Around the 12th century – period then known as low middle age – a specific type of “love,” or loving behavior, developed. it was about the courteous love. By courteous love is meant the kind of love that idealized the loved person, elevating him to an ethereal plane, that is, almost divine. In addition, there was in the atmosphere of courteous love the “love game”, which was installed from the moment a third gentleman began to court the married lady, feeding her pride and arousing the jealousy of the husband.
Many historians agree that medieval courtly love first appeared in the region of Occitan, located between the south of France and Spain, and that its roots come from the Arab culture, which settled for centuries in this region. Among the Arabs there was “a certain idealizing exaltation of women”, as proposed by the Portuguese researcher José Maria Silva Rosa in his essay “The Spiritual Transfiguration of Courtly Love in Bernardo de Claraval". From such exaltation a loving form of mystical tone was born, that is, a type of "communion" between the souls of lovers, such as there is in the mystical "communion" of religious with God.
It was in this context that the ideal of courtesy. Courtship implied submission and unconditional fidelity to the woman he loved on the part of the medieval knight. The honors of chivalry and the prestige gained by the knight enabled him to prostrate himself before the desired lady. Some historians have observed that in this gesture there was also a certain symbolic reproduction of the social relations of the feudal system that took place between lords and vassals.
When it came to the "love game", the feudal lords, who allowed young knights to inhabit their court, they also allowed them to court his wife, without, however, granting the primacy of conjunction carnal. Adultery was reprimanded, but the game of seduction was allowed as a tactic to strengthen the marital bonds between wife and master, as well as the lord's authority over younger knights.
One of the late Middle Ages intellectuals who reflected on courtly love was Bernardo de Claraval (1090-1153). Claraval's reflection focused on the obsessive aspect of desire that was implicit in courtly love—a deviant form of the soul of loving God. The mystical love of souls for Christ would have, in the form of courtly love, channeled to the figure of the lover and, therefore, according to Claraval, always was frustrated, given that the loved person could never correspond to the idealized perfection, since the substance of the perfection was just divine.
St. Bernard of Claraval developed a theological reflection on courteous love *
As emphasized by the aforementioned researcher, José Maria Silva Rosa, “from the point of view of Bernardo de Claraval, the tragedy of courteous love and of all human love” is “to aim at the unity of lovers, but not to be able to achieve it”.
In the medieval imagination, many popular songs created by troubadours who inhabited the courts became famous for their theme of courtly love. This was the case with Roman de la Rose (Romance of the Rose), which began to be written, initially, by the poet Guillaume de Lorris, around 1230.
* Image credits: Shutterstock and Zvonimir Athletic
By Me. Cláudio Fernandes
Source: Brazil School - https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/historiag/amor-cortes-medieval.htm