The Kings and Queens of Hearts

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Lancelot is desperate to reach Guinevere’s chamber – so desperate that he’s crawled over a bridge made from a sword blade to rescue her. The French poet Chrétien de Troyes describes Lancelot’s fingers shredded to the bone as he wrenches the bars from her window, but in her service he feels no pain… When, in the latter part of the 12th century, Chrétien de Troyes wrote this powerful account in his poem Lancelot, he was giving voice to an ideal taken up by almost every other writer of the Arthurian stories, from Thomas Malory in the 1460s to Lerner and Loewe in the mid-20th century, when they wrote the musical Camelot.

But the idea of what a later age dubbed “courtly love” goes far beyond the Arthurian tales. This creed of love was heard in the songs of the troubadours and given formal shape in the courts of what we now call France. It began as a literary fantasy, centred around the image of service – a knight, or young noble lover, kneeling in devotion before a lady he may never even attain – which fascinated the aristocracy. Triggering a huge outpouring of poems, songs and novels, courtly love was described by medievalist and writer CS Lewis as a movement compared to which “the Renaissance [was] a mere ripple on the surface of