Courtly love is known as the ultimate type of love, when a man is willing to do anything for the one he desires. It was practiced across Europe during the middle ages. Courtly love was something that for many was not obtained within their marriage, either the wife or the husband usually found it with someone outside of the marriage, although the romantic custom of courtly love allows the knights and ladies to show their admiration regardless of their marital status for example it was a common occurrence for a married lady to give a token to a knight of her choice to be worn during their tournament. The concept of courtly love is also combined with the code of chivalry which forms the ideal medieval world of brave and elegant knights.
One …show more content…
In consequence of this, adultery is presented as a romantic feature of love although in reality adultery, especially that form of adultery in which a vassal seduced the wife of his lord, was “regarded in medieval law as a form of treason on a level with regicide” (Benton, 27). The punishments were harsh and in form of castration, banishment and death. In the light of these severe historical realities, the love story of Lancelot and Queen Guinevere is quite a different tale, than the romantic and glorified one that Gaston Paris imagined. It is highly probable that Paris got the wrong intention of Chretien de Troye`s Lancelot story, because Chretien described deliberately a behavior which would be definitely denounced by his courtly audience. They looked on Lancelot as the knight who rides in a shameful cart, who betrays his lord and not as the casual lover. Chretien could not foresee that the modern society regards Lancelot as a sympathetic figure who was guided by love rather than reason, depending on the fact that “modern attitudes differ from the medieval ones” (Benton, 28). David Lyle Jeffrey in fact goes beyond this and declares that courtly love was used here as a literary vehicle for social satire (c.f. Jeffrey, …show more content…
Paris and the other modern authors missed entirely the contextual irony and thus the real meaning of the story. It is not only a phenomenon of Victorian English readers as well German readers often “failed to perceive the ironical overtones in French literature”(Jackson, 55) and according to that they display something as lovely and charming, what the French medieval authors were deriding. Corresponding, the most modern interpretations of medieval love literature tell us more about modern sensibilities than medieval ones. This misunderstanding, too, is based on the fact that people in the medieval times were not comfortable with the practices of approving and analyzing intimate feelings and in fact, we know almost nothing about the way “real-life” men and women actually felt when they were in love, because “only a very small amount of factual documentations is available to reveal their emotions to us” (Porter, 9). It is rather likely that desire for love as a basic human need was also an elementary factor in the society of the Middle Age and also that emotions like tensions, passions and jealousies existed as they do in society today. These emotions are rooted in all human beings independent from the eras, but to what extent they could be shown in public or could be acted out, is relative to restrictions and customs of the
One …show more content…
In consequence of this, adultery is presented as a romantic feature of love although in reality adultery, especially that form of adultery in which a vassal seduced the wife of his lord, was “regarded in medieval law as a form of treason on a level with regicide” (Benton, 27). The punishments were harsh and in form of castration, banishment and death. In the light of these severe historical realities, the love story of Lancelot and Queen Guinevere is quite a different tale, than the romantic and glorified one that Gaston Paris imagined. It is highly probable that Paris got the wrong intention of Chretien de Troye`s Lancelot story, because Chretien described deliberately a behavior which would be definitely denounced by his courtly audience. They looked on Lancelot as the knight who rides in a shameful cart, who betrays his lord and not as the casual lover. Chretien could not foresee that the modern society regards Lancelot as a sympathetic figure who was guided by love rather than reason, depending on the fact that “modern attitudes differ from the medieval ones” (Benton, 28). David Lyle Jeffrey in fact goes beyond this and declares that courtly love was used here as a literary vehicle for social satire (c.f. Jeffrey, …show more content…
Paris and the other modern authors missed entirely the contextual irony and thus the real meaning of the story. It is not only a phenomenon of Victorian English readers as well German readers often “failed to perceive the ironical overtones in French literature”(Jackson, 55) and according to that they display something as lovely and charming, what the French medieval authors were deriding. Corresponding, the most modern interpretations of medieval love literature tell us more about modern sensibilities than medieval ones. This misunderstanding, too, is based on the fact that people in the medieval times were not comfortable with the practices of approving and analyzing intimate feelings and in fact, we know almost nothing about the way “real-life” men and women actually felt when they were in love, because “only a very small amount of factual documentations is available to reveal their emotions to us” (Porter, 9). It is rather likely that desire for love as a basic human need was also an elementary factor in the society of the Middle Age and also that emotions like tensions, passions and jealousies existed as they do in society today. These emotions are rooted in all human beings independent from the eras, but to what extent they could be shown in public or could be acted out, is relative to restrictions and customs of the