Courtly Romance and Arthurian Legend

In the courts of southern France, a new lyric tradition emerged around the concept later called fin'amor, or courtly love: the poet-lover's devoted, often unrequited, service to an idealized lady, expressed in the vocabulary of feudal loyalty. Guilhem IX, Duke of Aquitaine (1071–1126), is the earliest troubadour whose Occitan poems survive, and his granddaughter Eleanor of Aquitaine, together with her daughter Marie de Champagne, became key patrons of this literary culture at the courts of France and England. Andreas Capellanus's treatise De Amore, written around the 1180s for Marie's circle, codified courtly love into something resembling a set of rules, while women troubadours, or trobairitz, such as the Comtessa de Dia, composed within and against the same conventions.