The Knight and the Cart

The Knight of the Cart

By the end of eleventh century, Western Europe had experienced a powerful cultural revival. The flourish of New towns provided a place for exchange of commerce and flow of knowledge and ideas. Universities, which replaced monasteries as centers of learning, poured urbanized knowledge into society. New technological advances and economics transformations provided the means for building magnificent architectures. These developments were representative of the mental and behavioral transformations that the medieval world underwent and the new relationships that were brought about between men, women and society in the twelfth century. As in technology, science, and scholasticism, Literature was also reborn with a new theme.3

Very different from traditional writings of the past was the new flourish of troubadour poetry. Troubadour poetry, derived of courtly romances, focused on the idea of unrequited love. "A young man of the knightly class loved a lady", most often, "the lady was married to the young man's lord". The courtly lover would compose highly lyrical and erotic poems in honor of his lady, and the troubadour was filled with rapture even at the slightest kindness that the lady might offer him.3 This new literary artifice provides us clues to the cultural changes that took place in medieval Europe during this time.

Of the many writers of courtly romance, the most distinguished literature can be found in the work of Chretien de Troyes. Troyes was a native of Eastern Champagne and most of his career was spent the court of Marie de Champagne. He was the inventor of Arthurian literature and the first to speak of Camelot, and write adventures of the Grail.

He may even have been the first to sing the tragic love of Tristan and Isolde. One of Chretein de Troyes' works, Chevalier de la Charette (The Knight of the Cart) expresses the doctrines of courtly love in its most developed form. The plot of this story is believed to have been given to him by Marie of Champagne and has been called "the perfect romance" for its portrayal of Queen Guinevere's affair with Lancelot of the Lake.1

The elements of courtly love operate at several levels simultaneously in