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l’Offrande de Cœur
Romantic love in the West is an invention of the Middle Ages. It’s not that earlier people in Europe didn’t have romantic feelings, but until the appearance in the late 11th century of tales of Courtly Love—an appellation coined in 1883 by the French philologist Gaston Paris (1839–1903)—these feelings found little expression in literature and art or public discourse. Romantic love is not a theme in epics like Beowulf or Song of Roland, in which men are warriors whose dearest relationship is with their liege lord, while women appear almost off-stage as servants, tokens in feudal real estate deals, or vehicles to produce heirs, preferably male. When the feudal Church spoke of love, it meant agape—Platonic love devoid of sexual passion, which was sinful. Marriages, particularly among and between the aristocracy and the emerging bourgeoisie, were based on dynastic and economic priorities. In contrast, the plots of these tales of "Amour Honestus" (Honest Love) or "Fin Amor" (Refined Love), as they were actually known, revolve around forbidden liaisons between adulterous lovers or unmarried lovers in defiance of their families. While these stories, written in the vernacular styled with rhymed hexameters, are ripe with erotic undercurrents, they often end with the ache of unrequited love. “Without your return of love, I am but as dead.” (Froissart) These popular romantic tales had many sources: Ovid's Ars Amatoria; Neo-Platonism; the cult of the Virgin, the Arthurian myths, lyrics by 11th century Provençal troubadours who first appeared in Languedoc, France; Catharism (a 12th century Gnostic doctrine that preached chaste love between unmarried couples also originating in Languedoc); and the literature of Andalusian Muslim Spain. For Medieval and Renaissance Europeans the heart was the home of the soul, the seat of sensation, and the fount of feeling, thought, and memory (we still say “to learn by heart”), so its association with romantic love is hardly surprising. In his satirical De art honeste amandi, composed 1174–1186, under the Rules of Love, Andreas Capellanus (fl. late 12th century) writes, “When a lover suddenly has sight of his beloved, his heart beats wildly.” In this 15th century tapestry a courtier hands his heart to a lady. The shape of this heart, and that of virtually all the hearts depicted in this book, is not the shape of the muscle pumping blood throughout the human body. The shape of the iconic stylized heart has been likened variously to the heart of the Nile crocodile that dynastic Egyptians deified as the god Sobek of fertility; the male prostate gland; the female pubic mount, spread vulva, breasts, or buttocks; or the silhouette of two people kissing. The romantic heart is a visual metaphor for love’s sweet pain, while the Sacred Heart is, in part, a metaphor for Jesus’ suffering
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