Laudatio Turiae: Troubadour style

Should I be surprised that your love

Has brought me so much misery?

Our love was always a mix

Of affection and agony

The eve before I was to gain you

You lost your dear parents

I found myself married to a warrior

Her quest for justice completed

My heart full and primed to break

Life goes on

And I was forced to leave my bride

The halls of our home were empty

Even miles away I was filled with pride

That my wife would guard her modesty

In the midst of such anguish

If you were in half as much pain in your grief

As I was in my longing

Then the anguish should've been paralyzing

Yet you protected that most sacred quality

What did you think would happen

To my poor, lovesick heart

When I heard you had abandoned our home

To protect your decency?

Did you think I would return to you?

Did you think I would feel proud?

Did you think I would feel indifferent?

Or did you not think of me at all? 

I felt nothing but agonizing desire

The distance between us suddenly insurmountable

Separate from such a virtuous soul

The very world seemed to ache with me

Your esteem nearly killing me

Unable to touch you, to kiss you

I was capable only of longing

Starved for your kiss

Letters and gossip fed my soul

O, sweet wife, you should have been by my side

And nowhere else

There has rarely been a woman

Forced to face such challenges as you

And there has rarely been a man

Lucky enough to hold her heart

And there has never been a man

More miserable to lose it

I could list all your virtues

But what good would it do?

Break my heart even more?

Name a marriage as long as ours

That was not cut short by separation or the scythe?

As impossible as task

As describing my departed love

Forty years you were mine

And still not enough

If our union was to end in death

My soul was the right one to take

I am filled with anger, my love, still!

How could your mind be capable

Of imagining a life without me?

No child could compare to you

My soul breaks to think

You ever believed otherwise

Never have I met such as fool

As you were in your selflessness

Fate’s cruelty knows no bounds

Given the most charitable wife

Generous enough to leave me

My blessing almost became my curse

I myself was a fool, too

Expressing my passion through gifts

A sapphire for your beauty,

A ruby for your kiss

The jewels shone like stars on you

Yet all the money in the world could not buy

The priceless gifts you gave me

Have you ever met a man without a soul?

Why am I surrounded by so many of them

Yet cannot find you?

Those fools tried to tear us apart

Cold men who have never known

The warmth of true love

Clinging to gold and weapons

Not knowing they possess nothing

Perhaps they saw the light of our love

Burning in the distance

And were beckoned like moths

They seized my name

Straight from your heart

Carved it on their tablets

And condemned it to death

Had I known that surviving their attempts

Would one day rob me of my heart

I would have written it myself

In those men we faced evil

For who would harm a ray of sunlight?

They broke your precious body

When you stood in my defense

Once again your altruism was a knife in my heart

A far worse sight

To see the bruises on your body

Than to see my name

On Death’s list

In need of safety I dragged myself away from you

It had delighted me so

In a simpler past

To see you with those jewels on your body

Gone, now, forever

Sacrificed for my flight

How I wish I could hold them

And pretend you were in the next room

You saved my wretched life

But where did it go?

I lost it when I lost you

You saved me just to kill me

Those men are long gone now

And yet I long for their knock on our door

For my name on their list

Now I know that death is nothing

Compared to life without you

My name should never be written

Unless in your script

Breaking News: Vis is in Love With the Kings Brother - But where is Mobad?

 Breaking News: There is a scandal in the Court! Queen Vis, Wife of King Mobad as allegedly entered into a secret romance with none other than the King's own Brother, Ramin. Sources close to the court tell us that this situation is quickly turning into a crisis for the court leading to questions on the very meaning of "perfect love".  

To understand this dire situation, we must go back long before Vis became queen and married Mobad. According to royal sources, Vis's mother (Shahru) had promised her daughter to Mobad, as a way to keep Mobad from pursuing her. Specifically, Mobad had asked, "If you won't grant me happiness and life, Give me your daughter,"(Vis and Ramin, 7). Vis's future had been set in stone even before she she was born. This arrangement—even if it was one that ended up being forgotten—shows that marriages in the royal world were not necessarily about love, but rather about control. Vis's early life had also made this situation more complicated, but she seems to have been put on a pedestal by her parents. During this time, Shahru had forgotten about her promise to Mobad; as a result, Vis ended up married to her brother Viru. Her mother had described this union as one in which "the best of women weds the best of men,"(Vis and Ramin,18). After being told this, "love sprang up in [Vis's] heart, she'd love Viru, and, say nothing, she acceded to Her mother's words" (Vis and Ramin, 18). Her love for her brother seemed to be very strong. However, Mobad came back, asserted his claim over Vis, and brought her back to the court, turning her into more of a possession than a companion. 

The story gets dramatic from here. It was the nurse at the center of this story. Behind the scenes we have been told that she played a big role in encouraging Vis to to change her promised loyalties. From sources we have been told that Ramin was already in love with Vis just from barely seeing her before, specifically, as, "the face of Vis appeared; Ramin's poor heart Was hers as he felt consciousness depart,"(Vis and Ramin,57). The nurse really had to persuade Vis to change loyalties. However, according to sources Ramin went to the nurse first about how he was dealing with his unrequited love for Vis. He told the nurse that, " A lover's life is worse Than any other wretch's life, dear nurse," (80). The nurses reaction to His agonizing over Vis seem to be one of opposition, "but still your magic won't be able to Prevail on Vis to give herself to you,"(Vis and Ramin, 85). He threatens her with his agony using her love of him to get her to help him with Vis, he guilts her till her opposition to his love is gone(88-89).The nurse ends with putting herself in the middle as if to bring "true love" to Vis. Vis who is grieving over her Brother Husband is persuaded by the nurse when she tells Vis of someone who would compare to Viru by saying Ramin has a face like Viru's(94). According to sources the nurse wanted to replace Vis's love of her brother with love of Ramin by convincing Vis that Ramin will give her the same love she had with her "brother husband"(Vis and Ramin,94-97). The nurses persuasion did take awhile to work but it led to Vis actually seeing Ramin is attracted to him but does not give in(Vis and Ramin,115). When they do meet she asks him,"Will love be like a rose, that in day Opens and blossoms and then fades away, or like a jewel, a turquoise, that persists and come what may  still stubbornly exists?" (Vis and Ramin, 126) He promises her happiness and she falls for him, revealing their love (Vis and Ramin, 128). 

Herein lies our scandal: it was the nurse who urged Vis to give Ramin, the king's brother, a chance! Unlike her arraigned marriage to Mobad who seemingly was in love with the idea of her and her, her relationship to Ramin is seen through agony, and personal choice. Though Vis and Ramin's relationship may be representative of a "true love" rather than one sanctioned by Vis's mother. There bond seems to be out of choice. The nurses actions highlight how "perfect love" it not necessarily morally approved but rather from internal feeling that puts love above duty. 

Now to the question at the heart of this scandal: can love that violates family and moral bounds still be considered "perfect"? 

Vis's actions are a dangerous threat to the royal authority and to social order. Adultery is frowned upon:  it is not just a betrayal of loyalty to the marriage, but a betrayal of the throne. King Mobad's control is expected to play a role in his marriage. Vis's relationship with Ramin challenges Mobad's authority. 

Consequences still remain; their relationship does a lot of damage. Through all of this, Mobad has become a shell of himself. According to sources close to Mobad, he has been wandering around grieving something that he never had to begin with(her love). Their marriage was not a choice. Vis's realtionship with Ramin was a choice. This scandal sidelines Mobad, as he loses control. 

Legitimizing and Delegitimizing Unions Through the Ideal of Reproduction

In the opening chapter of the Hebrew bible, God commands, “Increase and multiply and fill the earth” (Genesis 1:28). While this may be a religious text, the charge is a universal one. The continuance of the human race relies on reproduction, and it is through the institution of marriage that this process has been organized across centuries and traditions. 

The widespread distinction of a child “born out of wedlock” is a testament to the central role that marriage played in ancient and medieval reproduction. Deuteronomy 23:2 imposes restrictions on illegitimate children, while in Rome, illegitimate children took on limited inheritance rights (McDougall 68). By the later medieval period in Europe, these children began to carry a social stigma alongside inheritance restrictions. While some early theologians, such as Paul, distilled marriage into an institution that controlled sexual activity that resulted in reproduction (1 Corinthians 7:1-2), the necessity of having children legitimized and delegitimized different types of relationships across the ancient and medieval worlds. 

 In the Christian tradition, Augustine moves beyond Paul to state his support in “the bonding of society in its children” and to laud reproduction as “the one honorable fruit” of the “sexual conjunction” of a married couple in an essay called The Excellence of Marriage (1). In Augustine’s construction, reproduction is not just an acceptable byproduct of a sex-controlling institution, but a motivating good of these unions. 

A fifteenth century depiction of Jupiter kissing his mortal lover, Ganymede (Maître François, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

If the ability of a union to produce children makes it good, then by that same logic, a union unable to result in reproduction can be stigmatized. This very logic is wielded in “Ganymede and Helen,” a twelfth century French poem by an unknown Christian author, which employs the characters of ancient epic to rebuke homosexuality. When Ganymede does not actively engage with Helen’s sexual advances, she first declares that “The natural order is overturned and law destroyed through you” (line 115), further asking Ganymede, “why, since you will not produce children // your father produced you?” (lines 116-117). Throughout the text, Ganymede is arguing in favor of having sex with other men, declaring himself disinterested in “replacing my face” (line 125). Helen primarily uses the inability of such a union to produce children as an indication of it being unnatural, calling his “Venus sterile and fruitless” (line 225). The text inexplicably concludes with the marriage of Ganymede and Helen, clearly positioning the sexually productive union of man and woman as superior. However, it is not just same-sex couples that face infertility. 

A portion of the Laudatio Turiae inscription (By Unknown artist - Jastrow (2006), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1715554).

In the so-called Laudatio Turiae, a first century BCE funerary inscription, such a situation was documented. The husband, who seemingly commissioned the stone inscription, writes “when I could not have children from yourself, you wanted me to have them through your good offices and, since you despaired of bearing children, to provide me with offspring by my marriage to another woman” (29). Although his wife "proposed a divorce outright” the inscription goes on to clarify that she wished to remain in the household to “take upon yourself the duties and the loyalty of a sister and a mother-in-law” (27). Her husband praises, but also vehemently rejects, such a proposal. As he explains, “What desire, what need to have children could I have had that was so great that I should have broken faith for that reason?” (29). While Turia represents an attitude toward marriage that hinges on its ability to produce children — an attitude often apparent in high-ranking families seeking heirs for succession — Turia’s husband recognizes a value in their bond distinct from this fruit. 

Interestingly, Christian authors like Augustine have a similar attitude. On the question of an infertile marriage, he writes “The marriage bond remains, even if because of evident infertility no children result, despite the fact that this was the reason for entering into the marriage” (15). Here, Augustine recognizes a value of the bond, but importantly he stipulates that the union was entered under the auspices of an ability to have children. 

 Ultimately, though the necessity of reproduction appears across cultures and traditions, its relationship to marriage, though often present, reflects nuance and variance. In traditions like Christianity, with its very ascetic views on sex, marriage is critically linked to reproduction. The ability to have children legitimizes and delegitimizes certain relationships. In high-ranking contexts where children secure financial or ruling futures, the goal of reproduction can be conceived as a legitimate reason to divorce or have a concubine. For example, the Frankish Merovingian dynasty, which ruled from the sixth-eighth century CE, was known to largely recognize any man born to a royal father as a possible successor (McDougall 68). 

Our modern attitudes creep closer to that of the ancient or high-ranking family — particularly the positions of Turia and her husband from the first century BCE. The growing popularity of IVF, sperm or egg donation, and surrogacy reflect a culture that believes in the necessity of creative solutions for couples to have children, while acknowledging that a natural ability to conceive does not legitimize or create value in marriages. 

Works Cited 

 Laudatio Turiae = Wistrand, Erik, trans. The So-Called Laudatio Turiae: Introduction, Text, Translation, Commentary (Göteborg, 1976). 

Ganymede & Helen = Boswell, John, trans. “Ganymede and Helen,” in Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago, 1980). 

Augustine of Hippo, The Excellence of Marriage = Kearney, Ray, trans., “Marriage and Virginity: The Excellence of Marriage, Holy Virginity, The Excellence of Widowhood, Adulterous Marriages, Continence. Vol. I/9,” in Rotelle, John, Hunter, David, eds., The Works of Saint Augustine (2nd Release). Electronic Edition. (New York, 1999). 

McDougall, Sara, “The Carolingian Example: The Sons of Concubines,” in Royal Bastards: The Birth of Illegitimacy, 800-1230 (Oxford, 2016), 66-93.

Thou Art… Complicated: A Medieval Love Quiz

Tired of modern dating rules? Ghosting, situationships, “what are we?”—it all starts to feel new until you realize history tends to repeat itself. So why not look back to a time when chivalry was very much not dead (despite what your last Hinge date might suggest)? You, the reader will be going back in time thanks to our our researchers over at MEDVLSTD 111 who have compiled a robust, curated selection of medieval texts—Ganymede and Helen, a selection of troubadour poems, Marie de France’s lais, Yvain, and The Knight in the Panther Skin—to help today’s forlorn lovers finally understand what kind of romantic disaster they are. Expect knights galore, dramatic declarations of love, and stories that would likely be categorized today as somewhere between catering to the female gaze and Wattpad enthusiast. Because knowing your love language isn’t enough anymore, and just because you’ve taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator doesn’t mean you actually know how you love.

This quiz is built on a simple question: what kind of medieval lover are you? The medieval texts mentioned above all construct romantic ideals, but they do not agree on what love should look like. Some value beauty and pleasure, others longing and distance, others social legitimacy, and others loyalty proven through suffering and separation. By translating these competing models into four modern romantic archetypes, this quiz sorts you into the kinds of lovers medieval literature rewards, punishes, or renders impossible. But as you’ll quickly find, the rules don’t quite line up: the love that is praised in one text is condemned, mocked, or made unattainable in another. Rather than clarifying who is allowed to love and how, medieval literature reveals that acceptable love is an unstable category—one shaped by conflicting fantasies of what love should be.

Before you begin: keep track of how many times you choose each letter, because you’ll need it to find out what kind of medieval lover you are.

Quiz:

1. You meet someone you’re really into. What happens next?

1. You start hanging out regularly (late-night texts, spontaneous plans) but every time the conversation gets close to “what are we,” you somehow pivot. 

2. You stalk their Spotify, imagine your wedding playlist, and convince yourself this is either fate or a devastating lesson. No in-between.

3. You ask them within the first few dates what they’re looking for and feel mildly stressed until you’re both on the same page.

4. You have amazing chemistry, but something about the timing feels off, so you pull back, telling yourself it’ll mean more if it works out later.

2. Your ideal relationship dynamic looks like…

1. You see each other all the time, but no one’s asking questions or defining anything. 

2. There’s longing. There’s tension. Maybe you don’t even end up together, but it changes your life.

3. You meet each other’s friends, make plans in advance, and have a shared understanding of where things are going.

4. You go through something difficult, long-distance during your summer internships, bad timing because THEY JUST got back together with their ex, emotional turmoil because they’re a philosophy major, and come out the other side stronger.

3. They tell you, “I’m not ready for a relationship right now.” You…

1. Say “that’s totally fine,” and continue seeing them exactly the same way as before.

2. Interpret it as part of a larger emotional arc and convince yourself they’ll realize your connection is different.

3. Take a step back because “exclusive but not dating” doesn’t make any sense.

4. Accept it, but respond to their late-night texts, quietly waiting for the moment when they are ready.

4. Pick the scenario that feels the most like you:

1. You’ve been seeing someone for three months, but introducing them as anything other than “a friend” still feels… premature.

2. You once liked someone more after they became unavailable.

3. You’ve had at least one moment where you thought, “I just want to put a label on it.”

4. You’ve convinced yourself that loving someone from afar counts just as much—if not more—than being with them. It’s more romantic obviously. 

5. Your biggest relationship downfall is:

1. You keep things going without ever really progressing them. Why fix something that isn’t broken? 

2. You fall in love with potential more than reality.

3. You ask about baby names on the third date. You obviously don’t want to progress if they name our kid something like “X Æ A-12”  

4. You stay loyal to your crush even when they don’t know you exist.

6. Which of these feels the most romantic to you?

1. Meeting someone on vacation and then never seeing them again, because it’s never that serious. Think Before Sunrise but without the sequels. 

2. A love that feels almost unreal—like the romance section of Barnes and Nobel #booktok

3. He brought a housewarming gift to my parents’ anniversary. That was our third date btw. I knew I was marrying when I met him. 

4. A love that survives distance, absence, or time apart. Long-distance gives you character. 

7. You’re in a relationship, but there’s one catch: they ask you to keep it completely secret. You…

1. Agree—it’s kind of ideal. No pressure, no expectations, no public complications.

2. Agree at first, but start to romanticize it as this intense, hidden love that makes everything feel more meaningful. Hook up in the stacks? 

3. Feel uneasy—if it can’t be acknowledged publicly, what’s the point?

4. Agree, but eventually tell someone anyway… and the entire situation spirals because of it.

8. Things are going really well, but you’re given a clear boundary: don’t disappear or mess this up. You…

1. Don’t overthink it, you assume things will work themselves out regardless.

2. Take it seriously, but also kind of believe that if it’s meant to be, it’ll survive anything.

3. Stick to the plan, you value consistency and don’t want to risk losing something stable.

4. Fully intend to respect it… but get caught up in your own life, lose track of time, and realize too late that you’ve ruined everything.

How to Score Your Results

Keep track of how many times you chose each letter:

• Mostly A’s → The Situationship Final Boss

• Mostly B’s → The Wattpad Romantic

• Mostly C’s → The Serial Monogamist

  Mostly D’s → The Professional Yearner

If you have:

• 4–6 of one letter → strong match

• 2–3 of two letters → hybrid lover

Hybrid Results: You may find yourself split between two types—for example, a Serial Monogamist with Wattpad Romantic tendencies. Medieval texts often demand contradictory things from love, so trying to fully belong to one category is nearly impossible.

Four or More A’s? You are … The Situationship Final Boss

(Ganymede, from Ganymede and Helen)

You don’t date…you circulate. You run into them in Lamont at 1am, share a playlist, maybe split a late-night Felipe’s run, and then somehow three weeks pass without either of you ever defining anything. Like Ganymede, you operate on attraction, timing, and presence—whatever feels good in the moment, without the burden of what it means. There’s always just enough connection to keep things going, and just enough distance to keep it from becoming real.
In medieval terms, this is where things get complicated. What reads here as chemistry and spontaneity would, for many theologians and proponents of courtly love, not register as love at all, but as something closer to lust. In Ganymede and Helen, this tension is staged explicitly: Ganymede defends a model of desire grounded in beauty, pleasure, and immediate attraction, while Helen argues for a form of love that is ordered, directed, and legible within a broader social and reproductive framework. 
Even the poem itself refuses to resolve this. The debate draws in larger authorities—divine, aesthetic, moral—and yet no single model definitively wins out. If you follow Ganymede, you align yourself with a tradition that privileges beauty and pleasure—but also, notably, with Zeus, which is not exactly the safest moral ground. If you follow Helen, you gain legitimacy but lose the freedom that made the attraction compelling in the first place. See the problem? Even here, at the level of two idealized figures, love is already split into competing systems that cannot be reconciled. 

Four or more B’s? You are … The Wattpad Romantic

(Lanval + Troubadour poetry + Marie de France)

Your love life has a plot. Not a timeline—a plot. You meet someone at a Currier ten-man, lock eyes for two seconds, and suddenly it’s your senior year and you’re still orienting your emotional life around that moment. Like Lanval, your ideal partner exists somewhere between real and imagined: elevated, exceptional, and governed by a set of conditions that make the relationship feel less like something you build and more like something you aspire to.
For a troubadour, love is not simply about mutual attraction or even fulfillment, but about refinement—of desire, of character, and of devotion. The ideal lover must be beautiful, noble, emotionally disciplined yet capable of intense feeling, modest yet worthy of admiration; love itself becomes a kind of performance of excellence. Even distance and longing are not flaws but mechanisms that heighten value: to love well is to endure, to wait, to feel deeply and continuously. This ideal, however, comes with limits. Courtly love is not for everyone; it presumes a very specific kind of lover, one who can meet these aesthetic, moral, and social expectations. Read alongside other medieval models, this creates a contradiction: what counts here as the highest form of love depends on qualities such as wealth, beauty, refinement, even the ability to suffer “correctly” that make it inaccessible to most. In this system, love is perfected not because it is universal, but because it is exclusive.

Four or more C’s? You are … The Serial Monogamist

(Helen, from Ganymede and Helen)

You don’t “see where things go.” Things go somewhere or you leave. You meet someone, you define it, you integrate them into your life: HUDS meals, problem sets, maybe even blocking off weekends in your GCal three weeks in advance. You are not interested in ambiguity; you are interested in clarity.
Helen would recognize this immediately. In Ganymede and Helen, she does not simply experience desire, she attempts to discipline it. Her model of love presents itself as “natural”: structured and oriented toward fulfillment. Love, in this sense, is something that should move forward, resolve itself, and take a recognizable form. This claim to naturalness, however, is more restrictive than it appears. It depends on a very specific alignment of gender, desire, and outcome: one that quietly excludes anything that does not fit within it. At the same time, Helen’s own position reveals a tension she cannot fully resolve: she is drawn to Ganymede’s beauty and immediacy even as she argues against the kind of desire he represents. Love, for her, must be directed and justified—but it does not begin that way. This is the contradiction at the center of your love: it feels like the most stable and universal model, but only because it has been carefully narrowed into a particular form. What presents itself as the most “natural” kind of love turns out to rely on limits that are anything but natural. You’re not wrong—you’re just following a system that defines love so precisely that it excludes more than it includes.

Four or more D’s? You are … The Professional Yearner

(Yvain + The Knight in the Panther Skin)

Your crush moved to the Quad, and now you talk about the relationship like you’re in a medium-distance marriage. You know exactly when your dhall crush gets lunch every Tuesday, you’ve memorized the walk from the Yard to Cabot, and somehow a twelve-minute shuttle ride has only made your feelings more serious. In other words, you turn logistical inconvenience into emotional destiny.
Medieval romance would understand this instinct immediately. In Yvain, love is not simply something one possesses; it must be proven, lost, and won back through delay and suffering. Yvain’s problem is not that he does not love, but that he cannot sustain love and chivalric ambition at the same time—the very acts meant to prove his worth are what separate him from it. The Knight in the Panther Skin, though set in medieval Georgia, reinforces this model: love is measured through endurance across distance, where constancy depends on surviving separation rather than avoiding it. This produces a central contradiction. Love is supposed to be unwavering, yet it becomes legible only through absence. The more devotion is proven through waiting and suffering, the harder it becomes to sustain love as a lived, mutual relationship. In these texts, yearning is not a failure of love but its highest form—and that is precisely the problem. The more perfect love becomes, the less possible it is to actually live.

Cited Sources

Rustaveli, Shota. The Knight in the Panther’s Skin. Translated by Venera Urushadze, Sabchota Sakartvelo, 1968.

Marie de France. The Lais of Marie de France. Translated by Glyn S. Burgess and Keith Busby, Penguin Classics, 1999.

Chrétien de Troyes. Yvain, or The Knight with the Lion. Translated by David Staines, Hackett Publishing Company, 1990.

Boswell, John, translator. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Kline, R. L., translator. From Dawn to Dawn: Troubadour Poetry. Garland Publishing, 1981.