expression in the ideal of chivalry, the Holy Sepulchre and the Holy
Grail, and suddenly love, bursting out in a brilliant flame, shed its
radiance on the sordid relationship which had hitherto existed between
the sexes, and transfigured it. Woman, the despised, to whom at the
Council of Macon a soul had been denied, all at once became a queen, a
goddess. The drudge, the patiently suffering wife, were things of the
past. A new ideal had been set up and men worshipped it with bended
knees.

"She shines on us as God shines on his angels,"

sang Guinicelli.

It was in a small country in the South of France, in Provence, that the
new spirit was born. The troubadours, wandering from castle to castle,
sang the praise of love, genuine love, the earlier ones without
admixture either of speculation or metaphysic. The dogma that pure love
was its own reward inasmuch as it made men perfect, was framed later on.

"I cannot sin when I am in her mind,"

wrote Guirot Riquier, and Dante, in the "Vita Nuova," calls his beloved
mistress "the destroyer of all evil and the queen of all virtues." The
monk Matfre Ermengau, who wrote a text-book on love, says:

Love makes good men better,
And the worst man good.

The later troubadours drew a much sharper distinction between spiritual
and sensual love. The latter was regarded as degrading and base (at