I have books piled around me on the living room floor in my usual cross-referencing mess. The compilations of love letters between Peter Abelard and Heloise; the Hilaire Beloc translation of the Bedier Tristan and Iseult; The Romance of the Rose; The Art of Courtly Loving by Andreas Capellanus, which I'm pretty sure was thrown in with the other books as my weekly red herring, because it's obviously written as a satire of Ovid, and Ovid's original was not exactly written as serious advice to lovers, either.

I'm looking for the chivalrous roots of the BDSM subculture in the cult of courtly love, which puts a whole new spin on the more romantic aspects of Arthurian legend. Guinevere and Iseult, for instance, can be seen as dominants. The concept is amusing, and not entirely out of the realm of the possible, although plausibility is another matter - I have a very hard time seeing a Western tradition of BDSM customs that stretches back all the way to the Middle Ages. It works better as a thought experiment than as history.

I scribble:

I think this modern revival of courtly love, under a new name, so to speak, is rather more romantic and genuine in its own way than the actual medieval cult of courtly love ever was. At least it seems that way, going by the disgruntled poems of Beatritz, Countess of Die and the other trobaritz women, who wrote in response to the obviously insincere professions of love and adoration made by their more well-known male counterparts; and of course, there are the tongue-in-cheek opinions of Capellanus. Even the later part of The Romance of the Rose, consisting of those chapters completed by Jean de Meun rather than the ones written by Guillaume de Lorris, the book's earlier author, is rather cynical about the whole courtly thing. Courtly love, in the literature of the high Middle Ages, seems to only exalt the impossible and fantastic. Bringing fantasies down to the level of enactment does not appear to have often been done. There were simply too many impossibilities.

In the Arthurian romances, the most romantic lovers were those who transgressed the rules of courtly love to succumb to something a little more earthy, but it usually meant certain death, by execution or trial by ordeal or getting sent on a quest that was a suicide mission. Even if the result of carnal pleasure was not death, the consequences of getting caught were dire. If a lover was very lucky, like Lancelot and Guinevere were, he or she might survive trials by ordeal and combat, suicide missions, banishments, accusations, and so on only to spend the rest of his or her life locked up in an abbey or a convent.

The legends were created during the Age of Faith, and they reflected their times; it was not uncommon for widows, second sons, et cetera to take religious vows due to having no other recourse, but religious devotion notwithstanding, taking vows for purely pragmatic reasons was probably a let-down. The Church told people that sexual desire of any kind was sinful and should only be used for the purposes of procreation, not pleasure. Living vicariously through transgressive characters in songs and stories could have helped relieve some of the tension of pent-up desires for those people who could not defy convention.

It thus seems unfair that Lancelot and Guinevere and similar chivalric characters should go through decades of sneaking around with each other, surviving accusation after accusation, trial after trial, only to end their days separated by religious vows. But there it was, and in real life, their story probably would have ended in death; retiring to the convent or abbey to spend the rest of one's life in a sort of second chastity was, relatively speaking, a "happily ever after." It hinted at some kind of heavenly reward when a garden of earthly delights had nevertheless been sinfully enjoyed.

Lancelot and Guinevere and Tristan and Iseult were legends. More than that, they were fantasies. Ordinary people would not have subjected themselves to the torments those legendary figures willingly endured; if they had, they would not have survived. Then would come an eternity of Hell.

In poetry and song, meanwhile, the convention of "passionate poet writing love poems to a noble lady patron, whom he loved from afar" seems, in practice anyway, to have been given little credence, except as a form of ritualized flattery aimed at getting money and other forms of material support from the patron. Hardly surprising, given that seducing the lady of the manor would have been a punishable transgression. There was one troubadour who wrote love lyrics not to his patron, but to his wife, and according to his vida, he was ridiculed for it, even though his confessions of abject love were probably quite sincere. Uxoriousness was not considered a courtly sin. Dressing up like a wolf and howling outside the window of your patron, making yourself the quarry in a wolf hunt, the way Pierre Vidal did, all because the married noblewoman you write poetry to has a name that translates as "she-wolf?" Courtly.

If indeed it ever happened, which is hard to believe.

The only two genuine courtly lovers who left behind reasonable proof of their romance were Abelard and Heloise, and it wouldn't have been a relationship based on courtly love had he not been castrated almost immediately after marrying his young lover. Their relationship (which was technically inverted, because the conventions of courtly love required a submissive male suitor and a dominant female of higher standing, not a dominant male tutor and a submissive female student who wound up being submissive wife for a short while, then a submissive nun in an abbey) also seems to have been subject to a certain amount of degrading due to religious fervor. Poor Heloise. Poor Abelard. Well. Maybe not so much poor Abelard, since it was his religious fervor that caused his relationship with his abbess-wife to deteriorate - when he was castrated, he lost his testicles, but the rest of him was untouched. At worst that might have caused impotence. Surely, in that case, he could have found other ways to make love with Heloise, inventive man that he was? Poor Heloise.

Oh, well. It's still a fun assignment. Valentine's Day is coming up, and this provides inspiration, as I am sure Magister intended.

"The first letter, written by Heloise to Abelard, begins: "Domino suo, immo patri; coniugi suo, immo fratri; ancilla sua, immo filia; ipsius uxor, immo soror, Abaelardo Heloysa." The parts about being brother and sister probably just reflect the fact that both of them have taken vows, at the time of writing, but she refers to him as her husband and her father, among other things. I really don't think that when she calls him her father, she's thinking of him as her abbot, especially since she also calls herself his servant. You did tell me that some power exchange relationships play on familial dynamics. Just because we don't have that in our relationship doesn't mean they didn't have it in theirs.

"Then there's this: "Qui tanta hostibus largiris, quid filiabus debeas meditare; atque, ut ceteras omittam, quanto erga me te obligaveris debito pensa, ut quod devotis communiter debes feminis, unice tue devotius solvas." Heloise speaks of Abelard's "debt" to her, and it's very clear that this is not a monetary debt - it's a debt of obligation, of responsibility. I think she is speaking of a debt owed by a master to his servant, especially since she concludes this paragraph of her letter by calling herself Abelard's alone. She makes it clear that she belongs to him.

"And of course, there's that notorious paragraph in which she calls herself Abelard's whore, his strumpet. His concubine. "Non matrimonii federa, non dotes aliquas expectavi, non denique meas voluptates aut voluntates, sed tuas, sicut ipse nosti, adimplere studui... Deum testem invoco, si me Augustus universo presidens mundo matrimonii honore dignaretur, totumque mihi orbem confirmaret in perpetuo possidendum, karius mihi et dignius videretur tua dici meretrix quam illius imperatrix." Yes, she was originally hesitant to marry him because marriage would have been the death of his ambitions and his academic career. At that time, the only route to scholarship was through the church, which meant taking orders, which meant taking vows of celibacy. That was why they tried to keep their marriage a secret. Marriage was not allowed for monks and priests. It was common enough for clerics to have lovers, but Abelard wanted to pacify Heloise's uncle by making her an honest woman, as the saying goes, fat lot of good that it did him. However, by the time Heloise wrote her letter, all this was in the past. She had no reason to think of herself as Abelard's concubine. They were already married. The only reason she could possibly want to be his concubine, his whore, was to tickle her own fancy.

"So. How much of her subordination to Abelard was purely conventional, the result of wives being required in those days to submit to their husbands, abbesses to their abbots, and how much of it was sincere? Was she only playing on words, or was she using her words to subject herself to Abelard? And would it have meant the same thing, in context, for those two as it would have meant for us?"

"That," he says, "is an interesting question. I would like to doubt that any of it was purely metaphorical. Heloise in particular seemed to be the sort of writer who said what she meant and meant what she said, and if a metaphor was involved, she'd preface it by informing Abelard of the metaphor. The two of them did have some rather extreme and unusual obstacles to their love that they could never manage to overcome, which would necessitate some equally unusual coping strategies. Would they have had a relationship based on power exchange, as we define it today, before and after the violent annulment of their affair? That's an interesting conundrum. I'm inclined to think so. Here."

He pulls Abelard's Historia Calamitatum from out of the pile.

"Quid plura? Primum domo una coniungimur, postmodum animo. Sub occasione itaque discipline, amori penitus vaccabamus, et secretos recessus, quos amor optabat, studium lectionis offerebat. Apertis itaque libris, plura de amore quam de lectione verba se ingerebant, plura erant oscula quam sententie; sepius ad sinus quam ad libros reducebantur manus, crebrius oculos amor in se reflectebat quam lectio in scripturam dirigebat. Quoque minus suspicionis haberemus, verbera quandoque dabat amor, non furor, gratia, non ira, que omnium ungentorum suavitatem transcenderent. Quid denique? Nullus a cupidis intermissus est gradus amoris, et si quid insolitum amor excogitare potuit, est additum; et quo minus ista fueramus experti gaudia, ardentius illis insistebamus, et minus in fastidium vertebantur.

"Or, loosely translated: Our hands sought our books less than they sought each other's bodies; love drew our eyes together far more than the lesson drew them to the pages of our texts. In order that there might be no suspicion, I did sometimes beat her, but it was in love, not anger; the marks I left were the marks, not of wrath, but of a tenderness greater than the sweetest perfume. What followed? Everything we could imagine doing to each other.

"In order that there be no suspicion? Really? When the blows were hard enough to leave marks? I highly doubt deflecting suspicion was the motivation, especially given that he confesses to trying every single possible sexual practice imaginable with Heloise, in the sentence immediately following." He smiles. "I wouldn't rule it out. I think it would be silly to say bizarre love games did not exist until some arbitrary point in modern history - that would be like saying the human race didn't invent sex until the twentieth century, and as long as sex has been around, I'm reasonably sure variations on it have likewise been around. And the two of them were, after all, the foremost academics and intellectuals of their day. The BDSM subculture seems to have always had a higher-than-average percentage of intellectuals in it than the general population as a whole. Awkward intellectuals. Perhaps we gravitate to the imposed structure as much as we do to the intellectual stimulation of twisting and bending sex to the dictates of our own imaginations. We thrive when we have fetters to wear, outlines to follow, roles to play. We're graceless, otherwise. Like stilt walkers on a field of eggs and land mines."

"Geeks and nerds have a tropism for kink? Yes, that would certainly explain us. Maybe not every pervert in the world, but that's us." I go back to my outlining and quote hunting.