Three Chapters on Courtly Love in Arthurian France and Germany: Lancelot - Andreas Capellanus - Wolfram von Eschenbach's "Parzival"

This study grew out of a lecture on the Lancelot theme delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, in April 1955. Addressing myself to a nontechnical audience, I was not concerned with the origins of that highly particularized cult of prowess and passion known as Courtly Love. On this much debated subject I would have nothing original to contribute. Neither was it my aim to present a historical or sociological study of the manners and customs actually prevailing at a given time in Western Europe. I was concerned rather with the creative imagination of an age that found its most brilliant expression in the verse novels of Chrétien de Troyes. Thus the emphasis of my title is on the Arthurian world, which neither poet nor audience equated with the world of reality.