concerning the Courts of Love are no more worthy of credence than those
of Nostradamus. According to these two unreliable authorities, courts
for the decision of lovers' perplexities existed in Gascony, Provence,
Avignon and elsewhere; the seat of justice was held by some famous lady,
and the courts decided such questions as whether a lover could love two
ladies at the same time, whether lovers or married couples were the more
affectionate, whether love was compatible with avarice, and the like. [21]

A special poetical form which was popular among the troubadours may have
given rise to the legend. This was the _tenso_,[11] in which one
troubadour propounded a problem of love in an opening stanza and his
opponent or interlocutor gave his view in a second stanza, which
preserved the metre and rime-scheme of the first. The propounder then
replied, and if, as generally, neither would give way, a proposal was
made to send the problem to a troubadour-patron or to a lady for
settlement, a proposal which came to be a regular formula for concluding
the contest. Raynouard quotes the conclusion of a _tenso_ given by
Nostradamus in which one of the interlocutors says, "I shall overcome
you if the court is loyal: I will send the _tenso_ to Pierrefeu, where
the fair lady holds her court of instruction." The "court" here in
question was a social and not a judicial court. Had any such institution
as a judicial "court of love" ever been an integral part of Provençal
custom, it is scarcely conceivable that we should be informed of its
existence only by a few vague and scattered allusions in the large body
of Provençal literature. For these reasons the theory that such an
institution existed has been generally rejected by all scholars of
repute.