Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility (review)

Building on his earlier studies of courtly society, Jaeger describes a central theme in Western culture from ancient Rome to the nineteenth century: the ideal of ennobling love, a form of public, aristocratic behavior limited until the eleventh century to male-male friendship and based on the idea that passionate love is elevating to the one who loves and a tribute to the charisma and power of the loved one. The implications of Jaeger's treatment are, first, that categories such as homo- or heterosexual are often beside the point for the language of male-male love in the Middle Ages; second, that scholars should not classify kinds of love according to institutional setting (monastic, courtly, etc.) but rather understand the similarity of assumptions in widely differing literary genres and contexts; third, that the so-called courtly love of the twelfth century was not a new discovery but an awkward readjustment to the "shattering" of a paradigm when women intruded into love. These arguments (and the first is not a new one) are surely both important and correct. Hence Jaeger's book is crucial reading, especially for nonmedievalists often misled by the stereotypes of older scholarship. The book's rather choppy style of jumping from one cursorily treated text to another is something of a barrier, however, despite the elegant translations provided in appendices. And the argument cries out for the historical analysis Jaeger asserts to be necessary but often fails to provide. If the intrusion of women in the twelfth century forces ennobling love to "lose its innocence," one must surely ask why this intrusion occurred and why it caused a crisis of sexual awareness. The answer lies, I expect, in fundamental changes in family structure and the gender system, and in a radical shift in religious attitudes toward sex, the body, and the world that we associate with the Gregorian Reform.