The third characteristic of the age of Dante is its chivalry, which
placed woman on the highest pedestal she had ever occupied. In
literature that unique influence is seen in a new and an exalted
conception of love. Love is now coupled with nobility of life. The
troubadours had sung of love as a quality belonging to gentle folk,
meaning by that phrase the nobility, and nobility had been defined by
the Emperor Frederick II, patron of the troubadours, as a combination
of ancestral wealth and fine manners. In the Banquet (bk. IV) Dante
rejects that definition and transfers nobility from the social to the
moral order holding that "nobility exists where virtue dwells."
Love, the flowering of this nobility, may be found in the heart of him
even lowest in the social scale provided that he is a virtuous man. It
is not an affair solely of gentle blood. It has no pedigree of birth or
richness. "In this sense the true lover need not be a _gentleman_
but he must be a _gentle man_, loving not by genteel code of caste
but by gentle code of character." (J.B. Fletcher: Dante p. 27.)
Thus Dante makes Guido Guinicelli say: "Love and the gentle heart are
one and the same thing." And Dante himself in one of his Canzoni writes:
"Let no man predicate
That aught the name of gentleman should have
Even in a king's estate
Except the heart there be a gentle man's.
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