vine, is to be found in the poems of the
somewhat pedantic Montanhagol:

The lover who loves not the highest love,
Is like a fool polluting precious wine.
Let loftiest love alone within thee move,
And purity and virtue will be thine.

Guirot Riquier expressed a similar sentiment:

For chaste and pure my love has always been,
From my "sweet bliss" I've never asked a boon;
If I may humbly serve her night and noon,
My life be her inalienable lien.

Walter von der Vogelweide says: "Love is a treasure heaped up of all
virtues."

As time went on the barrier erected between true spiritual love and
insidious sensuality became more and more clearly defined; the former
pervaded the erotic emotion of the whole period. Parallel with chaste
love, sensuality continued to exist as something contemptible, unworthy
of a noble mind; and it must be admitted that according to the
contemporary "Fabliaux," later German comedies and Italian and French
novels, the sexual manifestations of the period, were of incredible
coarseness. As against these, spiritual love was not merely an artistic
and theoretic concept, but the profound emotion of the cultured minds,
and remained a powerful and creative force even in later centuries.
Spiritual love and sexuality were irreconcilable contradistinctions; the
man who thought otherwise was looked upon as a libertine. The following
passages from the poems of the troubadours and their heirs, the Italian
poets of the _dolce stil nuovo_, will prove the historical reality of
this relationship, the ideal of the declining Middle Ages. We need take
no account of the German minnesingers, for although they shared the same
ideal, they did not influence principle in the same way as the neo-Latin
poets.

Bernart of Ventadour:

Lady, I ask no other meed
Than that you suffer me to serve;
My faith and love shall never swerve,
I'm yours whatever you decreed.

Peire Rogier:

Mine is her smile and mine her jest,
And foolish were I more to ask
And not to think me wholly blest.
'Tis no deceit,
To gaze at her is all I need,
The sight of her is my reward.

Gaucelm Faidit:

Of all the ways of love I chose the best,
I love you, love, with ardour infinite,
Yours is my life, do as you will with it.
Nor kiss I ask, nor sweet embraces, lest
I were blaspheming....

The most enthusiastic champion