The medieval lyric, as it gradually loses its exclusive preoccupation with ecclesiastical subjects, becomes more and more concerned with woman, and concerned with her in a new way. Through the poetry of Italy, where the Renaissance was already stirring, the troubadour literature of France, and that strange “Rose” tradition which is preserved to us in Chaucer’s translation of the _Roman de la Rose_, there grew up during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries a small special vocabulary defining the landmarks in that new region of the imagination which the poets, and even the scholars, of Europe were just discovering; we might call it the region of devotional love. Indeed, it was more than a vocabulary; it developed at one time into a sort of miniature mythology, for the various conflicting elements in a lady’s disposition which the lover had to meet with and overcome were actually personified, ‘Danger’ being a kind of mixture of modesty and haughtiness—an ill-omened creature whom ‘Pity’ or ‘Mercy’, if the lover was fortunate, finally put to rout: Al founde they Daunger for a tyme a lord, Yet Pitee, thurgh his stronge gentle might Foryaf[33] and made Mercy passen Ryght. In these three lines from Chaucer’s _Legend of Good Women_ the four Anglo-French words _Danger_, _Pity_, _Gentle_, and _Mercy_ are all Latin terms whose forms had altered, and whose meanings had received the Christian stamp during the Dark Ages. _Pity_ comes from ‘pietas’ (compare _piety_); _gentle_ from ‘gentilis’ meaning ‘of the same family’ and later ‘of noble birth’; and _mercy_ from ‘merces’, ‘a reward’, then ‘a reward in heaven for kindness displayed on earth’. None of them—with the exception of _mercy_ in its theological sense—are known to have been used in English before the thirteenth century. _Anguish_, _beauty_, _bounty_, _charity_, _comfort_, _compassion_, _courtesy_, _delicate_, _devotion_, _grace_, _honour_, _humble_, _passion_, _patience_, _peace_, _purity_, _tender_ are further examples of this new vocabulary of tenderness which came to us from Latin through Early French. Some of them, such as _charity_, _delicate_, and _passion_, were probably brought to England by the preaching friars before the Conquest; others came with the devout Normans, and did not develop a secular meaning until after they had reached our shores (_devotion_ remaining purely theological until as late as the sixteenth century); while yet a third class had already been secularized by nimble spirits like Petrarch and Ronsard a century or two before they reached us by the Norman route along with more frivolous terms, _amorous_, _dainty_, _dalliance_, _debonair_, _delight_, _pleasure_, _pleasance_, and the like, in which there is no particular reason to perceive a strong ecclesiastical influence. All of them, apart from the last group, are alike in that they started with a theological meaning and subsequently developed an affectionate one alongside of it.