It is impossible to understand the Tudors without considering Renaissance-era love, above all the courtly kind, argues Sarah Gristwood in “The Tudors in Love”
and the rituals of modern romance—without considering Renaissance-era love, above all the courtly kind.
Yet much like the ideal courtly maiden, the precise definition of courtly love is hard to pin down. It seems to have begun as a literary trope among French troubadours, before an 11th-century ecclesiastical clampdown on sexuality apparently caused a literary ideal to become a pragmatic one. Carnal romping was out; largely chaste mooning around was in.of the “gentil knight” was not always as pure, nor the knight so gentil, as the literary ideal implies.
Soon, courtly love was popular enough to have its own genre of slightly creepy self-help guides, including one that offered a series of points on how the infatuated courtly lover should behave. Rule two advised that “He who is not jealous cannot love.” Point 15 explained that “Every lover regularly turns pale in the presence of his beloved.” Few things shout unbridled passion like a numbered how-to list.
The prolonged smouldering of Henry VIII’s feelings for Anne adhered to the courtly code, as did the flirtations with courtiers that contributed to her downfall. InIn the end, though, its divorce from reality is the big problem with courtly love. Often it feels like a contrived conceit with which the showy elevated their lusts. It is a relief when, as the book progresses, later writers such as Shakespeare and Erasmus—still widely read and admired today—pop up to laugh heartily at the genre.
But perhaps courtly love foresaw its own demise. As rule 17 in that list had it, “A new love puts to flight an old one.” That goes for literature as well as paramours.
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