinent to the interpretion of this psychological and stylistic feature because his ironic distancing from his subject matter cannot be the reflection of a different social status, as in the case of Gottfried. If, like the Italian poets later on, Wolfram chose to detach himself from his material, it had to be because its most direct users, that public who had embraced it because of ideological affinity, could now perceive it as “literature,” a ludic fiction. The changes vis-à-vis Chrétien included an increase in irony and humor. Parzival himself is more clownish than Perceval ever was: when he leaves home, his mother dresses him up as a buffoon, whereas Perceval's mother had simply dressed him in rawhide, Welsh fashion. Perceval's mother had advised him to take kisses and then perhaps a ring from maidens, but only if willingly granted, and no more; Parzival's mother admonishes him to win (erwerben ) a ring and then kiss and hold the chaste woman, with her consent. In both texts the young hero clumsily forces the maiden to grant him favors in ways that endanger her reputation, but the clumsiness comes closer to actual rape in the German text, where the encounter with Jeschute turns out to be considerably more offensive than in Chrétien, with the hero behaving like a boorish teenager.^[57]

Practical aims may also have affected the poem, that is, the praise of the Plantagenet house of Anjou in France and England and, in particular, of an admired Angevin bishop, Philip of Poitou, a fighter/courtier who had become a man of God, like Trevrizent in the poem.^[58] These aims could not be as strong a determinant for the orientation of the poem as Ariosto's wish to praise his Este patrons, but they could condition the handling of the particulars. It is also worth noting that Wolfram seemed better inclined than Chrétien de Troyes toward courtly love since, Perceval/Parzival aside, he showed love-service possibly coming to good ends, as in the cases of Gawan and Orgeluse, Gramoflanz and Itonje, and Obie and Meljacanz.^[59]

There is, then, the question of Parzival's real mission. He is a bungling young man who is destined for high achievements, but has to find his way by a gradual learning process of inner education and humanization. He unwittingly causes his mother's death, abandons his beloved wife, and fails to ask King Anfortas the decisive question. The realiza-

tion of his failures plunges him into aimless wandering in a state of “God-hatred.” He will emerge from this phase of despair when Trevrizent converts him by explaining to him not only the meaning of the Grail, but also the supreme duties of the good Christian (book 9, 472: 13–17). Parzival then seems ready to enter a life of ascetic dedication to a higher goal than mundane chivalry, having understood those limitations of Arthurian chivalry that Chrétien and then Hartmann had implicitly but effectively criticized. He should now abandon all frivolity (473: 3: “bewart sîn vor lôsheit”), turn the pride of the fighter to the supreme meekness so heroically practiced by his new adviser, and forsake that service of Minne and the “God of Love” which had been King Anfortas's ruin: “‘Amor!’ was his battle-cry. / But when humility's the test, / Such battle-cries are not the best.”^[60] The knights who serve the Grail must abjure all love for women (495: 7 f.). Neither that kind of love nor any natural remedies, including the art of herbs or magic that issues from human science, can heal Anfortas's wound. Christian charity is the only remedy. The “question” that was expected of Parzival was to be prompted by humane concern, compassion, and pity. Parzival will succeed in answering his calling, will ask the fateful question and free Anfortas, and will even become King of the Grail. When he has accomplished his task, Trevrizent will once again urge him to turn from pride to humility: “You attained a great success. / Now turn your mind to humility.”^[61]

Yet, when we read the elaborate subsequent sections of the poem we wonder whether Parzival has really “converted.” In what way has he changed, if at all? For our hero does not come out of Trevrizent's retreat to pursue the great quest directly and exclusively. Instead, he goes back to his accustomed life of adventure, more aimless than ever, amid all the usual trappings of beautiful and sensuous maidens and displays of rich, high living. In due course, he will simply, as it were, stumble once again, by good fortune, into the path of the Grail, which will be handed to him without much effort. In what sense, then, is chivalry really transcended?

We might tentatively conclude that, despite all the moral qualms and the intellectual realizations of absurdities and shortcomings, the paraphernalia of chivalrous living, or dreaming, were just too powerful to be, even only temporarily, obliterated, let alone effectively transcended. Literature and fiction were stronger than reality. Wolfram was, after all, a knight. To be sure, there is a transcendent, mystical side to the Quest of the Grail, but there is also, at least implicitly, an ethical and social

one: the correction of the shortcomings of knightly and courtly behavior. Only by broadening the horizons could the Christian truth be combined with the knightly one to produce a superior, non-warlike chivalry. Wolfram the knight was educated by the cleric: chivalry became meek, and Wolfram was paving the way for Dante.^[62]

This conclusion on Wolfram's hero should remind us of Jean Frappier's (1954) rather severe judgment on the religious element in the Grail cycle as “un masque,” religion being exalted there for no deeper purpose than the self-serving intention of better honoring the chivalric class. In a remarkably “deconstructionist” mood avant-la-lettre, the eminent medievalist surmised that the inner mystique of the Grail, allowing the knights to see themselves as noble in the highest and purest way they could devise, truly as homines sibi relicti, without and outside the Christian militia dreamed about by a St. Bernard, was the defense mechanism of a class that felt threatened—mainly by the rising bourgeoisie. This may be a fair assessment of the complex, mysterious phenomenon of the Quest as reflected in the texts examined by Frappier, and certainly, as I read it, in Wolfram's. It is not that the knight poets felt no religious commitment: indeed, one of them, Hartmann von Aue, abandoned the worldly literature he had so brilliantly cultivated and turned to religious themes for his successful and much discussed, hagiographic Gregorius, although, if the accepted chronology is correct, he did return to chivalry for his last and supreme poem, Iwein. As Frappier put it (1954), the peculiar mystique of the Grail romances as a whole, from Chrétien through Wolfram and on to Robert de Boron and the Vulgate prose romances (the Lancelot/Graal ), expressed not so much a view of chivalry at the service of religion as, rather, of knighthood as a religion in itself. The old ideal of a marriage of bellicosity and piety, which the clerical milieus had fostered and nurtured, resulted once again in a juxtaposition rather than a full harmonization.

Incidentally, a curious symptom of the feeling for social refinement that both courtliness and chivalry embodied and promulgated can be seen in the frequent semi-ironic allusions to personal hygiene. As often and as regularly as feasible, the sweating heroes bathe and wash their hands and bodies, sometimes in elaborate ceremonial situations where the solicitous assistance of fair maidens makes the ritual erotically exciting. Details are not spared: washing after meals is said to prevent hurting one's eyes by rubbing them with hands still scaly from handling fish (487: 1–4). It is worth recalling that the ritual bath on the eve traditionally preceded the dubbing ceremony.

Hartmann's Iwein

The complex case of Hartmann von Aue is fraught with inner contradictions. Iwein, his last great work and, as it were, his conclusive statement, has received two alternate readings: 1) the story reveals the failures of the Arthurian court (which might imply a more general critique of courtly life), since Iwein fails until he transcends the exterior rules of the court and becomes a richer human being through experiences dictated by his conscience rather than by the knightly code; or 2) it reveals the hero's individual failure to uphold the courtly virtues: his conversion from an egotistic adventure-seeker to a socially responsible knight, lord, and husband culminates in his reconciliation with his wife Laudine.^[63] The two interpretations may not be mutually exclusive; what the hero experiences in his personal story may be the shortcomings of the court ideology and the way to overcome them by reaching for a higher level of true chivalry.

We are more interested in the social aspects of our literature, but critics have also speculated on political motivations. In contrast to Wolfram, who presented Arthur as a prince of justice and peace among rival lords, possibly as “a corrective for the political chaos of Wolfram's own time,” Hartmann has been said to have idealized Arthur as a paterfamilias, without the tense feudal antagonisms from baronial competition that one sensed in Chrétien.^[64] The dialectical picture of courtly behavior has its specific counterpart in the opposite vices: in Hartmann's Iwein, for example, the evil conduct of Duke Aliers and of Lunete's older sister is described as “arrogance,” übermuot (vv. 3410, 7657), which leads to “pride,” hôchvart. Interestingly enough, this is also the language of the epic: compare Nibelungenlied 54: “der kan mit übermüete der hôhverte pflegen,” “he can nurture pride with arrogance.”^[65]

Even more than Chrétien, his source and model, Hartmann uses chivalric themes as an opportunity to build tales of character formation, moral education, and civil manners on the heroic level that is expected of ideal leaders and social exemplars. In Iwein a typically worthy knight was “by courage and generosity the finest man who ever entered the ranks of knighthood” (“der aller tiureste man, / der rîters namen ie gewan, / von manheit und von milte,” vv. 1455–1457).^[66] The growth from the early Erek (1190–1192 ?) to Iwein (1202 ?) seems to show an increasing interest in the virtues of mâze, self-control, decorum, and manners.^[67] Lunete, for example, is declared a true lady except for her excessively loud complaining (Enite's problem, too, in Erek ): “hete sî sich niht verclagt” (v. 1154). The trials of Iwein and Laudine, like but

even more severe than those of Erek and Enite, are a necessary path to maturity through error and painful atonement. Iwein shows his exquisite sense of propriety and consideration when he dismounts to avert the inelegance of a duel of swords fought on horseback, once he and Gawein have broken their spears.^[68] The Irish seneschal Kay is probably the worst type of courtier, a radical interpretation of Arthur's partly comic figure Kay (Chrétien's Kex, the “ill-mannered Keiî,” “zuhtlôse Keiî” in Hartmann's Iwein, v. 90). The educational burden of Hartmann's devotional story Gregorius is analogous to the main thrust of his previous Erek, in which he had expanded on the didactic aspects of Chrétien de Troyes's Erec et Enide, stressing the virtuous elements in the knightly code and condemning the disregard for measure (mâze ) as a violation of self-restraint.

As Hartmann's relationship to Chrétien encompasses some of the latter's concerns with the moral side of knightly behavior, it also includes a critical view of the troubadourlike kind of Minnedienst. Hartmann is even more socially-oriented than his French source and his plots and characters are clearly invested with a complex, highly problematical didactic role.^[69] The positive conjugal love between Hartmann's Erek and Enite contrasts with the courtly theory of love as Minnedienst in the episode of Mabonagrin, displaying toward the prevailing code a critical stance that ties together Chrétien, Hartmann, and Dante. Somewhat similarly, Hartmann's Iwein used Chrétien's Yvain to good advantage as a model for the harmonious blending of conjugal faithfulness and heroic dedication to the knightly duties of service to society and the needy.

The preceding analysis should show why Germany was better prepared to receive a practical lesson on behavior (specifically aimed at Hartmann's own milieu of the courtly ministeriales ) than the France of Chrétien, not because of the serious philosophical bent of the German mind, as critics have been wont to assume, but for the moral, social, and political features of circumstantial historical background. Chrétien remained the provider of themes and forms, but the deeper messages were developed independently. The popularity of Hartmann's Iwein remained high among the nobility through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and in the fifteenth it also extended to the wealthy merchants, who were striving to imitate the ways of noblemen.^[70] Yet even in the Germanic area the continuators of the Yvain story tended to draw upon the French sources, especially Chrétien, with the exception of Ulrich Füetrer's Yban, composed around 1480.

If we should wonder why such outstanding poets as Wolfram and

Hartmann exerted themselves in “translating” Chrétien, even with much freedom of interpretation and reelaboration, the obvious answer is that Chrétien was a very great narrator. From a strictly literary vantage, even in comparison with his sophisticated and complex German imitators, he remains the best storyteller all around. Yet his imitators carried further his remarkable gifts for imparting “meanings” to sheer stories (the sen Chrétien referred to at the beginning of his Lancelot ).

Alongside the three great masters, some early texts used Celtic fantasies for mere entertainment. The Swiss cleric Ulrich von Zatzikhoven's rather erotic Lanzelet (perhaps 1194, no later than 1200) made of Lancelot a sort of mindless Casanova, while Wirnt von Grafenberg's Wigalois (1204–1209 or 1210–1215) emphasized the nontranscendental, non-Grail-like religious theme of sacred royalty and salvation through a just king (Gawein's son Wigalois, not Arthur).^[71] In the rich German production of romances that surrounded and followed the three masters, the Arthurian matter generally lacked vitality. Instead of moral concerns, the main business became jousts, feasts, and sundry pastimes, together with the refined pleasures of the table. It was so in Der Stricker's Daniel von dem blühenden Tal (1220–1230), Heinrich von dem Türlin's encyclopedic compilation Diu Crône (Die Krone, ca. 1230), the anonymous Wigamur (ca. 1250), Albrecht von Scharfenberg's Jüngerer Titurel (ca. 1272), and Konrad von Stoffeln's Gauriel von Muntabel (ca. 1300). Der Stricker and Heinrich von dem Türlin seem to have been commoners, from Franconia and Carinthia respectively. True enough, the Jüngerer Titurel, which stands out with fiftyseven surviving manuscripts in addition to a 1477 printed edition, may have impressed the audiences with its didactic attempt to hold up a mirror of knightly virtue, combining chivalry with Christian conduct. As to the thirty-thousand-line Diu Crône, it was an important original version of Arthurian lore, which Heinrich von dem Türlîn, alone among German romancers, centered on the popular figure of Gawein, placing him within the search for the Holy Grail.^[72] Dissatisfied with the marginal role of the chivalric Arthurian ethos in the Daniel, Der Pleier retorted between 1250 and 1280 with his Garel von dem blühenden Tal, Meleranz, and Tandareis und Flordibel, but he could not keep such high values from turning conventional and rather lifeless.7

The learned Rudolf von Ems (d. in Italy 1252/1253) drew upon a lost French original for his very popular Willehalm von Orleans (perhaps 1235–1240; at least 76 manuscripts are extant) but in it praised several German poets including Hartmann, Gottfried, and Wolfram

(who after 1210 had also composed a Willehalm similarly based on a lost French chanson de geste unrelated to Rudolf's romance). The hero is an ideal knight striving to survive in a harsh world of practical realities: he believes in what the poet calls “the highest dignity the world has a name for, I mean the title ‘knight.’”^[73] Interestingly enough, Rudolf, a ministerial who had acquired noble status in the entourage of the Count of Montfort and showed clear pride in this status throughout his work, made a rich merchant commoner from Cologne the hero of his early Der gute Gerhard (ca. 1220), a poem of charity and humility told in first person to Emperor Otto I as a warning against excessive pride. Around 1230 Ulrich von Türheim completed Gottfried's Tristan and, between 1240 and 1250, Wolfram's Willehalm. In midstream, the prolific Konrad von Würzburg (ca. 1225–1287), virtuoso of the geblümte Rede, the flowery style, as he labeled it, tried his hand at many genres including the longer romance in Engelhard and Partonopier und Meliur (derived from the French Partonopeus de Blois of ca. 1170). Konrad, too, was a commoner who could count clerics (including perhaps the bishop of Strassburg), city fathers, and high merchants among his avowed patrons in Strassburg and Basel. The Trojanerkrieg, Konrad's last work, managed to mix the story of Troy not only with Arthurian themes but also with the saga of Dietrich von Bern. Chivalric love and adventure joined with the crusading spirit in the syncretic romance Wilhelm von Österreich by Johann von Würzburg (1314), where the Third Crusade had become a test to conquer the beloved.

Most of the epigones imitated Hartmann, down to Ulrich Füetrer, who closed the cycle. Sharing his friend Jakob Püterich von Reichertshausen's enthusiasm for Wolfram von Eschenbach, Füetrer (connected since the 1460s with the court of Munich, d. after 1492) managed to express his appreciation for German romances by gathering the stories of Merlin, Titurel, Parzival, Diu Crône, Lohengrin, Wigalois, Iwein, and others in his 41,500-line Buch der Abenteuer der Ritter von der Tafelrunde (ca. 1473–1490).

All the narrative streams had been coming together, but without unity of inspiration or a convincing message. Boiardo and Ariosto would see to it that this mixed recipe produced more inspiring results.