Did It Happen: Courts of Love

A common theme among painters of Medieval scenes during the Victorian era are knights and ladies reenacting dramas of love.  A lady fair gives a favor to a knight about to go into battle, etc., etc.  A common fiction in novels and poems of the era was the existence of Courts of Love, where noble women, usually led by Eleanor of Aquitaine or her daughter Marie, solved disputes about the correct forms and procedures of courtly love at Eleanor's castle of Poitou, in France.

Did it happen?

Courtly love, in and of itself, was very much a thing in the Middle Ages and through to the Renaissance.   This consisted of an elaborate set of ideas and rituals which bound younger men of lesser social rank (knights), to older women of higher social rank (ladies), who were otherwise unattainable because they were married, or of too high a social standing, etc.  Troubadours and poets such as Chretien de Troyers composed songs and poems about this form of love.  Books were written about the etiquette of a knight to his lady and vice versa.  Moralists condemned the practice as a cover for adultery.  Courtly love had its erotic features, but the extent to which it was sexual, or even practiced in daily life, is open for debate.  However, in none of the literature of the period is there any mention of Courts of Love, where disputes about love were brought before high-born ladies to adjudicate and render rulings.  This is a later invention and probably a misunderstanding of Medieval life on the part of later generations, most notably the Victorians, who romanticized most things Medieval.

The women of the time were busy, running large households and overseeing their families.  Eleanor herself was ruler of large domains in her own right, held prisoner by her husband for almost twenty years, and running interference between her husband and her various warring sons.  Although she was credited with introducing the idea of Courtly Love from Aquitaine to France and later England, she likely didn't have the time to sit around adjudicating other people's love disputes.  Her daughter by her first marriage, Marie, Countess-Consort of Champagne, also kept a lively court, at which her mother was often a guest.  If Courts of Love existed at all, they were probably salons at which people read poetry, flirted, or in general gossiped about love and its many facets and problems.  Nothing more.