Marie of Champagne and courtly love’s invention are central to understanding the romantic ideals that shaped medieval European literature. As the daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine and a prominent cultural patron, Marie de Champagne played a pivotal role in fostering the concept of courtly love, inspiring iconic works like Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart by Chrétien de Troyes. Her court became a hub of literary creativity, where the chivalric ideals of devotion, passion, and noble yearning were celebrated.
Explore how Marie de Champagne’s influence helped define the enduring legacy of courtly love and its impact on romance narratives through the centuries.
Rough transcript of Marie de Champagne & the Invention of Courtly Love: The Medieval Rules of Romance:
 Today we are going to talk about Valentine’s related things because it is in fact that time of year the hearts are out, the candles are lit, the roses are out, all of it’s happening and we are going to talk specifically about courtly love.
So I’m going to be releasing on Friday an interview with Sarah Gristwood, who wrote The Tudors in Love, and she talked about courtly love. And she did a patron talk, patron author chat. We do once a month patrons and YouTube members. We have live Zoom chats with authors and historians. And so she did one of those for patrons on Tuesday.
So on Friday, I’m going to be releasing highlights of that talk, but in this episode, we’re going to talk about courtly love and the legacy of Marie of Champagne, Marie de Champagne, courtly love and the legacy of Marie of Champagne.
Valentine’s Day, the annual celebration of romance, grand gestures, and love letters, and there’s another Bridget Jones movie coming out, which just makes me so very happy. I just love Bridget Jones so much. Anyway, seems like there’s always like a Hugh Grant movie that comes out around Valentine’s Day, or at least there was when I was younger now that he’s getting older, it’s shifting, but I think Music and Lyrics came out on Valentine’s Day, and that was actually a Valentine’s Day date that my husband and I went on way back, what was it, like 2008 or something? Huh, it’s been a long time.
Anyway! A new Bridget Jones movie is coming out on the 13th, and it’s not like I’ve been counting down the days or anything, but, I have. Okay, today we associate Valentine’s Day with chocolates, roses, and the idea that love should be passionate, overwhelming, and, if Hollywood is to be believed, perhaps even a little bit dramatic.
But where do these ideas actually come from? Why do we expect love to be all consuming, something to be fought for and even suffered for? The answer, in a large part, lies in a literary tradition shaped over 800 years ago at the court of Marie of Champagne.
Marie of Champagne and the Origins of Courtly Love
In the medieval world, love and marriage weren’t exactly synonymous, particularly among the aristocracy. Marriages were strategic, political, financial. They were entirely practical. A noblewoman’s marriage had little to do with affection, and everything to do with securing land, peace, or influence.
Love, if it existed at all within the marriage, was a happy accident rather than the goal. And yet, at the very same time that arranged marriages were the norm, an alternative vision of love was being developed in literature, one that celebrated longing, suffering, and devotion.
This was the world of courtly love, an elaborate and often contradictory set of ideals that glorified love outside of marriage. The great knightly romances, Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristan and Isolde, emerged from this period where the knight’s devotion to his lady became as central to his identity as the prowess on the battlefield.
And at the heart of this literary revolution was Marie of Champagne. As the daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine, and the patron of some of the greatest medieval writers including Chrétien de Troyes, she helped transform these romantic ideals into something structured and influential. It was at her court that the concept of chivalric love became formalized, where stories of noble lovers found an eager audience And where even a monk, Andreas Capellanus, would attempt to write down these so called rules of love.
The Paradox and Ideals of Courtly Love
But where did these ideas come from? What did medieval people actually think about them? To understand the origins of courtly love, we have to go back to Marie’s court. And to the stories that reshaped how we think about love itself even 800 years later.
At its core, courtly love was a paradox, an elaborate game of longing, of devotion, and often impossible desire. It was an idealized form of love, usually between a knight and a noble lady, one that followed strict, almost ritualistic rules. Unlike marriage, which was a business transaction arranged for the benefit of families, courtly love was about passion, suffering, and a kind of noble yearning. It wasn’t necessarily even meant to be consummated, but it was expected to be all-consuming.
The knight, driven by devotion to his lady, would prove his love through great deeds, poetic declarations, and unwavering loyalty. This was, of course, completely impractical in a world where noble marriages were arranged before children even reached puberty and where a woman’s primary duty was to produce heirs.
A noblewoman wasn’t meant to choose love. Her role was to secure alliances and to strengthen dynasties. Yet within the literary world of courtly love, she became something else entirely, an unattainable goddess, the object of a knight’s deepest devotion. Someone whose very presence could inspire great acts of valor.
Courtly love wasn’t just about sentiment. It was about proving oneself, often through trials of hardship and suffering. A knight might endure public humiliation for his lady, engage in a dangerous quest in her name, Or even fight in a tournament wearing her token, a scarf or a ribbon tied to his armor.
In Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, written by Chrétien de Troyes under Marie of Champagne’s patronage, we see one of the most famous examples of this. Lancelot, the model of the chivalric lover, is so devoted to Guinevere that he willingly suffers the ultimate knightly disgrace, riding in a cart, the mode of transport for criminals as he sets out to rescue her.
The fact that he hesitates for even a moment before stepping onto the cart is enough for Guinevere to later chide him, a sign that in the world of courtly love, devotion had to be absolute and immediate. Critian’s Lancelot wasn’t just a story, it helped solidify the ideas of courtly love into a recognizable literary form.
Alongside Tristan and Isolde and the later Roman de la Rose, it shaped the way medieval audiences thought about love, portraying it as a force that could elevate a knight to greatness, but also destroy him.
Lancelot’s love for Guinevere defines him, but it also dooms him, preventing him from ever achieving the Holy Grail in later Arthurian legends. His devotion is total, but it leads him to betrayal of his king, his duty, even his own moral code. The tension between love and duty is one of the hallmarks of courtly love.
Unlike modern romance, which ends in a happily ever after, medieval love stories rarely had satisfying conclusions. The love was either impossible, or tragic, or both. In Tristan and Isolde, the lovers are bound together by love potion but ultimately die for their passion. In the real world, the same aristocrats who delighted in these stories would never have encouraged this kind of behavior in their own families.
But if courtly love was an impractical fantasy, why did it gain such traction? Part of the answer lies in its connection to chivalry. The great knights of the medieval world needed a code beyond just fighting and prowess, something that distinguished them from mere warriors. Courtly love, with its emphasis on refinement, self discipline, and service to a lady, provided that.
A knight wasn’t expected to just be strong, he was also supposed to be courteous. eloquent, and willing to suffer for the sake of love. And of course there was an element of wish fulfillment. Courtly love allowed noble men and women to imagine a world where love had meaning, where devotion mattered, where romance was something grand and noble rather than a political contract. But for all its high ideals, courtly love also had a darker side, one that would become increasingly clear as writers and thinkers began to critique its contradictions.
Marie of Champagne’s Influence and Legacy
Marie of Champagne wasn’t just an aristocratic lady indulging in romantic tales. She was one of the most significant cultural patrons of the 12th century, a woman who actively shaped the way Europe thought about love and chivalry.
She was the daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Louis VII of France. She inherited her mother’s intellect and her fascination with romance. And her court at Champagne became a center for literature and philosophy, a place where the ideals of courtly love were discussed, debated, and ultimately codified.
One of her famous commissions was Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, written by de Troyes. In this story, we see the classic courtly love dynamic. Lancelot is utterly devoted to Queen Guinevere. He endures humiliation, disgrace, mortal danger to prove his love for her. His willingness to ride in a cart is the ultimate test of devotion.
But, as Chrétien himself notes in the prologue, the story wasn’t entirely his own creation. He said, “The material and manner of the story were given and furnished to me by my Lady of Champagne, for she herself has provided the conception and direction of the work.” This was an astonishing admission.
Chrétien, one of the greatest medieval writers, acknowledges that Marie was not just his patron, but also his guide in shaping the tale. The themes and values in Lancelot reflect a deliberate vision of love, one in which devotion to a lady is essential as part of a knight’s honor. Marie’s influence extended beyond Chrétien.
She was immersed in a literary culture that viewed love as both an art and a discipline. The famous Art of Courtly Love, attributed to Andreas Capellanus, was written under her patronage and set out the rules of love in a structured, almost legalistic way. One of its most famous maxims declares, “marriage is no real excuse for not loving.”
This idea that true love could exist outside of marriage, that it was something nobler and separate. It was a radical idea. It positioned love as an ideal, something that elevated the soul rather than merely serving political or reproductive purposes. The art of courtly love lays out specific guidelines on how a lover should behave, emphasizing patience and suffering and devotion.
A man should wait humbly for his lady’s affection, suffer in silence, and prove his worth through service. Marie’s court was the ideal environment for these ideas to flourish. Champagne at the time was this hub of cultural exchange, a meeting point for poets, troubadours, and scholars. Here, love was dissected as a philosophical concept.
Its meaning was debated in salons much like medieval versions of the Parisian literary circles of later centuries. It was at Marie’s court that famous courts of love were said to have taken place gatherings where noblewomen, presiding as judges, would rule on matters of love and fidelity. Today, scholars debate on how much of this was real and how much was literary invention, but the idea itself still speaks to Marie’s reputation.
In a world where women were expected to be passive, her court became a space where they defined the very rules of romance. As the art of courtly love suggests, it’s a place where women could declare, “A true lover considers nothing good except what he thinks will please his beloved.”
Marie of Champagne’s legacy wasn’t just in the texts that she inspired, it was in the ways that she helped shape the medieval imagination. The image of the suffering knight, the noble but unattainable lady, the idea that love itself was a chivalric quest, all of this can be traced back to her patronage.
At the time, this wasn’t without controversy. Some saw courtly love as a dangerous indulgence, a distraction from the true duties of the nobility. The church also grew increasingly suspicious of a literary culture that seemed to celebrate extramarital devotion. But Marie’s vision endured. The works that she fostered became the foundation for the love stories that still shape our ideas of romance today. Now, I had wondered whether Marie was married and what her relationship was like.
She was married to Henry I, Count of Champagne. She was the daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine from Eleanor of Aquitaine’s first marriage before she married Henry II of England. She had children with Louis VII. She had a whole life before she, left and married Henry II. So she was one of those children that Eleanor had with Louis.
And she was married, her husband joined the Third Crusade in 1179, and he died in 1181 in the Holy Land, and Marie ruled as the regent of Champagne for their son Henry II for six years, until he came of age.
Now if courtly love had begun as an artistic and poetic tradition, By the late 12th century, it was being transformed into something much more structured, almost a doctrine. The most famous attempt to formalize its principles came from a somewhat unexpected source, a cleric.
Andreas Capellanus was a chaplain at the court of Marie and he wrote De Amore, the art of courtly love, around 1185, quite possibly at Marie’s request. This work took the abstract ideals of courtly love and turned them into a list of rules. A sort of medieval guidebook for lovers.
The irony, of course, is that the codification came from a monk, someone bound to a church that viewed sexuality outside of marriage as sinful, and marriage itself as a sacred duty rather than a romantic union. And yet, De Amore doesn’t just tolerate love outside of marriage, it outright dismisses the idea that true love can exist even within it.
One of its most famous maxims, like I said, is marriage is no real excuse for not loving. For Capellanus, love was an ennobling force, something that existed separately from the mundane duties of marriage, which was primarily a contract for social, political, and economic stability. Love, as imagined in the tradition of Marie’s court, was something higher, something that lifted the soul above petty concerns of dynastic politics.
Cappellanus didn’t stop at broad philosophical ideals. He laid out explicit rules for how a lover should behave. Among them, He who is not jealous cannot love. A true lover considers nothing good except what he thinks will please his beloved. Love is always a stranger in the home of avarice. Real jealousy always increases the feeling of love.
A new love puts an old one to flight. Love can deny nothing to love. Love is always growing or diminishing, and nothing which a lover gets from his beloved is pleasing unless she gives it of her own free will. Love is a certain inborn suffering, derived from the sight of an excessive meditation upon the beauty of the opposite sex, which causes each one to wish above all things.
The embraces of the other and by common desire to carry out all of love’s precepts in the other’s embrace. Ooh, it gets a little steamy in there. Anyway, these rules reinforce the idea of love as an all-consuming passion, something that demands secrecy, devotion, and suffering. A knight in love must endure hardship to prove his worth.
The lover must pine, must struggle, must never take love for granted. And more importantly, love and marriage are fundamentally opposed. One is about duty, the other is about desire. There’s one of the quotes from the story of Lancelot says he suffered as much pain as his body could endure, but love, which guided him, made him insensible to it.
This idea that love must involve suffering, that it’s defined by obstacles and devotion, was one of the defining characteristics of the courtly love tradition. Of course, the world these rules described was not the world that most people actually lived in. The idea that love was this pining passion was at odds with the reality of arranged marriages.
The insistence that true love and marriage were incompatible ignored the fact that many couples did, in fact, develop deep bonds over time. Perhaps most strikingly, these rules positioned women as the gatekeepers of love. Yet in reality, noble women were often pawns in political games married off without much of a choice.
Even Christine de Pizan, writing two centuries later, recognized the hypocrisy in how love was framed in literature versus how women were actually treated. She observed in La Dite de la Rose that the tradition of courtly love often placed impossible expectations on women while simultaneously restricting their real world agency.
But despite these contradictions, the ideals set forth in De Amore and reinforced at Marie’s court endured. The notion that love could and should even be separate from marriage, that it could be secret, passionate, full of suffering, continued to shape European romance for centuries. From Tristan and Isle to Romeo and Juliet, we see echoes of these ideals tragic, obsessive love that defies social constraints.
Critiques and Evolution of Courtly Love
Capellanus himself, however, ends De Amori on a rather abrupt and contradictory note. After spending pages outlining the beauty and importance of love, he suddenly condemns it, declaring that it leads only to ruin and should be avoided. Some scholars argue that this was deliberate satire, perhaps a reflection of the growing tension between secular and religious views on love.
Others suggest it was a strategic move, a way to appease the Church, while still leaving his work open for noble audiences to interpret it how they pleased. Either way, by the time De Amore was circulating in aristocratic courts, the concept of love had been transformed. It was now beyond a poetic idea or a literary convention.
It was a structured philosophy, a set of rules that would influence European literature and culture for generations. For all the influence of courtly love in shaping medieval ideas of romance, it didn’t take long before writers and thinkers started questioning its effects, especially on women.
What had begun as an aristocratic ideal, a supposed elevation of noblewomen into objects of adoration, increasingly looked like an elaborate rhetorical game that gave men all the power and left women with little agency beyond their role as muses and passive recipients of devotion.
One of the most vocal critics of the courtly love tradition was Christine de Pizan, an extraordinary writer of the late 14th and early 15th century, who became one of the first professional female writers in Europe. Her book of the City of Ladies dismantles the notion that women were mere objects of desire or prizes for men to win.
Instead, she argues that women have their own intellect, virtue, and agency, independent of how men perceive them. In direct contrast to the courtly love tradition, where the lover must suffer, pine, and sometimes deceive to gain his lady, Christine describes an alternative vision of female worth, one that is not dependent on romantic adulation.
Meanwhile, John Gower, a contemporary of Chaucer, took an even more critical stance in his Confessio Amontis. He explored the dangers of love in excess, portraying it not as noble or an ennobling force but as something that could become obsessive, destructive, and even violent, could lead to deceit, betrayal, and ultimately ruin. His verse plays on the paradox of courtly love, that it claims to elevate women while actually reducing them to passive figures. entirely dependent on male desire.
By the late medieval period, the grand ideals of courtly love were already beginning to be satirized and mocked. One of the most famous examples is the Roman de la Rose, which begins as a conventional courtly love allegory, But in its later sections, devolves into a cynical, misogynistic text portraying women as manipulative and deceitful.
The disillusionment was also shaped by historical events. The Tour de Nestle affair in the early 14th century, in which the daughters-in-law of Philip IV of France were accused of adultery and subjected to brutal punishment, marked a turning point. It exposed the hypocrisy of the chivalric world. Where noble ladies were supposed to inspire perfect love, yet in reality were subject to intense scrutiny, control, and, if they stepped outside expected norms, cruel retribution.
Courtly Love’s Enduring Influence
For all the ways in which courtly love was critiqued, parodied, and even abandoned in later medieval literature, its influence didn’t disappear, instead it evolved, shaping ideas of romance well beyond the Middle Ages. By the Renaissance, the language and rituals of courtly love had embedded themselves in literature, court culture, and even political maneuvering, most famously in the Tudor court.
And that’s what Sarah Gristwood writes about in her book, The Tudors in Love. And it looks at how courtly love influenced the 16th century and the Tudor period. And it’s super, super interesting. So you should totally get that book. Anyway, one clear example of courtly love’s influence can be seen in Shakespeare’s works, where knights and nobles continue to pine for unattainable women, engage in poetic professions of devotion, and suffer in love as a mark of its sincerity.
There’s Romeo and Juliet, which takes the ideal of a passionate forbidden love and intensifies it to a tragic extreme. There’s Twelfth Night, playing on a courtly lover’s suffering through the character of Orsino who wallows in unfulfilled longing. The very notion that love should involve dramatic tests and trials, whether duels, disguises, or desperate gestures. owes much to the courtly love tradition.
Even beyond fiction, the Renaissance world saw real figures adopting the language of courtly love in their own relationships. For example, Henry VIII‘s love letters to Anne Boleyn are laced with the conventions of the courtly lover. He casts himself as her devoted servant, pledging loyalty and enduring suffering in the hopes of earning her affection.
In one letter, he laments his separation from her. “My own sweetheart, this shall be to advertise to you of the great loneliness that I find since your departing. I think it long since I heard from you.” This kind of lovesick longing, framed as both emotional pain and proof of true devotion, was straight out of the courtly love playbook.
Courtly love also helped to shape the ways in which love was commemorated. The traditions of Valentine’s Day, writing love poetry, offering tokens of affection, and engaging in romantic rituals owe much to the medieval chivalric customs. Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules, written in the late 14th century, links Valentine’s Day with the choosing of a mate, popularizing the connection between the saint and romantic love.
The idea of Valentines as messages of love exchanged in honor of a beloved, developed further in the courtly tradition, and persists even to this day. Beyond literature and historical figures, courtly love’s core themes, like forbidden love, grand romantic gestures, the idea that true love must be proven throughout devotion and hardship, still shape modern romantic narratives.
Whether it’s in classic romance novels, period dramas, Bridget Jones, the echoes of knights pining for their ladies, and risking all for love continues to captivate audiences, from Pride and Prejudice to Titanic, these tropes of longing, obstacles, and grand declarations can all be traced back to the medieval courts where these ideas first flourished.
In the end, while few today would embrace the strict rules of courtly love, its legacy is undeniable. The way we tell love stories, celebrate romance, and even imagine what makes love true owes much to the literary tradition that began centuries ago at the courts of Marie of Champagne and Eleanor of Aquitaine. The ideals of passion, devotion, and the trials of love are in many ways still very much alive, especially on Valentine’s Day.
Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast,  the original Tudor history podcast, started in 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. In 2019 she created Tudorcon, which is now a yearly event, in addition to writing books, and running TudorFair.com - a whimsical Tudor Merch shop.
She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 30 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history (how exciting when she got to interview Alison for the first time!). In addition to history, she is passionate about travel, and has lived in 3 countries and 4 states (not counting her perpetual state of confusion), and her family (who help her host her YouTube channel occasionally).
