`lo Cop Mortal': The Evil Eye And The Origins Of Courtly Love.
...They both have vehement wishes; They frame themselves readily into the Eye; especially upon the presence of the Objects; which are the Points, that conduce to Fascination, if any such Thing there be." Francis Bacon, Essay IX: "Of Envy"(n1)
Courtly love seems the epitome of formalized culture, the origin, in many ways, of our own mannered romanticism. The evil eye, that unseen force that causes harm to babies and crops to wither and die, seems the opposite: a superstition arising from a perceived lack of control through knowledge or art.(n2) I wish to propose, rather, that courtly love has much in common with the evil eye; that it is a code that arises from a desire to legitimate the same drives that produced the superstition of the evil eye: a growing fascination with the world. My argument, quite simply, is that courtly love, as it is spelled out in 12th c. works, is derived as much from envy as it is from love and, as a result, represents a reorganization of such cultural paradigms as the taxonomy of the vices and virtues. The origins of courtly love, in other words, speak to a new way of perceiving the world, but it is one that is grounded more in the substratum of myth than in the codes of the elite.(n3)
The locus classicus for the symptoms of courtly love is, arguably, the following description of Lavine from the Eneas:
Lavine fu an la tor sus,
d'une fenestre garde jus,
vit Eneam qui fu desoz,
forment l'a esgarde sor toz . . .
Amors l'a de son dart ferue . . .
ou al recut lo cop mortal . . .
Ele comance a tressuer,
a refroidir et a tranbler,
sovant se pasme et tressalt
sanglot, fremist, li cuers li falt,
degiete soi, sofle, baaille: . . .
or sui tote espalie et vaine,
dedanz le cors une ardor sent
(Levine was up in the tower. She looked down from a window and saw Eneas, who was below. She gazed intently at him above all.... Love...
View Full Essay
