L'ambiguità morale della fin'amors nel romanzo cortese del XII-XIII secolo

Fin’amors, « cet amour courtois si compliqué à vivre et à chanter, cet amour dont la mesure de la sincérité est la qualité de la poésie», is a very complex concept to define; since it was first exalted by the troubadours’ poetry, it has always elicited a keen interest in modern and contemporary critics. The corpus of troubadours’ poems laid the foundations for the first erotic language and for the creation of a series of topoi and motifs, which characterise the ideal of the fin’amors; they eventually found a breeding ground for the other European literatures: in the North of France, specifically with the trouvères’poetry, in the German-speaking areas, thanks to the Minnesënger, in the Iberian Peninsula and in Italy. We have tried to build a case study, as a possible interpretation of a traslatio amoris into the different French literary manifestations of the 12th and 13th centuries, particularly starting from the troubadours’ poetry until reaching the prose romance. It appears that a certain number of topoi and motifs of the fin’amors - among these one can mention the desire in absentia and two topical characters, the lauzengiers and the gelos who find a new dimension in the Arthurian romance - have been used by the Medieval writers to create their great summae, by making the courtly love the heart and motor of the story-telling: the syntagmatic axis around which the whole romance revolves. The love legends of Tristan and Iseult and Lancelot and Guinevere offer the most successful narrative representation of the fin’amors: it is about two stories of immersive erotic passion based on adulterous relations, which share a social dimension and a courtly perspective. The remarkable interest for these illicit loves is best expressed in the prose continuation of the 13th century which assures the circulation of the legends all over Medieval Europe, by making the protagonists’ adulterous love a myth for the Western culture. On the one hand the protagonists’ love stories find a new dimension in the prose romances, which evoke and develop certain themes and motifs of the fin’amors into a more complex narrative frame; on the other hand there is a whole tradition of verse romances, called “Romans de l’amour troubadour,” that is a sort of hybrid category, which alternate narration and poetry. These peculiar stories, entirely based on the adulterous relationship between the protagonist and a married woman, revive some of the most important elements of the troubadours’ poetry, by making the fin’amors the keystone of the narration. However, both in the verse and the prose romances, the authors’ choice to set up a whole story based on an adulterous relationship implies a series of social and moral implications, which are revealed through the different characters’ speeches, and appears to mirror the writers and the society’s thoughts at the time. From verse to prose, the two couples’ forbidden loves are remarkably developed. The courtly love carries out a double function: it gives the narration an internal and external cohesion and, being the common thread for the various episodes, it allows the writers to (re)create new adventures and to foster the romance continuations.