Abstract
This chapter documents the development of sincere love as evidenced in epistolary and literary texts. Romantic love in particular was originally introduced through contact with Anglo-Norman culture, and genres such as romance forwarded the ideal of sincerity and its performative language under the rubric of courteous speech. Likewise, sincerity influenced styles of narration in love literature, a development that culminates in late medieval writers such as Chaucer (especially in Troilus and Criseyde). The chapter ends with a discussion of the influence this literature had on the language of fifteenth-century letters (e.g. from the Pastons, Stonors and Celys), and the way in which these writers appropriated scripts of sincerity in the pursuit of marital affection.
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Notes
- 1.
In this respect, it is also unsurprising that historians of both romantic love and post-Classical subjectivity have for the most part taken the twelfth century as their point of departure.
- 2.
The extent to which the appearance of these ideals in twelfth-century France was a first in the European West is complicated, for example, by the Ancient Greek love novels, which contain many of the same themes and tropes that ostensibly arise only after the troubadours. This is a grand subject that should not be treated too summarily in a footnote, but while the lineage between texts such as the second-century Leuicippe and Clitophon and the fourteenth-century Troilus and Criseyde has to my knowledge yet to be explored in much detail, the similarities between the two would suggest that in some respects at least the cultural idealization of love in the Middle Ages was perhaps a case of neogenesis in a Christian context. Thanks to my Sheffield colleague, Meredith Warren, for organizing such an excellent reading group around the Greek texts.
- 3.
That many clerics would have done so with a sense of ambivalence, however, is evidenced immediately in the work of Capellanus . De Amore is a work of three books, the first offering a socially stratified introduction to the discussion of love , the second containing the rules by which love should be maintained, and then the third (notably the shortest), which consists of a condemnation of love . This gives a general sense of the contradictory views expressed in this work, which has led to much speculation on De Amore ’s meaning and purpose.
Stylistically speaking, however, De Amore consists of dialogues and the question of the fictional speakers’ affective interiority is not addressed directly by the narrator . This was also an impasse for troubadour verses, which were often written about the love of the poet themselves; i.e. the writer and possibly the speaker, or singer, is the lover (according to the reality of the verse anyways), and thus there is no omniscient third-party authority for the emotions being represented in the text (see Kay (1990) on subjectivity and autobiography in troubadour poetry). As far as courtly pastimes went, this impossible circle must have been amusing and perhaps intellectually stimulating, not to mention conducive to producing more text. Yet it also meant that the expressions of love practiced in response to a troubadour lyric could not be (dis)confirmed by the text itself. In this way then, in-persona performances, in song or natural conversation, rely heavily on paralinguistic markers of sincerity (e.g. intonation, facial expression, tears, etc.). Yet with the advent of romance, which is generically and stylistically related to the saints’ lives discussed in the previous chapter, developments in psychonarration came to provide compelling ways to represent and thus to some extent prove sincere romantic love in literature, which, particularly due the popularity of the romance genre, promoted the ideal of sincerity in other aspects of language and discourse.
- 4.
The idea that royalty was closest to God by way of literacy is evidenced, for example, by the fact that Matilda’s mother, Margaret of Scotland, was officially recognized as a saint in 1250, and Matilda was the one to commission the Latin saint’s life, composed in the first decade of the twelfth century by Turgot, Bishop of St. Andrews, that would have played some part in her canonization. One of Margaret’s chief saintly attributes, according to the life commissioned by her daughter, was of course her sincerity, but also her commitment to reading, which was an exercise she is reported to have impressed upon her otherwise illiterate husband, King Malcolm III of Scotland (trans. Forbes-Leith 1884, see esp. 39–40).
- 5.
As the problematic gap between internal psychology and externalized language is a constant theme for Troilus and Criseyde, so it remains a perennial topic for scholarship on the poem; issues to do with language and (mis)representation have been discussed, for example, in relation to the keyword entente (Archibald 1991; Campbell 1993) and the ‘psychology of love ’ (Stokes 1983; Love 2002).
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Williams, G. (2018). Sincerity in Love: From caritas to affectio maritalis. In: Sincerity in Medieval English Language and Literature. New Approaches to English Historical Linguistics . Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54069-0_5
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