While it was a generally accepted theory that love was the source of man's perfection, I know of only one passage (by Raimon of Miraval) contending that woman, also, was perfected by love; everywhere else we meet the universal and silently accepted opinion that the essence of womanhood is something unearthly, unfathomable and divine. Perhaps the most classical formulation of the new doctrine, to wit, that spiritual love is the begetter of all virtue and the mother of chastity, outside which there is nothing divine, 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.