Supplemental: Sarah Gristwood on Courtly Love
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Hi friend, welcome back to the Renaissance English History Podcast. I am Heather and I am delighted to have welcomed Sarah Gristwood back to my channel and podcast just this week to talk about The Tudors in Love. It is love time, love day, and she's written this book called The Tudors in Love all about the history of courtly love and how courtly love influenced the Tudors. Really, really interesting. A super good deep dive into that. Highly recommend it.

So one of the things I do for YouTube channel members and patrons is have monthly author chats like this. I send out a Zoom link in advance and people come on. So you're actually seeing the recorded one of that. We had it live and people joined in and could ask questions, things like that. So if you would like to join in on these monthly author chats as well, why not either hit join this channel if you're watching this on YouTube to learn more or go to patreon.com slash England cast. Whatever.

whatever's easiest for you you do it for about a dollar an episode podcast episode four dollars a month and you get all kinds of extra mini casts and author chats and all kinds of extra fun stuff so patreon.com slash england class england cast or click join this channel to learn how to join live in our next month's author chat all right let's get started with this chat with sarah gristwood

Sarah Gristwood is an English journalist and author. She was born in Kent, grew up in Dover. She's written as a journalist for a number of British papers, including The Times, The Guardian, and The Telegraph. She's written historical biographies as well as fiction and contributed to television documentaries. Her historical biography, Arbella, England's Lost Queen, is about Lady Arbella Stewart.

an English noblewoman who was considered a possible successor to Elizabeth I. We've talked about her on this channel. She also wrote the fabulous Game of Queens, all about queenship in the 16th century. Really loved that as well. So thank you to Sarah Gristwood for joining us. And I'm just going to turn it over to our talk.

So what inspired you to look at the theme of courtly love? And your book kind of transcends the medieval ideas of courtly love and then how the Tudors interpreted that. So can you tell me, like, what was the inspiration for that? I know. Well, I really hate to say this.

Probably Vanessa Redgrave in the movie Camelot, heaven knows how many years ago. Basically, it was as if there was a missing piece. You know, I've written a number of books about the Tudors, in love, not in love, you know, women and power. And it's as if there was a step we were missing, something in

in their heads a really dominant ideal in the way that just wasn't there in ours and i can't remember what exactly first twigged me on that as it were i think i was thinking about as we all we all do if we're interested in the tudors henry the eighth and anne boleyn

And what was the code that made sense of that? You know, what made this king, long-married man, declare himself the servant, the slave, you know, to this woman whose recommendations were personal rather than, you know, political? Oh, well...

And similarly, I've written about Elizabeth I and about her courtiers and suitors. And if you look at a lot of it now, you know, a lot of their behaviour, you'd be inclined to think, get a grip, you know? But there was a missing step and I came to realise that, A, this ideal was it and, B, that it still affects us all today.

Interesting. And so can you tell me like how you talk about the Tudors as being like this last dynasty that really believed in love and obsessed with love? How much of the Tudor view of courtly love was a real emotion? How much of it was like a performance? Yeah, good question. Yeah.

I suspect courtly love was almost always performative in a way, but that doesn't necessarily make it less powerful. I think, well, courtly love born in the songs of the troubadours really kicking off late 12th century, the court of Marie de Champagne, Eleanor of Aquitaine's daughter.

And then it had already a huge number of absurdities. But guess what? It didn't go away. For centuries, it remained this kind of creed that held the imagination of aristocratic Europe in thrall.

So although it was performative, it was never altogether real. Certainly, in theory, it gave the woman the upper hand. In fact, I'd say it was in many ways a trap for her, as Anne Boleyn found. But nonetheless, there was obviously some real emotion, some real aspiration there.

And I think that's true, not least for the Tudors. I think Henry VIII is the first key figure here. You know, a man desperate. I'd say Henry VIII was in some ways, and I don't mean this kindly, the last of the great romantics. I think he was in love with love. It's just it was this love.

strange ideal that didn't actually make much provision for reality. Right. And it actually just occurs to me that there might be some people who listen to this who aren't so familiar with courtly love, so I got into it earlier. I should back up for a second. No, let's back up. As I say, okay, late 12th century, the court of Marie de Champagne where this great lady

requests, orders a poet, Précien de Troyes, to write down the story for the first time of Lancelot and Guinevere, King Arthur's Guinevere and Lancelot. And, of course, it's become an absolute staple now. I mean, look at Camelot, the musical. Look at a great many other versions as well. But at the time...

It was pretty weird. What you've got here, you've got King Arthur's wife in love with, forgive me, having it off with, King Arthur, if that's American usage. I'm sure you can guess. With King Arthur's best friend.

And yet, at a time when in real life church and state would have absolutely slammed them, condemned them, we're meant to honour them for the strength of their passion. I mean, there's all sorts of strange things in Critias Lancelot. He finds a comb.

you know, hair comb, that Guinevere has been dropped by the road with a few strands of her hair caught in it. And he starts to worship it as if it was a holy relic. When he leaves the door of her bedroom, he genuflects as if he were leaving a holy shrine. I mean, today we would urge him to seek professional help. Quickly.

But nonetheless, this idea came in like a tiger and it didn't let its claws slip. And there's all... Oh, sorry, go ahead. Over the next centuries, it didn't go away. I mean, then late to a marriage champagne's court...

A monk wrote a version of the actual rules of courtly love, somewhat satirical maybe. But over the next centuries, you'd get the church slamming it. You'd get Christine de Pisa from another feminist point of view, proto-feminist, also criticizing it. But you'd get writers like Dante,

a Boccaccio, um, Chiusa, all making use of it. The great medieval bestseller was the Romain de la Rose, which absolutely explores it. Somehow it just stuck there in literature, which meant in life to some degree.

Right. I wonder, there's also the idea that the woman is always out of reach, right? Or so we should talk about, like, was this courtly love ever consummated? Did it ever become like a true thing? No, no, quite. The ideal, the central image of courtly love, and it's one that comes to us through the Victorian revival more than through medieval, is a knight kneeling at the feet of a beautiful lady. Mm-hmm.

The lady is theoretically unobtainable. Courtly love terms, she's usually already, like Guinevere, already married to someone else of higher status. That was always the big question, to what degree she really was unobtainable. I mean, Guinevere wasn't unobtainable to Lancelot.

even though they were, you know, honoured as this honourable pair. Over the centuries, that would go on being the great question. I mean, the woman was meant to be of higher rank, married, saying no, no, until maybe in the end she said yes, yes.

I mentioned that manual, The Rules of Courtly Love. Well, there's a bit in there where the monk, monk who's writing it, says that the lover may enjoy the embraces of his lady naked in a bed, and yet their love may be accounted honourable if the final solace is denied to them.

And I think you can all guess what the final solace is meant to be. So they got very specific. Yeah, exactly. It's a much politer way of saying the kind of high school first base, second base, you know? Right. Gotcha. My question then is also like about what,

what did people get like this gets into gender psychology and all of this kind of like yeah my brain starts to hurt but like what do people get out of this idea of like so I can understand potentially a woman being worshipped and the woman has this maybe it puts women on it but but they weren't really and men with like yeah hunting thing

What do people get out of this idea of courtly love? Yeah, well, I think we have to look there at the circumstances, the world in which this was conceived. So we're looking at the time of the Crusades. We're looking at the world of the medieval castle, which was massively male. You'd have a lot of men and mostly young men

high testosterone levels, you'd have very, very few women. Even all the jobs like kitchen jobs that we think of today as mostly female would have been done by men. And particularly with a lot of the Lord and a lot of the knights away on Crusade, there'd be this group of young men with nowhere to go emotionally, basically.

So it probably was helpful for the women who were in fact would have been sold off into marriage, you know, by their male relatives without a thought for their own interests or wishes. But it may also have worked for the men. Mm-hmm. Gotcha. Because these young men were supposed to worship the noble, honourable lady, but emphasis on the word lady.

There is a line in that manual for courtly love that says, you know, yes, the knight, the lover, should do everything to please his noble mistress. But if his fancy chances to light on a woman of the lower classes, quote, a measure of force may be necessary. Well, not very courtly to our eyes, is it?

No. And so that's starting in like the 12th, 13th century in the Crusades. How did that change or did it by the time of the Tudors? Yes, it did. But just before the Tudors, there'd been a great revival. I mean, courtly love ebbed and flowed, you know, after the original kind of enthusiasm. It may have faded away a bit. The church weighed in against it.

And then, as I said, you know, people like proto-feminists like Christine de Pizan said, well, you know, hey, excuse me, are women really getting a good deal here? Is this really realistic? Is it really virtuous? But the 15th century, the end of the Middle Ages, did see a revival.

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I mean, all the early literature of courtly love imagined Marie de Champagne and her ladies adjudicating at actual real-life courts of love, debating knotty points, you know, etiquette and emotion. No, they almost certainly didn't exist in the 12th century. But guess what? In the early 15th century, in France, they were revived in reality.

as a kind of court game. It's as if with the waning of the Middle Ages, with the coming of a new world, people kind of groped for the old one again. Sure. And we see that's a very human thing, isn't it? Yeah, I think it is. Yeah. Yeah.

And certainly, sorry, at the dawn of the Tudor age, you can absolutely see this big, in England, resurgence of interest, particularly in the Arthurian legends with which, you know, Courtney Love was so bound up. I mean, was that the first book that was printed? Yeah, that's it.

No, exactly. You're quite right. Was the Morte d'Arthur Mallory in exactly the year of the Battle of Bosworth. And of course, Henry VII absolutely jumped on this bandwagon because he needed some kind of credibility for his new, his rather dubious Tudor dynasty.

Right. And then thinking about Henry VIII, and I was thinking about the whole with the women being unavailable and the Henry and Anne, of course, but then Anne becomes available. And then so how do you think courtly love?

their relationship and Henry's obsession with courtly love and how did you know talk about that I think in many ways it explains the story of Henry and Anne as nothing else can do because if you look at the letters that Henry wrote to Anne early early in their courtship they are

absolutely, you know, from a servant adoring his noble mistress, which is totally courtly love. I mean, in fact, obviously in the real world, he was the king and she was a comparatively unimportant lady. But in this courtly world, she could be adored. And a big thing about courtly love was nobility of worth, not birth. So the fact that

The fact that he could present Anne, in his own mind at least, as this kind of epitome of learning and virtue, because of course she was leading him towards a different way of thinking, a different strand of faith, that was absolutely key. But later, when they were married, that's where the real cracks in the courtly love theory occurred.

start to show because just, I mean, in the early days of his reign, Henry had talked in those terms about Catherine of Aragon, had ridden in the joust, you know, with her initials embroidered on his saddlecloths. He was so loyal heart and loyal to Catherine of Aragon. But courtly love was never really equipped to go much past the

the church gates, the marriage bed. Kind of like a fairy tale that happens ever after. And it's like, okay, well then what happens? Yeah, exactly that. In theory, it put the woman on a pedestal, but there's not much you can do on a pedestal except fall off it, you know?

Pretty much what happened to Anne. And then, of course, the kind of courtly play that she'd learned in France, this very, this gay, this cultivated court she kept around these young men like, you know, Wyatt and Norris and so on, making not terribly serious, adoring comments to her could be used as weapons against her. Right.

And then just thinking about her, and you mentioned Christine de Pizan and those proto-feminists, and Anne having been raised probably with exposure to it. Can we talk about Anne's perception of courtly love? And you kind of hinted at it there with the court that she was building. Yeah. Henry's view of court love and how they might have clashed. Yes. Well, in a sense, of course, we know more about Henry's because Henry's

We have his letters, and because he was the king...

and his story didn't end in 1536 with Anne's death. We know far more about his thinking. We have, in a way, singularly a few bits of real evidence about Anne. But yes, indeed, she'd grown up at the courts, first of Margaret of Austria and then the court of France. It does seem very definite that she learnt a lot of these things

charming, fascinating games and how to play them. And that's probably what made her a star in the quarry at the English court. And that's probably a lot of what attracted Henry. But it does sound as though, insofar as we can judge, she played the game, she knew it was her power base, but she didn't know when to stop playing.

that the rules were different for a wife. Or, to put it another way, to look at it another way, she had no option but to go on playing. Because, after all, she didn't have a powerful European royal family at her back. She didn't really represent a great alliance, you know? Yeah. So, in a way, she staked her all on courtly love, but maybe she had to.

Yeah. And then I also wonder, just thinking about, you said some of these people who took a different, like Christina Pizan and Anne, you know, a lot of times people talk about Anne being a feminist, which that can be debated modern terms on people who, but like, do you think that Anne would have, do you think that she, this is getting way side charged, but do you think that she would have really loved

liked the idea of queerly love or would she have been influenced by some of these negativities potentially or feminist no no i think she'd have liked it because after all it did for a while give her a

a staggering and almost unprecedented rise. Gotcha. So no, I think she would have liked it. I think she liked it a bit too much. Okay. So then moving on to her daughter and some of the flirtations that Elizabeth was famous for. Can you talk about how that was? Yeah. Well, you see, I think that's all, we're almost flipping the coin here, which is what's so interesting.

I think the courtly love was, you know, a lure and then finally a trap for Anne. But I think Elizabeth absolutely made use of it because she

Well, we think of her now as the virgin queen, long and successful, solar rain, all the rest of it. But we forget a bit that when she came to the throne, everyone absolutely expected that she would, that she had to marry. No other options. When it began to become clear that she wasn't going to,

There needed to be kind of a language for this, a code for this unprecedented solo female model.

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because remember england hadn't had a queen until her sister mary mary married all those discussions about how much power her husband had in england but with elizabeth

Both, you might say, professionally, politically and personally, I think courtly love absolutely worked for her and she absolutely played it. Because, again, it was a court very largely composed of men, except for the women, you know, directly in Elizabeth's own chamber. And, of course, men like Robert Dudley wanted women.

seriously hoped at first to marry her. But again, when it became clear that wasn't going to happen, Elizabeth had to somehow keep them still on the street and they had to find a way of still being around her, still seeming, you know, on their knees in this posture of devotion for decades without looking ridiculous.

guess what? Courtly loves, the ideal of courtly loves, makes sense of it all. Whether or not you really, you 100% believe it, it's the code, it's the game you can play.

And do you think there was a difference in how her various courtiers viewed her and courtly love people like Essex in the later years compared to somebody like Dudley? Yeah, exactly. No, I think in the early years, well, Dudley...

did have real hopes of marrying her and real real almost familial affection for her i think someone like christopher hatton yet and raleigh in many ways yes played this game as a game

Essex, it's interesting isn't it because Essex is where it all goes sour the last years and it's as if he's still talking the talk that oh that he hopes in his letters hopes to conquer her resisting will that her windows will be the lodestars that will guide his ships home but he's absolutely not walking the walk

It's as if then courtly love reached its kind of apogee, its tipping point, as it were, and it was all downhill from there. I have one final question and then Simone also, if you have any questions or want to hop in, please feel free to chat them or unmute yourself.

um my question is it is love season right now and that's why i'm talking to you about this but how do you think that courtly love and then the tutor interpretation of courtly love and then the victorian interpretation of the tutor interpretation of the midi how did all of that come to us and how do we influence us i think it does i think it did and it does i think it came to us

chiefly because I mean after all most people don't know much about 12th century history through the Victorians and Edwardians who had this massive revival of it but we've all sort of got those pictures in our heads you know the kind of knight kneeling in front of the and it goes on right to one example I can think of

I don't, it may not, sorry, forgive me, this may not be comprehensible in America. But when I was growing up in England, there was an advert for a brand of chocolates and

um it had a lover leaping off a ship you know swimming through dangerous waters climbing to bring his lady love her desire now in fact it was a rather sickly box of chocolates but that's bang on courtly love stuff we can see it in so many all popular we can

I'll spare you. Romantic comedies and like Bridget Jones. Well, I won't try and hum it to you, but if you've got in your head those chords, Giorgio Moroder, Electric Dreams, I only saw her for a while. That's absolutely cool. And some of the feminists of the Germaine Greer era, she for one, did write about it and write about its dangers.

So I think in a way, Valentine's Day reflects what you could say the benign side of courtly love. You know, the imagery was big on hearts and flowers and May Day and spring and lovely. But dig a bit further down and I'm not so sure. Yes, for sure. Very good.

All right. Well, we've come to our half an hour. I do appreciate you taking the time. And your book, The Tudors in Love, is such a good book to read at this time of year. And Simone, I'm guessing you don't have anything to share, but thank you for hopping on to, Simone. And thank you, Sarah Crestwood, for being here. And so it's always a joy to see you and to speak to you. And thank you so much for your work. And Game of Queens is also an amazing book, which I talked to you about when it first came out years ago. Indeed, yes, I remember.

All right. Thank you so much. Have a good one. Thank you. Okay. Bye-bye. Bye. All right. I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. Sarah Gristwood, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your time and your expertise. Again, if you would like to be part of these author chats live as they happen, you can either click join this channel right now if you are watching on YouTube, and that'll give you all of the details, or you can go to patreon.com slash englandcast to see how you can support there. What

whatever is easiest for you. All right. Thank you so much for being here. Remember, you are deeply loved. I'm so glad that I share the planet with you. I'll be back very soon. Don't forget to drink your water. Bye-bye, friend.

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