Today in History of Music (not having to listen to the lecture does give one time to think, I've found) Dr. Allen mentioned something that made my mind wander from the subject at hand - Papal Avignon and Pope Clement V, if anyone is curious. He asked us what courtly love was and he said I was spot-on when I said that it was a pure, non-physical honor and devotion that a knight held for his lady, and vice-versa. While Dr. Allen said I was right, I didn't really delve too deeply into the true meaning of courtly love.
Dictionary.com tells me that courtly love is:
The conception of an ideal and exalted relation between the sexes, which developed in the West in mediaeval times from sources as various as Plato's Phaedrus, Ovid's Ars Amatoria, and the cult of the Virgin Mary. Before the 12th-c women were for the most part considered inferior to men, but courtly love idealized women, placing them on a pedestal, and the lover's feelings for his mistress were supposed to ennoble him and lead him towards moral excellence. Mediaeval love poetry was deeply infused by the idea, which also influenced Renaissance sonneteers, although by this time the convention was treated with some irony.
Coincidentally, we had been discussing this very subject in Chaucer last week. Frank asked us what a "gentleman" was and we all offered our own interpretations of the term. The words gentle, polite, chivalrous, manly, and brave were all mentioned. Well, being a gentleman in those days also meant being a nobleman, and being a nobleman generally meant that said gentleman adhered to the rules of chivalry - courtly love being an important part of the rules of chivalry.
Frank pointed out, while were discussing what made a man a "gentleman" both now and back in the Middle Ages, that there are very few gentlemen in this world. They are a dying breed. Why? Women's liberation seems to bear a lot of the blame, at least from other sources. Women don't need men anymore, therefore why should men attempt to live up to the rules of gentlemanly conduct when there is no one to reap the benefits?
My question is this: Why should gentlemanly conduct depend upon the behavior of women? This attitude harkens back to the good ol' days when we women were "higher beings" and "angels on earth" and men claimed that women must behave well in order to reign in man's more primitive and uncouth nature. Yet these same men frequented brothels and kept mistresses - "bad girls". Did the mild natures of their sisters, wives, and mothers keep these men "gentlemen"? I think not.
A true gentleman is a gentleman unto himself. He is a gentleman to please himself and God - then, and only then, can he please others.
Since I've hashed this out, I have only one question left, and that is: Where is my gentleman, I wonder?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Part of the problem is also that nobody cares about blood anymore. It used to be that when lower class people got wealthy, they'd try to act as much like gentlemen as possible so that they'd blend in with the "real" gentlemen. These days, though, there's much less of a class distinction and since gentlemen were always a minority, they're the ones who got absorbed, not the other way around. (Plus, to be frank, the courtly love ideal got on everybody's nerves since no big strong man who's been trained since early childhood in the noble art of killing things wants to do ridiculous things for a lady who isn't going to sleep with him anyway.)
Post a Comment