In his Tristan and Isolde, Gottfried of Strassburg lays out a non-courtly, non-comic, mystical vision of love. As WTH Jackson puts it in The Anatomy of Love, Gottfried rejects the comic vision of love as uncomplicated and easy joy. He also rejects the idea that the lover seeks the moments of joy in the presence of the beloved. “It is precisely this idea of love with which Gottfried disagrees. He does not believe that love can be entirely happy, not because he... Read more
Yellowhammer News reports that the Alabama state legislature is considering getting the state out of the marriage business: “State Senator Greg Albritton (R-Range) saw his bill to remove the state government from the marriage business clear its first hurdle Wednesday, after it passed out of the Judiciary committee unanimously. “SB377 would remove the duty of confirming marriages from county probate judges and allow marriages to be recorded by the state after filing a simple contract between two people eligible to be... Read more
Barbara Newman has argued in Medieval Crossover that we mistake medieval literature and thought if we look at it from a post-Renaissance angle of vision. Sacred and secular exist in every world, and the shift from medieval to modern doesn’t change that. The issue, though, is which is the default option. For us, the secular is the obvious, natural state. For medieval, “the sacred was the inclusive whole in which the secular had to establish a niche” (viii). This is why... Read more
Allegorization was one of the techniques medieval used, adapted from ancient writers, to incorporate pagan writing in a biblical framework. As Ernst Curtius (European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages) writes, “the Middle Ages subjected profane writers to allegorical interpretation exactly as it did the Bible, and . . . regarded them as sages or ‘philosophers’” (52). Allegorizing becomes the mode of interpretation during the medieval period: “It finds expression not only in the ‘moralizing’ of Ovid and other authors... Read more
Even today, when historians have abandoned the idea, many regard the Middle Ages as a time dark and ignorant, the huddled masses in shadows until the burst of light that came with the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment. For centuries, it is often thought, medieval thinkers knew little of the classical world, and hated what little they knew. Not so. Medieval thinkers and educators didn’t invent the liberal arts, but they took them up with abandon. One of the most... Read more
Andreas Capellanus literally wrote the book on the Art of Courtly Love, but the concluding Book 3 suggests that the book was a cautionary tale throughout. Capellanus closes the treatise with an exhortation to Walter, the man to whom the book is addressed to abstain from the desires of the flesh: “If you will study carefully this little treatise of ours and understand it completely and practice what it teaches, you will see clearly that no man ought to mis-spend his... Read more
Insofar as Derrida’s thought is a thought of the ineffable, retreated sublime, the transcendent signified that escapes language and leaves only traces, his thought is structured like the courtship of a courtly lover. In an essay in the Cardozo Law Review, Barbara Vinken shows that Derrida was quite self-conscious about the debt, describing his relationship to language as that of a courtly lover to his mistress. As Vinken explains, Derrida sets up his analogy by exploring sexual metaphors to describe various relationships... Read more
Before Lacan and Zizek devoted attention to courtly love, there was Denis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World, which was popular reading among French intellectuals among whom postmodernism arose. It’s an exaggeration to say that postmodernism ontologizes courtly love, but it’s the kind of exaggeration that gets at the truth. Like many others, Rougemont argues that romantic love is a specific paradigm of love that is specific to Western civilization. It’s a matter of falling in love with love. In... Read more
Jacques Lacan devoted considerable attention to the psychoanalytical import of the courtly love tradition, and this has been developed at some length by Slavoj Zizek, especially in Metastases of Enjoyment. For Zizek, the elevation of the Lady that takes place in courtly love isn’t a “spiritualization” but rather a distancing that treats the woman as an abstraction, a “cold, distanced, inhuman partner.” She is “by no means a warm, compassionate, understanding fellow-creature.” He quotes Lacan’s observation that in courtly love, the... Read more
Troilus is mentioned in the Iliad, long enough to die. Priam laments that his best sons have died at Greek hands, leaving him with only the dregs of his family. In Pope’s translation: Inglorious sons of an unhappy sire! Why did you not all in Hector’s cause expire? Wretch that I am! My bravest offspring slain, You, the disgrace of Priam’s house, remain! Mestor the brace, renown’d in ranks of war, with Troilus, dreadful in his rushing car, and last... Read more
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