Ennobling Love. In Search of a Lost Sensibility

319 Pages·2010·17.3 MB·English

by  C. Stephen Jaeger

Ennobling Love
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THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES
Ruth Mazo Karras, General Editor
Edward Peters, Founding Editor
A complete list of books in the series
is available from the publisher.
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Ennobling Love
In Search of a Lost Sensibility
C. STEPHEN JAEGER
PENN
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia
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Copyright © 1999 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 21
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jaeger, C. Stephen.
Ennobling love : in search of a lost sensibility / C. Stephen
Jaeger.
p. cm. — (The Middle Ages series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8122-3494-4 (alk. paper). —
ISBN 0-8122-1691-1 (pbk, alk. paper)
1. Literature, Medieval — History and criticism. 2. Love in
literature. 3. Literature, Medieval Translations into English.
4. Nobility of character, Literary collections. 5. Nobility of
character in literature. 6. Love, Literary collections. I. Tide.
II. Series.
PN682.L68J34 1999
809'.93 3543 — dc21 99-24084
CIP
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Contents
Preface ix
Introduction: Cordelia on Trial i
Part I: Charismatic Love and Friendship
1 Problems of Reading the Language of Passionate Friendship ii
2 Virtue and Ennobling Love (i): Antiquity and Early Christianity 27
3 Love of King and Court 36
4 Love, Friendship, and Virtue in Pre-Courtly Literature 54
5 Love in Education, Education in Love 59
6 Women 82
Part II: Sublime Love
7: Sublime Love 109
8: Love Beyond the Body 117
9: Sleeping and Eating Together 128
10: Eros Denied, Eros Defied 134
11: Virtue and Ennobling Love (2): Value, Worth, Reputation 145
Part III: Unsolvable Problems — Romantic Solutions:
The Romantic Dilemma
12: The Epistolae duorum amantium, Heloise, and Her Orbit 157
13: The Loves of Christina of Markyate 174
14: Virtuous Chastity, Virtuous Passion — Romantic Solutions in
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Two Courtly Epics Download Date | 5/5/161 89:440 PM
viii Contents
15: The Grand Amatory Mode of die Noble Life 198
Appendix: English Translations of Selected Texts 215
Alcuin, one letter and three poems 215
Hildesheim Letter, Epist. 36, a master to his student 218
Letter of R. of Mainz to the students of the Worms
cathedral school 221
Baudri of Bourgueil, poem to a haughty boy 222
Marbod of Rennes, "On the Good Woman," from the
Book of Ten Chapters 224
From the Regensburg Love Songs (No. 28) 225
From the "Letters of Two Lovers" (Epistolae duorum
amantium] 226
"Metamorphosis Goliae" 229
Notes 241
Abbreviations 241
Bibliography
283
Index 303
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Preface
With this book now out of my hands and in those of readers I can say with
Richard of St. Victor, "What a happy and inexhaustible subject love is. No
writer tires and no reader wearies of it."1 He (and I) did not mean to foist
benevolence on our readers with that last phrase, but to speak as readers
ourselves, who had the good fortune to spend several years studying the sub-
ject. I would only add, "No teacher tires of teaching it!"
The "Search" of my subtitle is not just mood music. I sensed in a few texts
a way of loving that seemed to me as strange as unicorns and stigmata, and just
as alien to my experience and that of my world. Over the years I tracked it like
an archeologist of the emotions gathering fragments from some layer of the
human psyche that had shattered and dispersed centuries ago and was detect-
able only like rock traces on the top of a buried site.
How "lost" the sensibility is that I've tried to reconstruct was brought
home to me even7 day in the year of an American president caught up in a
scandalous affair with a young woman drunk on love, lust, and power. The
culture of love this study deals with found ennobling force in the erotic attrac-
tion that power and charisma exert. The counterpoint of degrading and exalt-
ing love was for me a lesson in the usefulness, in fact the pragmatism, of a social
value which molds the erotic into an instrument for the exercise of power,
parallel to wisdom and strength of character as a ruler's virtue, and which
thrusts degradation back onto those who see shame and not nobility in the
muted eroticism of kings, queens, princes, knights, bishops, and saints in love
with their "minions."
This book is about a kind of love that conferred honor on those who
practiced it. The book's goal is limited; it aims at one strain of love among
many. I do not want to suggest exclusivity by putting this strain in the fore-
ground. In the background at varied distances, interlaced with my main sub-
ject, are other forms of love: sexuality of any gender combination, romance,
wedded love. Ennobling love is an important strain because it links politics,
the social life, and the emotions. It is a means of peace-making, treaty-making,
and treaty-keeping, of giving and receiving prestige, rank, and standing, and of
recognizing "virtue." It is the source of a morality and a heroism of self-control
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and self-mastery. Studying it shows how passion and socDiaolw ancltoiaodn ,D laotev e| 5a/n5d/1 6th 9e:41 PM
x Preface
exercise of power, make common cause. Aristotle said that love and friendship
are important to the polis, because the more human interactions are regulated
by friendship, the less they require regulation by the law. That makes love and
friendship alternate and higher forms of governing. The insight and the experi-
ence were not lost on the Middle Ages, though not linked to the name and the
work of Aristotle. A law code from the early twelfth century states the com-
mon human experience that "Agreement is better than litigation and love is
better than a judge's edict" ("Pactum legem vincit et amor iudicium.")2
A "culture of love and friendship" developed in medieval Europe based
on underlying conceptions that link works as disparate as letters of friendship
from monasteries and cathedral communities, courtly romances, the biogra-
phy of the English visionary recluse Christina of Markyate, love lyric in Latin
and the vernacular, Ailred of Rievaulx's tract on friendship, and the treatises on
love by Andreas Capellanus and Baldesar Castiglione in the fourth book of his
Book of the Courtier.
One of the premises of this study is that the love literature of the western
European aristocracy from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance, across a
wide spectrum of genre and social origin, has common features and common
roots in antiquity. The documentation of the cult of love and friendship is
ordinarily considered in discrete packets, for each period, for each genre, and
for each social order its own packet. My purpose is partly to argue a fundamen-
tal coherence and partly to show the distortions that can arise from too tight a
focus on a particular section of the nobility.
I owe special thanks to John Baldwin and Brian McGuire, both of whom
read the manuscript and made valuable comments that changed the complex-
ion of the book. Ruth Mazo Karras, Ullrich Langer, Eugene Vance, Raymond
Cormier, Robert Tobin, and an anonymous reviewer of University of Pennsyl-
vania Press also helped refine many of my analyses. Two good friends gave me
invaluable help both in the research stage and in the formulation of the manu-
script: to Sieglinde Pontow and Stephanie Pafenberg I owe more than can be
confessed or repaid in a few words. Horst Wenzel is both patron saint and
muse of this project. He nominated me for a Research Prize of the Humboldt
Foundation and acted as my gracious host and stimulating conversation part-
ner in Berlin when the nomination was successful. The Humboldt Foundation
is a generous and courteous Maecenas to whom I am particularly grateful. A
summer grant from the Royalties Research Fund of University of Washington
supported my work at an early stage. Paul Pascal was generous with help on
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