Both Eleanor and Henry loved literature, especially stories about King Arthur. Henry encouraged the tales of fighting and brave knights in order to support his claim to the throne and to strengthen the psychological connection between Arthur’s Camelot and his own court, a form of publicity or, perhaps, propaganda. Eleanor, on the other hand, enjoyed the new kind of literature called the romance, and the earliest surviving romances, such as Tristan by Thomas of England and Lancelot (The Knight of the Cart) by Chretien de Troyes, were written during Eleanor and Henry’s reign. The court in which Eleanor grew up was a very cultured place, heavily influenced by the Spanish courts of the Moors, and home to the famous troubadours Cercamon and Marcabru along with dozens of lesser musicians and poets. An extrovert, she responded to fashion and sophistication instinctively, and growing up in a court where the social model was an early version of “courtly love,” she was surrounded by clever, witty, educated men who admired Love.
Thus, while Eleanor and her court were in Poitiers, she (along with her daughter Marie of Champagne and Marie de France, a close relative of Henry II) encouraged and developed what has come to be called “the court of love” or “courtly love.” Although all but fragmented records of this court have been lost, the writings of Andreas Capellanus give us an idea of what the festivities were: 12 men and women would hear “cases of love” between individuals, deciding issues of fidelity, vows, proper behavior, and worthiness of love. (This court was later used by Eleanor in a more secular way as a forerunner of the jury system.) Eleanor herself was the subject of songs and poetry, many of which openly convey the poet’s sexual desire for her or express hopeless passion for a mistress who is far above him in rank. This type of untouchable love is often called fin’ amors, a love that not only exists outside of marriage but is actually incompatible with marriage. Lovers give each other love freely, but married people must obey each other out of duty. A husband has a right to enjoy his wife’s favors, and a wife her husband’s, but a lover must earn his favors, if any, from his lady. Thus a husband gains no worth or virtue in pursuing his wife, but a lover can gain worth in his endeavors or quests to gain favor from his lady. For the men who played this game, Love was an end in itself, and the beloved Woman was an object of worship, unattainable due to the fact of her superior rank and usually her preexisting marriage. The man was the supplicant and had no power over her; indeed, his prayers and wishes were usually denied, and he was supposed to suffer ghastly torments because of this denial. Placing women (who were considered to be powerless by both church and state) in this position was revolutionary because it gave women complete dominance over their lovers, indeed over the whole relationship. Eleanor created a court where, for the first time in Western history, a man’s status was based (partly) on his behavior toward women. Some scholars see this as an elaborate intellectual game played solely by aristocrats, an ironic literary joke enjoyed by Eleanor’s court, while others see it as an actual cultural shift, the blossoming of the light of chivalry out of the darker androcratic ideals of the time—and today we still see the results of this game, in that men are (or used to be) taught to open doors for “ladies” and to stand up when a lady walks into the room.
In addition to Eleanor’s love of romance, her love of music and song led her to support the troubadour style that her grandfather Guillaume IX had introduced in Aquitaine, where this aristocratic music had developed based on Poitevin, the area’s vernacular language. Her father, Guillaume X, continued to patronize the troubadours, encouraging their music to become a tradition in its own right. Troubadours were always welcome at her court; in fact she found them to be a necessity and took them wherever she went in her travels: as a patron can create a demand for artists, Eleanor’s favoring of the music encouraged other aristocratic circles to welcome the musicians. The budding art form, seen memorably in the lais of Marie de France, spread to other courts to meet the demand for the new and fashionable. The music and song soon expanded beyond the Poitevin language barrier and became a style of its own, called trouvere music. Eleanor’s importation of troubadours to her court in England spread the music to that country and strongly influenced later English music and vernacular song. Her son Richard was a troubadour himself, and her two daughters by Louis helped spread the music throughout northern France, passing on the tradition of patronage. Eleanor’s need for intellectual diversion, her love of music and troubadours, and her desire to turn unruly young men into proper courtiers were powerful factors in the creation of courtly literature as we know it. Without Eleanor’s patronage the Celtic legends that she enjoyed might never have been introduced into the literature of educated Europe, nor would the exploits of King Arthur and his court, the love of Guinevere and Lancelot or Tristan and Isolde, the magic of Merlin and Morgan Le Fay, or the tender heroism of Gawain be remembered and cherished today.
World History
