Editing Courtly love (section)

===Sexuality===
A point of ongoing controversy about courtly love is to what extent it was sexual. All courtly love was erotic to some degree, and not purely platonic—the troubadours speak of the physical beauty of their ladies and the feelings and desires the ladies arouse in them. However, it is unclear what a poet should do: live a life of perpetual desire channeling his energies to higher ends, or physically consummate. Scholars have seen it both ways.

[[Denis de Rougemont]] said that the troubadours were influenced by [[Cathar]] doctrines which rejected the pleasures of the flesh and that they were metaphorically addressing the spirit and soul of their ladies. Rougemont also said that courtly love subscribed to the code of [[chivalry]], and therefore a knight's loyalty was always to his king before his mistress.{{sfn|Rougemont|1956}} Edmund Reiss claimed it was also a spiritual love, but a love that had more in common with Christian love, or ''[[Charity (virtue)|caritas]]''.<ref>{{cite journal |first=Edmund |last=Reiss |year=1979 |title=Fin'amors: Its History and Meaning in Medieval Literature |journal=Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies |volume=8 }}</ref> On the other hand, scholars such as Mosché Lazar claim it was adulterous sexual love, with physical possession of the lady the desired end.{{sfn|Lazar|1964}}

Many scholars identify courtly love as the "pure love" described in 1184 by Capellanus in ''[[De amore (Andreas Capellanus)|De amore]]'':

{{blockquote|It is the pure love which binds together the hearts of two lovers with every feeling of delight. This kind consists in the contemplation of the mind and the affection of the heart; it goes as far as the kiss and the embrace and the modest contact with the nude lover, omitting the final solace, for that is not permitted for those who wish to love purely.... That is called mixed love which gets its effect from every delight of the flesh and culminates in the final act of Venus.{{sfn|De amore}}
}}

On the other hand, continual references to beds and sleeping in the lover's arms in medieval sources such as the troubador {{lang|pro|[[Alba (poetry)|albas]]}} and romances such as [[Chrétien de Troyes|Chrétien]]'s ''[[Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart|Lancelot]]'' imply at least in some cases a context of actual sexual intercourse.

Within the corpus of troubadour poems there is a wide range of attitudes, even across the works of individual poets. Some poems are physically sensual, even bawdily imagining nude embraces, while others are highly spiritual and border on the platonic.{{sfn|Boase|Bornstein|1983}}