The antique form of bucolic life still satisfied the aspirations of the waning Middle Ages. No need is felt to correct the pastoral fiction in accordance with real life. The new enthusiasm for nature does not mean a truly deep sense of reality, not even a sincere admiration for work; it is only an attempt to adorn courteous manners by an array of artificial flowers, playing at shepherd and shepherdess just as people had played at Lancelot and Guinevere.
In the Pastourelle, the short poem relating the facile adventure of the knight with the country girl, pastoral fancy is still in touch with reality. In the pastoral proper, however, the lover or poet thinks himself a shepherd too, all contact with reality is lost, all things are transferred to a sunlit landscape full of the singing of birds and playing of reed-pipes, where even sadness assumes a sweet sound. The faithful shepherd continues to resemble the faithful knight only too closely; after all, it is courtly love transposed into another key.
However artificial it might be, pastoral fancy still tended to bring the loving soul into touch with nature and its beauties. The pastoral genre was the school where a keener perception and a stronger affection towards nature were learned. The literary expression of the sentiment of nature was a byproduct of the pastoral. Out of the simple words of exultation at the joys caused by sunshine and shade, birds and flowers, the loving description of scenery and rural life gradually develops. A poem like Le Dit de la Pastoure of Christine de Pisan marks the transition of the pastoral to a new genre.
The bucolic idyll, then, offered itself as a new style for courtly amusement, a supplement to chivalry, as it were. Once received as such, it becomes another mask. The pastoral travesty serves for all sorta of diversions; the domains of pastoral fancy and of chivalric romanticism mingle. Tournaments are held in the apparel of an eclogue, like the “Pas d’armes de la bergère” of King René. These pastoral representations, even if they did not really deceive people, at least seem to have been regarded as important. Among his “Marvels of the World” Chastellain mentions King René’s playing at shepherd.
