Re: Courtly behavior (fwd)

[clevin@ripco.com (Craig Levin)]

Poster: clevin@ripco.com (Craig Levin)

AEdric the Grene:

> While I am all for courtesy and Chivalry (which co-developed with Courtly
> Love), I am very much NOT a beliver in Courtly Love.  From what I've read
> and been taught, it comes across as something that I do not believe is part
> of the "Middle Ages As It Should Have Been".  The crux of the problem is
> that I find it anti-woman while claiming not to be.  Hardly an ideal I'd be
> at all interested in encouraging.

I've never liked the phrase "Middle Ages [aside: only English
puts the period into the plural, AFAIK. Neat, huh?] As They
Should Have Been." That aside, I'd note that amour courtois isn't
exactly a dominating influence on a great deal of the Middle
Ages, arising as it did in the 12th century, which means that the
period had, by our definition, only four centuries to go. I can
hardly imagine a Northman of the "Viking Age" taking its ideas
seriously-his outlook on the role of the sexes was different from
both our present one and that of his sixteenth century
descendants. See Lewis' Allegory of Love on this.

_However_, once amour courtois came into being, it didn't take
long for it to spread to most of western Europe (it took a bit
longer for it to get to eastern Europe, if it got there at all).
For most people's personae, amour courtois would have formed part
and parcel of their upbringing. Even the poor got to sample a bit
of it, because the cult of the Virgin and amour courtois
essentially are facets of the same gem. Some people do protest it
(for example, De La Tour Landry and De Pisan), but even they end
up giving it credit for a number of things.

> Without going into a long treatise with references to works, college class
> notes, and all, I'll try to sum up why I believe this.  Men place women as
> the objects of desire and then expect women to follow these rules.  In
> fact, what with the worship and acting as servants to them, they cage and
> bind the women into a circumscribed role that turns previous power into
> lessened influence, collapses a women's world into the sphere of love and
> breeding heirs, and generally takes away any power and authority they may
> have had previously.

Actually, I'd say that it empowered women. Poetry, before then,
was essentially epic. A man's world. Take Beowulf as a classic
example. Once amour courtois developed, women became sources of
patronage, if not authorship, in their own right (like Marie de
France and, paradoxically, Christine de Pisan). Also, if one
looks at the texts of the poems, it's the women who make the
decisions, not the men (with the exception of the poems of
Bertrand de Born and Guillaume, duc d'Aquitaine, for example).

> Thus, while I will support Chivalry (which fortunately has rules quite
> apart from Courtly Love), I will not particpate in a game that actively
> promotes (No matter how innocent or noble the intentions of those
> recreating it) inequality of women.  Of course, one can argue that women
> can not be Chivalrous (not in Period, at least), but it is not inherently
> anti-women.

Unless you're using the old classification of Painter (whose
study has been cast in doubt by the works of Barber and Keen),
it's not really all that easy to tease the two apart. Certainly,
by the fourteenth century, when Froissart was writing his
_Chroniques_, a work as unlike a love poem as anything I've ever
read, the codes of amour courtois and knighthood are inextricably
intertwined.

> certainly we should expect equal Chivalry from all to the best of each
> gentle's abilities.  If this seems improper for Period to you, then maybe
> you gain immediare insight into my argument above.

"From each according to his/her abilities, to each according to
his/her needs"? Sounds like Marxism to me...

In Service,

Dom Pedro de Alcazar
Barony of Storvik, Atlantia
Drakkar Pursuivant
Argent, a tower purpure between 3 bunches of grapes proper
-- 
http://pages.ripco.com:8080/~clevin/index.html 
clevin@ripco.com
Craig Levin
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