Marriage and love in the narrative lay in French (12th and 13th centuries): A historical and literary study.

Abstract

The narrative lay in French (not to be confused with the Occitanian lyric lay which resembled the descort) flourished in Northern France and Britain in the years c. 1150-1250. This thesis discusses its peculiar characteristics, form, content, chronology and audience, which are often disputed, as a necessary prelude to an examination of the treatment of love and marriage contained in them. This is preceded by a study of contemporary attitudes to marriage among the nobility, taking ecclesiastical and lay opinions into account, and likewise a study is made of attitudes towards love, concentrating on influential contemporary French and Latin treatises on the subject. In the lays marriage and love are prominent factors, often included even when plainly extraneous to the authors' source material. Some authors devote their whole attention to them, and the narrative content is but slight. Most lays avoid these extremes. Marriage is perceived as an event over which individuals (particularly women) have little control, since it was generally assumed that marriage was an important means of achieving stability, and so many people had a legitimate interest in arranging them for reasons other than emotional satisfaction. Consequently, marriages were frequently unavoidable, unwelcome and unhappy.At the same time, love was highly regarded by the nobility as an essential personal experience, eagerly sought and accepted despite the dangers it might have posed as a threat to social order if it was extra-marital; agents of that order defended their interests vigorously. The lays presented no easily available alternative to marriage (death or the Otherworld being the only possibilities), but found love and marriage compatible, provided individuals were consulted, and in this they display commonsense humanity compared with the legalism of Church and feudal society and are refreshingly free of the over-complexities of theories of love.