Giorgio Agamben has argued in his book State of Exception (2003) that emergency measures represent “the legal form of what cannot have legal form.” Although Agamben argues that this paradox is primarily a modern phenomenon, this chapter argues that medieval authors explore both the ubiquity of the state of exception as well as the ways in which the law can be applied allegorically to other fields of knowledge. We see this especially in Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan, where legal examples of dire need (ranging from the feud to the maxim necessity knows no law) are used as metaphors to explore how courtly love is often begun by necessity and consummated in extremis. What Gottfried’s allegorical mode reveals is that love, with all its laws, is ultimately a state of exception.