12th century CE

The 12th century CE figures in The Second Sex as a moment when women’s cultural standing could rise without overturning the structures that subordinated them. Noblewomen fostered conversation, poetry, and patronage, while the prestige of the Virgin encouraged a religious idealization of womanhood. Yet the married woman remained subject to a husband who could act as both guardian and tyrant; courtly love offered a form of compensation for those conditions, not their abolition.

Courtly Culture and Women’s Prestige

The account links the growth of courtly culture to the leisure of château life. Noblewomen cultivated polished conversation and poetry, and women of letters such as Eleanor of Aquitaine, her daughter Marie of France, Béatrice de Valentinois, and Blanche of Navarre attracted and supported poets. This patronage helped culture flourish first in the Midi and then in the North, giving women a new kind of prestige.

Religious developments supplied a further source of idealization. Against the figure of Eve as sinner, the Church glorified the Virgin Mary, whose following became so extensive that the text describes the 13th century as a time when God was made woman. The rise of a mysticism of woman thus accompanied the cultural prominence associated with courtly society, though idealization should not be mistaken for women’s equal standing in social or political life.

Love and Marriage

The origins of courtly love are presented as disputed: proposed explanations connect it to relations between lords and young vassals, Cathar heresy and devotion to the Virgin, or a broader transposition of religious love into secular life. The evidence for formal courts of love is also uncertain. What the account treats as clear is the social function of courtly love: where the feudal husband was both guardian and tyrant, a wife might seek love outside marriage, and the ideal of courtly devotion could compensate for the harshness of official marital customs.

That compensation did not make marriage reciprocal. Courtly love was often represented as platonic, and Chrétien de Troyes excluded adultery from his romances except in the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. The broader historical interpretation, however, connects medieval love to adultery because marriage itself restricted women’s choices. Courtly love therefore appears as a cultural response to the institution’s constraints, not proof that those constraints had disappeared.

Historical Significance

The period’s importance rests in the coexistence of symbolic elevation and social dependence. Noblewomen could sponsor poets and shape cultural life, and religious devotion could place womanhood at the center of an influential ideal. Yet these forms of prestige did not make women peers of men within marriage or social authority. The account treats courtly love as a temporary cultural counterweight to patriarchal custom, whose persistence is underscored by the claim that love would continue to take the form of adultery for as long as marriage endured.