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Courtly Love

For some time, the Southern noble courts of Aquitaine, Toulouse and Provence had been dominated by the troubadours, who were romantic songwriters and storytellers. Duke William IX was the first “Prince of Troubadours” who also became one of the first Crusaders. The troubadours challenged the traditional views of marriage for property, family alliance and convenience. They sang of the romantic idea that individuals should have the choice to live up to their ideals. They told the myth of Tristan and Isolde, a famous love story of the Middle Ages when chivalry prevailed.

While the nobility in Southern France was away on the Crusades, the noble women left behind picked up the legends of the troubadours, and created new rules for courtship which they imposed on younger men not invovled with the Crusades. Eleanor of Aquitaine, the granddaughter of William IX and wife of Louis VII, was the catalyst behind these changes in courtly love and chivalry. She had the British legends of Camelot translated into French, and she introduced Courtly Love into the courts in northern France with love poems and songs. This was when the French passion for poetry and language, debate and wit, and style and fashion was born and when the idea of romantic love was permanently instituted in the Western world.

Middle Ages in France

The period of the Religious Crusades to Jerusalem began in 1095 from Clermont. The Crusaders were mostly French and led by French kings, on a mission to rid the earth of heretics, particularly the Turks who had taken over the Holy Land. When they reached Constantinople and saw its splendor, and specifically its books, they were astonished. In France, books had only existed in the monasteries, accessible to only monks. Masses of books were transported back to Paris where they caused a huge sensation. Scholars from all over Europe journeyed to Paris to read or be taught by those who had studied the books already. Thus the Crusades ended the Dark Ages, restored culture to France and Europe, and Paris became the intellectual center of Europe.

Middle Ages

Pierre Abélard (1079-1142) was the most popular rhetorician of his day, and was highly influenced by reading Plato and Aristotle. At the age of 20 he became a student of the cathedral school at Notre Dame in Paris and his theories of scholasticism and conceptualism have shaped French thought ever since. He believed that to question and to investigate facts and to use logic would lead to discovering Truth, but the Catholic church deemed this view as heresy because reason did not belong with faith. Abélard was one of the first individualists, rebelling against his father’s desire for him to become a knight by traveling to Paris to study. Abélard was also the first hero of Western romance, and his love affair by letters with his student Héloise was all the rage in Paris at the time, being compared to Tristan and Isolde. Déscartes would be heavily influenced later by Abélard and expand on his theory.

France was the birthplace of Gothic architecture, primarily in its church construction. Prior to this, buildings and churches were being built based on Roman architecture in the Romanesque style in the 11th century as France emerged from the Dark Ages. Then, when books were brought back to Paris from Constantinople by Crusaders, Geometry was introduced. Abbot Suger discovered the architectural possibilities through geometry in the 12th century, and had the Romanesque church of St-Denis rebuilt in this new Gothic style. The famous Cathedral at Chartres followed half a century later.

The outstanding characteristics of Gothic Architecture are its pointed domes, spires and arches, recessed, sculpted portals, flying buttresses, large rose-shaped windows, and its ornate stone carvings. Through studying geometry, architects were able to heighten the size of Cathedrals by converting the rounded arches of the Romanesque style into triangles, which were stronger, and adding flying buttresses as supports. This also allowed for the windows to be made larger to allow more light inside.

Gothic Cathedrals are mainly found in the North of France, and its quintessential examples are Notre-Dame deParis, the cathedrales in Chartres, Reims, and St-Pierre in Beauvais.