Sign Up Now
Get instant access to over 1 million+ study documents
OR
Already registered? click here to login
By creating your account, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and student honor code.
Courtly love is usually defined solely in terms of the image of a noble knight pining for a woman he cannot have, because she is married or betrothed to another. Later writers such as Dante, Cervantes, and Milton often viewed this construct of courtly love as absurd or funny. Dante in particular saw courtly love as an inferior reflection of the love a man was supposed to feel for God. In the Italian poet's own affection for Beatrice, a woman he fell in love from afar, he felt that his love for this woman acts was a kind of conduit to higher spiritual truth and feelings for the divine. Likewise, courtly love's use of an earthly woman was the parallel for an mediating holy figure such as Mary who acted as an intermediary between God and humanity -- for Cervantes, it did not matter what the woman was 'really' like (Dulcinea is actually a barmaid in "Don Quixote") only that the knight felt love for something on earth to lead him to do noble deeds. One author described courtly love as "derived from the sight of and excessive meditation upon the beauty of the opposite sex, which causes each one to wish above all things the embraces of the other...
(Andreas 28).
However, courtly love in its original, Arthurian incarnation was not simply about a man's relationship with God, as seen through the form of a woman. Feeling love for a lord's lady also suggested a profound political conflict of loyalty between the knight's own interests and his lord's desires. The knight Tristan pines for Isolde, even though she is destined to become King Mark's queen. Loyalty, through arranged marriages and feudal alliances, pressures the knight and the woman to behave in a carefully contained manner. But in their hearts, because of their spiritual longings for one another, and simply their own self-interested desire for love, tear them in a different way, away from their obligations owed to Mark. Thus courtly love underlined an inherent contradiction between the material and the spiritual in medieval times, between society and individual, and the interests of institutions such as church and king with the self-interested…
Works Cited
Andreas, le Chapelain. De Amore et Amoris Remedio. Translation by P.G.Walsh. London: Duckworth 1982.
de France, Marie. The Lais of Marie de France. With Introduction, Translation, and Notes by Robert Hanning and Joan Ferrante. Grand Rapids: Baker Books 1995.
"Tristan and Isolde." Arthurian Legends. 2005
http://www.angelfire.com/me2/legends/
Middle Ages Romances Le Chevalier au Lion Chretien de Troyes' Le Chevalier au Lion (The Knight of the Lion) tells the story of the lovelorn Arthurian knight Yvain, rather than Arthur and Guievere themselves. Thus, the tale of Yvain acts a powerful challenge to contemporary assumptions of about what constitutes a Middle Age Arthurian Romance. First of all, the tale does not revolve around the knightly, courtly conventions of Arthurian honor
This includes the need to maintain chastity, a test Perceval passes when he "has a close call with sexual temptation: slipping into bed with a demon in alluringly feminine form, he is only saved when his glance falls on the red cross inscribed on his sword pommel. The 'lady' and her silk tent disappear in a flash and a puff of smoke, leaving the tell-tale sulphurous stench of hell.
Pearl Poet's Sir Gawain The Arthurian Legends are one of the most mysterious of Middle English literature. For many years historians have tried to match King Arthur to one of the Early Kings of Britain, however, all attempts have met without success. It is now generally accepted that King Arthur and the other Knights of the Round table represent a composite of the behaviors and attitudes of people of that time
The supernatural element is also often present in the Arthurian legends, such as the appearance of the Green Knight in Sir Gawain, and it is an important part of the mystical experiences described in the legends. In a sense, the knights, just like the epic heroes, are confronted with the supernatural so as to prove their worthiness, but the difference is that the knights, such as Lancelot, Percival or
As Pearsall indicates, in discussion on a French retelling by Chretien De Troyes, "Perceval's quest receives only 200 lines: he loses faith, meets some penitents on Good Friday who expound to him succinctly the meaning of Christ's sacrifice and goes to a hermit from whom he hears the explanation of the grail and from whom he himself receives communion." (Pearsall, 37) This may be perceived as a statement that
The French tradition of the Arthurian legends, however, are far less overtly political in their approach to the tales and to Guinevere in particular, and though politics and loyalties are still important elements of these stories the aspects of romance, love, and sexuality are far more prominent. Beginning with the poet Chretien de Troyes, Guinevere began to take on a more active role that at once justifies the feminine