, in Italy, in the fabulous kingdoms of
Arthur and Charlemagne, the strange new thing which I have named
Mediaeval Love.

Has such a thing really existed? Are not these mediaeval poets leagued
together in a huge conspiracy to deceive us? Is it possible that strong
men have wept and fainted at a mere woman's name, like the Count of
Nevers in "Flamenca," or that their mind has swooned away in months of
reverie like that of Parzifal in Eschenbach's poem; that worldly wise
and witty men have shipped off and died on sea for love of an unseen
woman like Jaufre Rudel; or dressed in wolf's hide and lurked and fled
before the huntsmen-like Peire Vidal; or mangled their face and cut off
their finger, and, clothing themselves in rags more frightful than
Nessus' robe, mixed in the untouchable band of lepers like Ulrich von
Liechtenstein? Is it possible to believe that the insane enterprises of
the Amadises, Lisvarts and Felixmartes of late mediaeval romance, that
the behaviour of Don Quixote in the Sierra Morena, ever had any serious
models in reality? Nay, more difficult still to believe--because the
whole madness of individuals is more credible than the half-madness of
the whole world--is it possible to believe that, as the poems of
innumerable trouveres and troubadours, minnesingers and Italian poets,
as the legion of mediaeval romances of the cycles of Charlemagne, Arthur,
and Amadis would have it, that during so long a period of time society
could have been enthralled by this hysterical, visionary, artificial,
incredible religion of mediaeval love? It is at once too grotesque and
too beautiful, too high and too low, to be credible; and our first
impulse, on closing the catechisms and breviaries, the legendaries and
hymn-books of this strange new creed, is to protest that the love poems
must be allegories, the love romances solar myths, the Courts of Love
historical bungles; that all this mediaeval world of love is a figment, a
misinterpretation, a falsehood.

But if we seek more than a mere casual impression; if, instead of
feeling sceptical over one or two fragments of evidence, we attempt to
collect the largest possible number of facts together; if we read not
one mediaeval love story, but twenty--not half a dozen mediaeval love
poems, but several scores; if we really investigate into the origin of
the apparent myth, the case speedily alters. Little by little this which
had been inconceivable becomes not merely intelligible