week 5

Question 1

stages of courtly love

Answer 1

• attraction to the lady, usually via eyes/glances
• worship of the lady from afar
• declaration of passionate devotion
• virtuous rejection by the lady
• love-sickness
• quest/heroic deed’s which win the lady’s heart
• consummation of the secret love
• endless adventures and subterfuge to avoid detection

Question 2

courtly love definitions

Answer 2

1580: to pay amorous attention, to seek to gain the affections of, to make love to, woo with a view to marriage
1896: highly conventionalized medieval system of chivalric love and etiquette, first developed by the troubadours of southern France and extensively employed in European literature from the 12th century throughout the medieval period

Question 3

Marie de Champagne’s court: guillaume de lorris

Answer 3

• dream allegory (most popular work)
• purpose: entertain and teach about the art of love
• guillaume (c. 1230) describes in 4058 lines the attempts of a courtier to woo his beloved
• much of the story is set in a walled garden
• Jean de Meung added 17724 lines (c. 1275)
• philosophical and encyclopedic discussion
• at the same time: rather mysogynistic

Question 4

Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122 - 1204)

Answer 4

first troubadour was her grandfather
wife of Louis VII of France
- Alice of Blois + Marie de Champagne
- no boys –> eventually divorce
wife of Henry II of England
- John Lackland + Richard Lionheart
- she brought the courtly love tradition with her to England

Question 5

courty love: history

Answer 5

troubadours = poets who are going from place to place, they make stories/poems about this special kind of love
it absorbs the culture from Spanish, Italian and Germanic countries

Question 6

sensible soul

Answer 6

sensible soul = mediator between reason and passion, aims at Integrity

Question 7

Marie de Champagne’s court

Answer 7

chertien de troyes: lancelot
Andea capellanus: de arte honeste amandi
- the lady is superior ‘mistress’
- lover becomes the vassal (feudal system)
- courts of love and cases
–> marriage is no excuse for not loving
–> he who is not jealous cannot love
–> when one lover dies, a widowhood of tow years is required
- courtly love should be adulterous –> chaucer questions this
guillaume de lorris: roman de la rose

Question 8

mans body and soul

Answer 8

the soul had an important value in the medieval time
plato’s triparlite souls (4th century BC)
- in the head resides reason
- in the chest or heart resides spirit (what makes a man courage)
- in the belly resides appetite (for food and sex)

Question 9

what is courtly love?

Answer 9

love between man and woman of status (aristocrats)
not love between spouses
- business not love, for procreation, priestly administration, a sacrament after IV lateran council (1215)
love between commoners is lust
–> elevated to pure love

Question 10

medieval soul (13th century AD) - Christian version

Answer 10

in the head: the rational soul (reason)
in the heart: the sensible soul (feeling)
- most important one
–> five outward senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch
–> five inward senses: memory, instinct, imagination, fantasy, wit
in the belly: the vegetable soul (passion i.e. nutrition, growth, propagation, appetite)