page_title: Courtly love
section_title: Andalusian and Islamic influence
hierarchical_section_title: Courtly love / History / Andalusian and Islamic influence
caption_attribution_description: English: Siege of the Castle of Love, mirror back. Français&#160;: Siège du château de l'Amour, valve de miroir.
context_page_description: Courtly love was a medieval European literary conception of love that emphasized nobility and chivalry. Medieval literature is filled with examples of knights setting out on adventures and performing various deeds or services for ladies because of their "courtly love". This kind of love is originally a literary fiction created for the entertainment of the nobility, but as time passed, these ideas about love changed and attracted a larger audience. In the high Middle Ages, a "game of love" developed around these ideas as a set of social practices. "Loving nobly" was considered to be an enriching and improving practice.
  Courtly love began in the ducal and princely courts of Aquitaine, Provence, Champagne, ducal Burgundy and the Norman Kingdom of Sicily at the end of the eleventh century. In essence, courtly love was an experience between erotic desire and spiritual attainment, "a love at once illicit and morally elevating, passionate and disciplined, humiliating and exalting, human and transcendent".
  The term "courtly love" was first popularized by Gaston Paris and has since come under a wide variety of definitions and uses.
context_section_description: Hispano-Arabic literature, as well as Arabic influence on Sicily, provided a further source, in parallel with Ovid, for the early troubadours of Provence—overlooked though this sometimes is in accounts of courtly love. The Arabic poets and poetry of Muslim Spain express similarly oxymoronic views of love as both beneficial and distressing as the troubadours were to do; while the broader European contact with the Islamic world must also be taken into consideration. Given that practices similar to courtly love were already prevalent in Al-Andalus and elsewhere in the Islamic world, it is very likely that Islamic practices influenced the Christian Europeans - especially in southern Europe where classical forms of courtly love first emerged.
  According to Gustave E. von Grunebaum, several relevant elements developed in Arabic literature - including such contrasts as sickness/medicine and delight/torment - to characterise the love experience. The notions of "love for love's sake" and "exaltation of the beloved lady" have been traced back to Arabic literature of the 9th and 10th centuries. The Persian psychologist and philosopher Ibn Sina (c. 980 – 1037; known as "Avicenna" in Europe) developed the notion of the "ennobling power" of love in the early 11th century in his treatise Risala fi'l-Ishq ("Treatise on Love"). The final element of courtly love, the concept of "love as desire never to be fulfilled", sometimes occurred implicitly in Arabic poetry, but first developed into a doctrine in European literature, in which all four elements of courtly love were present.
  According to an argument outlined by Maria Rosa Menocal in The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History (1987), in 11th-century Spain, a group of wandering poets appeared who would go from court to court, and sometimes travel to Christian courts in southern France, a situation closely mirroring what would happen in southern France about a century later. Contacts between these Spanish poets and the French troubadours were frequent. The metrical forms used by the Spanish poets resembled those later used by the troubadours.
caption: Warfare imagery: the Siege of the Castle of Love on an ivory mirror-back, possibly Paris, ca. 1350–1370 (Musée du Louvre)
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