Ancilla

Chesed (part 2)

    I have books piled around me on the living room floor in my usual cross-referencing mess. The compilations of love letters between Peter Abelard and Heloise; the Hilaire Beloc translation of the Bedier Tristan and Iseult; The Romance of the Rose; The Art of Courtly Loving by Andreas Capellanus, which I'm pretty sure was thrown in with the other books as my weekly red herring, because it's obviously written as a satire of Ovid, and Ovid's original was not exactly written as serious advice to lovers, either.

   I'm looking for the chivalrous roots of the BDSM subculture in the cult of courtly love, which puts a whole new spin on the more romantic aspects of Arthurian legend. Guinevere and Iseult, for instance, can be seen as dominants. The concept is amusing, and not entirely out of the realm of the possible, although plausibility is another matter – I have a very hard time seeing a Western tradition of BDSM customs that stretches back all the way to the Middle Ages. It works better as a thought experiment than as history.

   I scribble:

I think this modern revival of courtly love, under a new name, so to speak, is rather more romantic and genuine in its own way than the actual medieval cult of courtly love ever was. At least it seems that way, going by the disgruntled poems of Beatritz, Countess of Die and the other trobaritz women, who wrote in response to the obviously insincere professions of love and adoration made by their more well-known male counterparts; and of course, there are the tongue-in-cheek opinions of Capellanus. Even the later part of The Romance of the Rose, consisting of those chapters completed by Jean de Meun rather than the ones written by Guillaume de Lorris, the book's earlier author, is rather cynical about the whole courtly thing. Courtly love, in the literature of the high Middle Ages, seems to only exalt the impossible and fantastic. Bringing fantasies down to the level of enactment does not appear to have often been done. There were simply too many impossibilities.

In the Arthurian romances, the most romantic lovers were those who transgressed the rules of courtly love to succumb to something a little more earthy, but it usually meant certain death, by execution or trial by ordeal or getting sent on a quest that was a suicide mission. Even if the result of carnal pleasure was not death, the consequences of getting caught were dire. If a lover was very lucky, like Lancelot and Guinevere were, he or she might survive trials by ordeal and combat, suicide missions, banishments, accusations, and so on only to spend the rest of his or her life locked up in an abbey or a convent. 

The legends were created during the Age of Faith, and they reflected their times; it was not uncommon for widows, second sons, et cetera to take religious vows due to having no other recourse, but religious devotion notwithstanding, taking vows for purely pragmatic reasons was probably a let-down. The Church told people that sexual desire of any kind was sinful and should only be used for the purposes of procreation, not pleasure. Living vicariously through transgressive characters in songs and stories could have helped relieve some of the tension of pent-up desires for those people who could not defy convention. 

It thus seems unfair that Lancelot and Guinevere and similar chivalric characters should go through decades of sneaking around with each other, surviving accusation after accusation, trial after trial, only to end their days separated by religious vows. But there it was, and in real life, their story probably would have ended in death; retiring to the convent or abbey to spend the rest of one's life in a sort of second chastity was, relatively speaking, a "happily ever after." It hinted at some kind of heavenly reward when a garden of earthly delights had nevertheless been sinfully enjoyed.