In the late thirteenth century an anonymous English poet closes his poem on the problematic nature of love with the following lines:

It is not clear to what ‘song’ the poet refers, but it is obvious that he is conscious that he is writing in what is an already well-established tradition of love poetry. The importance given to the sentiment of what is variously known as fin amor, amour par amour, or in English fyn lovynge, however, is notable, particularly since, in the view of most scholars, it was a fairly recent development in European culture, though Peter Dronke has argued strongly that it was of much more ancient provenance. The conception of an ideal and exalted relationship between men and women may have drawn ideas from sources as diverse as Plato's Phaedrus, Ovid's Amores, and the cult of the Virgin Mary, but its earliest, most complete and most significant articulation was in eleventh- and twelfth-century texts such as the troubadour poetry of Provence, the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, and Andreas Capellanus's De Amore. Here appears, time after time, in text after text, the idea that love is the most important aspect of life, the conception of the idealised lady, worshipped or deferred to in an almost feudal manner by her devoted and obedient lover who believes that in her lies all the happiness that life can give if he can win her love, and all the despair and suffering if he fails to attain it: as this English poem affirms, love is lif, love is deth.