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.