Life in a Medieval Castle by Joseph Gies

of eighty she played a decisive role in the struggle for the English throne between her grandson Arthur and her son John.
    Eleanor’s native French province, Aquitaine, was the birthplace of the poetry of the troubadours, founders of the Western poetic tradition. Eleanor’s grandfather, Count William IX of Aquitaine, was the earliest troubadour whose work has survived, and Eleanor is sometimes credited withthe introduction of troubadour verse into northern France and England. Eleanor’s daughter by her first marriage, Marie de Champagne, was also a patroness of poets, notably the celebrated Chrétien de Troyes, creator of the Lancelot-Guinevere romance. At Marie’s court in Troyes (or at the court of France) a work was formulated that had immense influence in aristocratic circles: De Amore (“On Love”), written by Andreas Capellanus (“André the Chaplain”), borrowing freely from Ovid. The treatise supplies an insight into the manners, morals, conversation, and thought of the noble ladies of the High Middle Ages, revealing a sophistication and wit at variance both with the image of pampered sex object of the romances and with the disfranchised pawn of the legal system.
    The thesis of De Amore is summed up in a letter purported to be written by Countess Marie to Andreas in response to the question of whether true love could have any place in marriage:
We declare and we hold as firmly established that love cannot exert its powers between two people who are married to each other. For lovers give each other everything freely, under no compulsion or necessity, but married people are in duty bound to give in to each other’s desires and deny themselves to each other in nothing.
    Besides, how does it increase a husband’s honor if after the manner of lovers he enjoys the embraces of his wife, since the worth of character of neither can be increased thereby, and they seem to have nothing more than they already had a right to?
    And we say the same thing for still another reason, which is that a precept of love tells us that no woman, even if she is married, can be crowned with the reward of the King of Love unless she is seen to be enlisted in the service of Love himself outside the bonds of wedlock. But another rule of Love teaches that no one can be in love with two men. Rightly, therefore. Love cannot acknowledge any rights of his between husband and wife.
    Lovers kneel before Eros, who aims an arrow at one of them. (Trinity College, Cambridge. MS. B.11.22)
    But there is still another argument that seems to stand in the way of this, which is that between them there can be no true jealousy, and without it true love may not exist, according to the rule of Love himself, which says, “He who is not jealous cannot love.”
    A chapter of De Amore cited “love cases” which were supposed to have been tried in “courts of love” before ladies of Eleanor’s and Marie’s courts and those of other noble ladies—assemblages now believed to be no more than an elegant fiction:
A certain lady had a proper enough lover, but was afterward, through no fault of her own, married to an honorable man, and she avoided her lover and denied him his usual solaces. But Lady Ermengarde of Narbonne demonstrated the lady’s bad character in these words: “The later contracting of a marital union does not properly exclude an early love except in cases where the woman gives up love entirely and is determined by no means to love any more…”
    A certain woman had been married, but was now separated from her husband by a divorce, and her formerhusband sought eagerly for her love. In this case the lady replied: “If any two people have been married and afterward separate in any way, we consider love between them wholly wicked…”
    A certain knight was in love with a woman who had given her love to another man, but he got from her this much hope of her love—that if it should ever happen that she lost the love of her beloved, then without a