In the 12th century CE, the troubadour poets of southern France invented a new kind of love. It is an oversimplification, to be sure, this assertion that romantic love, or what came to be called Courtly Love, is a new contrivance. Lyrical celebrations of erotic and emotional attachment between two people, such as the Song of Songs, to cite an obvious example, were hardly unknown to earlier times. But there is still a truth to the assertion that the kind of romantic love celebrated by the Courtly Love tradition is different from earlier expressions of love, and one manifestation of that difference is a very different relationship to marriage, the subject of which the present newsletter is a continuation from last week. In Courtly Love, both the beloved and love itself are so intensely idealized that they often seem to lead beyond any possible happy ending in the ordinary world. Originally, romantic love of this type was a love outside of marriage. As the word “Courtly” implies, romantic love was a preoccupation of the aristocratic elite—and among the aristocracy, marriages were controlled and arranged. They were ways of disposing of estates and of cementing political alliances, in addition to the age-old goal of marriage, reproduction. The original purpose of marriage was not “romantic” but social.
September 8, 2023
September 8, 2023
September 8, 2023
In the 12th century CE, the troubadour poets of southern France invented a new kind of love. It is an oversimplification, to be sure, this assertion that romantic love, or what came to be called Courtly Love, is a new contrivance. Lyrical celebrations of erotic and emotional attachment between two people, such as the Song of Songs, to cite an obvious example, were hardly unknown to earlier times. But there is still a truth to the assertion that the kind of romantic love celebrated by the Courtly Love tradition is different from earlier expressions of love, and one manifestation of that difference is a very different relationship to marriage, the subject of which the present newsletter is a continuation from last week. In Courtly Love, both the beloved and love itself are so intensely idealized that they often seem to lead beyond any possible happy ending in the ordinary world. Originally, romantic love of this type was a love outside of marriage. As the word “Courtly” implies, romantic love was a preoccupation of the aristocratic elite—and among the aristocracy, marriages were controlled and arranged. They were ways of disposing of estates and of cementing political alliances, in addition to the age-old goal of marriage, reproduction. The original purpose of marriage was not “romantic” but social.