he day. And, while into the
West were insidiously entering habits and modes of thought of the East;
throughout Germany and Provence, and throughout the still obscure free
burghs of Italy, was spreading the first indication of that emotional
mysticism which, twenty or thirty years later, was to burst out in the
frenzy of spiritual love of St. Francis and his followers. The moment is
one of the most remarkable in all history: the premature promise in the
twelfth century of that intellectual revival which was delayed
throughout Northern Europe until the sixteenth. It is the moment when
society settled down, after the anarchy of eight hundred years, on its
feudal basis; a basis fallaciously solid, and in whose presence no one
might guess that the true and definitive Renaissance would arise out of
the democratic civilization of Italy.

Such is the moment when we first hear the almost universal song of
mediaeval love. This song comes from the triumphantly reorganized portion
of society, not from the part which is slowly working its way to
reorganization; not from the timidly encroaching burghers, but from the
nobles. The reign of town poetry, of fabliaux and meistersang, comes
later; the poets of the early Middle Ages, trouveres, troubadours, and
minnesingers are, with barely one or two exceptions, all knights. And
their song comes from the castle. Now, in order to understand mediaeval
love, we must reflect for a moment upon this feudal castle, and upon the
kind of life which the love poets of the late twelfth and early
thirteenth century--whether lords like Bertram de Born, and Guillaume de
Poitiers, among the troubadours; the Vidame de Chartres, Meurisses de
Craon, and the Duke of Brabant among the trouveres of Northern France;
like Ulrich von Liechtenstein among the minnesingers; or retainers and
hangers-on like Bernard de Ventadour and Armand de Mareulh, like
Chrestiens de Troyes, Gaisses Brulez, or Quienes de Bethune, like
Walther, Wolfram, and Tannhaeuser--great or small, good or bad, saw
before them and mixed with in that castle. The castle of a great
feudatory of the early Middle Ages, whether north or south of the Loire,
in Austria or in Franconia, is like a miniature copy of some garrison
town in barbarous countries: there is an enormous numerical
preponderance of men over women; for only the chiefs in command, the
overlord, and perhaps one or two of his principal kinsmen or adjutants,
are permitted the luxury of a