In particular I'm responding to the comedic treatment of adultry in The Millers Tale, which has essentially no sympathy for the cucukolded husband. Also, the portrayal of Tristram and La Beale Isoud in Le Morte d'Arthur was surprising--she is married to King Mark and is lovers with Tristram and yet the only thing Tristram seems to get condemned for is leaving her to marry another woman. And in contrast to what I've traditionally heard about "courtly love" they are explicitly having sex. Isoud herself is treated totally sympathetically. Another section in that same part of the story has a magic cup that spills when any "faithless" woman drinks from it that only a handful out of a hundred women successfully drink from.
In the 1400-1600s era bookended by these works, was adultery really so ubiquitous? Was it a serious moral/criminal offense in reality or the commonplace part of daily life these works seem to suggest?
The wild sexcapades and bridled courtly passion of medieval popular literature seem to come from a different world than the early medieval Church penetential handbooks or 13C theologian Thomas Aquinas writing that adultery represents an additional special deformity of lust. But between fantasy and prescription, we can see complicated--and evolving--perspectives on adultery in the Latin Middle Ages. And in fact, the Arthurian tradition is a really interesting evidence.
Medieval western Europe inherits Roman and biblical legal traditions that place marriage in the realm of property law. Property meaning inheritance by legitimate offspring, but property also in the sense that wives were the property of their husbands. These principles governed the understanding of adultery as based on the marital status of the woman involved. It was a problem any time a married woman slept with a man besides her husband, because it would throw the parentage of any children into doubt. It was also a problem when any non-husband slept with a married woman, because he was violating the husband’s property rights. Under late antique law like the Lex iulia (especially in its post-Christianity incarnations!), the penalty for adultery could range up to death.
You’ll notice that one category is exempt: married men could sleep with unmarried women without a formal charge of adultery getting in the way. This tradition would endure solidly into the early Middle Ages and still cling on tenaciously even later. For example, female concubines of elite men were an accepted, even expected part of court life in early medieval Italy. Legally and conceptually, they did not see this as adultery.
But an increasing force in the Middle Ages disagreed: the Church. The discomfort with the “worldly” pleasure of sex combined with its unfortunate necessity for procreation led to the Augustinian tradition that sex was licit only for reproduction and only within the confines of monogamous marriage. This represented a theoretical gender equalization in the determination of adultery, although in practice, men with power continued to flaunt what they could.
As the Church moved to increase its power (spiritual, political economic) within and over medieval society from the years around 1000 onward, sex and marriage—and sex and marriage law--became a key pillar of this control. Adultery was both a sin and a crime, subject to religious penance as well as social sanction. The Middle Ages developed two distinct legal systems, canon (Church) and secular. Adultery could actually land the accused in either court!
What constituted adultery? Well, the legal boundaries were well established: any sex that broke a marital bond. Even if the other spouse approved it: the wife would be charged as an adultress, and the husband for the separate crime of procuration or pimping (this is how the Latin legal texts are gendered), sorry, Mr. James Reynolds. In practice, adultery generally amounted to “sex beyond marriage that other people labeled adultery,” as unsatisfying as that is.
But while lords and kings continued to achieve quite the reputations for sleeping around, the Church’s hold on popular views of sex and marriage was increasingly strong. This power coincided with a growing emphasis on public order throughout society. While the internal disease of sin still mattered, the external social ramifications thereof were an increasing focus of concern. Additionally, in the 14-15C the nuclear family, with marriage at its heart, was more and more the fundamental economic unit of late medieval society. These developments combined to make adultery either the most or second most common sexual crime of the late Middle Ages! Adultery was both common and an increasing concern for people, laity and clergy alike.
Medieval popular literature, and especially the Arthurian tradition, reflects the changing mores surrounding the need to prosecute adultery. Although the story of King Arthur himself seems to predate the 12th century, Arthurian romance with the attendant Knights of the Round Table and their paramours is a creation of the later 12C. Writers after that are indebted to the earlier, since it’s what their audiences know and expect. So different authors’ treatment of adultery is quite revealing—especially when it comes to the trio of Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot.
Lancelot becomes a starring figure in Arthur’s court in The Knight of the Cart by the author we call Chretien de Troyes. His love affair with Guinevere is both treason against his king and adultery, and the text even acknowledges the folly of adultery by having Lancelot defend Guinevere’s honor when she is accused of the crime (with another knight). This 12C portrayal of Lancelot is actually somewhat ambivalent on the thoroughness of his heroism.
The 13C Arthurian Vulgate cycle (not the Bible) plays out public understanding of adultery in literature. The third of its 5 texts, the Prose Lancelot, shows how Lancelot in all his adulterous glory had become entrenched as a true hero in medieval readers’ minds. But when a probable-monk author got his hands on the PL, he wrote a sequel, Quest for the Holy Grail, which sees Lancelot actually doing penance for his affair. Scholars typically see this text as a direct attempt to counter a popular interpretation that deviated from social norms. And why would it not? To use a modern parallel, the Arthur tradition is one of the Middle Ages’ greatest fanfiction products. What percentage of modern fanfic is shipfic? The characters an author wants to see together, they can finally put together in their own writing. The unconsummatable becomes consummated in later fiction, where it would not be present in the formal, official storyline.
The fraught emotions surrounding people's interpretations of love, marriage, honor, and social order combined with an increasingly rigid attitude towards Church teaching are well displayed by the 14th century master, Dante Alighieri. Awesomely, Dante even points to the troublesome role of romance literature within society! Few readers of Inferno come away without some sympathy for Francesca da Rimini, damned to the outermost circle of Hell's punishments for lust=>adultery. Her murder at the hands of her husband before she had the chance to repent seems unfair, a damnation that did not have to be. Certainly Boccaccio himself upped the pathos, inserting into the literary tradition a backstory which has Francesca tricked into a horrid marriage, presenting readers with an additional layer of tragedy. Dante himself takes the additional step of having Francesca read the story of Lancelot as she falls into into her adulterous love! Ultimately, the Inferno must damn her for adultery, however sympathetic her plight may be...while slyly pointing out the double standard of popular romance literature.
By the time Malory is writing in the 15th century, however, concern over the social tearing of adultery, prostitution, sodomy is rising. He has 250 years of sprawling Arthuriana to squish into one text. The “facts” of the knights, including Tristam and Lancelot, are well known—this would include the adulterous affairs. When it comes to less significant knights, Malory actually works to justify their adultery in light of honor and social order. Thus Gawain may kidnap a “knight’s lady” while he sleeps. But his heroic deed is slaying the man who slept with his (widowed) mother, since Lamorak is the son of the man who made her a widow. The death restores his family honor violated by an affair that is fornication, not adultery. By his benchmarks, Gawain remains the chivalric hero.
With Tristam and Isolde, Malory makes a crucial change to earlier tradition. Tristam and Isolde consummate their love only after King Mark proves treacherous. Once Mark has removed himself from the plane of honor so totally, there is no honor to be violated by the love affair. Malory writes out a whole lot of “Isoldam” sex from the French tradition. In order to justify adultery to his 15C audience, Malory had to paint Mark’s actions as a worse violation of right order than adultery, in large part by cleaning up the actions of the wayward lovers.
The royal trio, however, shows most of all the increasing discomfort with adultery even in literature. Since Arthur is the faithful Christian king par excellence, Malory can’t exactly take the King Mark solution. Instead, he works from the other side. Lancelot’s presence in the Tristam section is also very carefully sanitized compared to earlier tradition: references to the physical adultery are scrubbed out. Lancelot sleeps with the unmarried Elaine, not actually Guinevere. Whenever it comes time to actually broach the question of physical passion between the storied couple directly, Malory hedges:
As the French book says, the queen and Sir Lancelot were together. And whether they were abed or otherwise, I must make no mention, for love at that time was not as love is nowdays.
Ultimately, that is where the 15th century laid their justification: love at at that time was not as love is nowdays. Acceptance of adultery in fiction did necessarily mean acceptance of adultery in reality.
What your talking about is called "Courtly love." Its a hugely influential medieval art and literary tradition imported by Elenore of Aquintine from France to England during her rule in the mid 1100s. It popularized an ideal of chivalric duty and honor in popular romance. Though physical expression was not a requirement for an affair of chivalric love, it was often alluded to or supported outright in bawdy poems or text. Some of these tales were fiction but since writers and troubadours carried these tales (and the people they were about thought it very fashionable to be a subject of a ballad) the truth tended to blend with fiction. In Sea of Faith, the author supports the ideas in text that the idea that courtly love was inspired by classical Arab and Islamic poetry, but the paintings and designs of courtly love are kind of famous online as memes. I'll link some of the original images below.
Courtly love stories mainly share in common certain story beats: virtuous man of lower social status falls for a noble lady (ideally the lady of his lord, according to Malory), he pines, then announces his feelings to the lady, she rejects him virtuously as she is married, he retreats to perform chivalric tasks to earn her love, she is won over, they share many stolen conversations and sweet moments together which may or may not include sex, but do emphasize desire and the need for secrecy. Both suffer tragedy when detected, or they escape to adventure.
If that sounds glib or kind of like Twilight or Outlander, that's because of how hugely influential the courtly love story arc is in Western romantic culture. Without the idea of Pure Love, there is no Disney idea of True Love. The Internet gets the term White Knight from the idea of noble knights defending their ladies honor. The term "m'lady" is a kind of funny callback to how courtly love tales often had the male adopting feudal terms to denote his service to his chosen lady. Courtly love narratives are everywhere in our romantic literature and hugely influential.
To be honest though, courtly love ideals didn't reflect the social treatment of adultery on an individual basis. It was a more humanist approach to the rigid ideas of marital duty in which marriage was duty and the Catholic church controlled sexuality, but individuals were still punished. Courtly love ballads and fantasy allowed everyone pleasant escapism and the idea that true, pure love existed in a world full of war and death. Classist exceptionalism played a huge role because courtly love affairs were very much strictly the realm of the noble elite: the court and the church still fined, interred, stocked and shamed both common men and women accused of adultery, harlotry, or fornication. But because of the need for succession in noble ranks and old sexist social norms, powerful kings like Henry the Second and even a few powerful women such as Countess Joan were allowed to more or less cause scandal yet have their affairs remain an open secret. It also helped that courtly love affairs were often framed by their troubadours as more a penance and peril. The church and courts punished women found guilty of adultery with harlotry or fornication which in court usually resulted in fines, while the church used punishments of social construct such as penance, or more rarely, interrogation, the float test if witchcraft was suspected, or banishment. Male cuckolds could not under church law divorce their adulterous wives, but they could turn them out on the streets. It was considered socially correct to beat your wife as a way to enforce your moral duty as a Christian husband to guide her, and by the 1530s, a law was even amended which held that women convicted of adultery were also guilty of treason, because disobeying your husband was the same as disobeying your king (both are figureheads of state, so to speak.) Women who faced an adulterous husband could be charged as a shrew or worse. Adultery was very much criminalized despite its place in romantic frameworks of the time.
Further complicating the idea of courtly love could carry the opinion of the Catholic church, which had a mixed relationship with the concept, to be diplomatic. The church didn't like adultery, but since courtly love emphasized a deeply emotional bond between men and women over the physical, the church and priests supported affairs of courtly love without fornication as a true, pure love. There were quite a few troubadours singing up bodice rippers, but the church had a complicated relationship with sex and it chose to be relatively tolerant of the medium. At the time the relationship between religion and the closeness of the divine to the soul was often described in a carnal light, so by that measure, a distant but unrequited affair was not nearly the priority for censure. Adultery could be allowed to exist in theory and tragic art as long as it didn't lead to major social upheaval.
Further Reading: The War of Roses, O'Beian
De Amore, Andreas Capellanus
Gender and petty crime in Medieval England
Courtley love in art:
