courtly love was the intrcate and riddling game of flirtation devised for mixing company at medieval courts. It depended upon teasing allusion to suspected, fictitious or real love-affairs, and the attraction of the game lay partly in agreeable shivers of salaciousness, but more in the opportunities it provided for graceful compliments, witty acrostics and guessing puns, for covert insolence or irony, and for expressions of real passion. And the real passion might centre upon loss or upon frustration or (as very often) the passage of time, and take a flirtatious subject merely as the vehicle for a profounder theme. Courtly love ,therefore, can provide the occasion for dignified wriring or for jaunty, flippant verse; it can be serious or it can be slight, and it is wrong to feel that its scope is narrow. the range is as wide as that of one human being's passion for another and sometimes, when human passion is used as a metaphor for divine or metaphisical passion, a good deal wider.
2006-10-10
02:20:15
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