Courtly love

unobtainable and that's part of the the attractiveness that you actually can't marry this person you can't be with that person it doesn't mean you can't love them deeply and desire them it's fascinating what that says about aspects of humanity what you can't obtain is almost more valuable than what you can obtain

yeah i think it says quite a lot about male sexuality and the thrill of the chase i mean it's certainly still a thing in the 16th century the courtly love culture and You know, I did an interview the other day with Susan Brigden, who wrote a brilliant book about Sir Thomas Wyatt, one of the most brilliant poets at the court of Henry VIII.

And his poems, many of them do conform to that courtly love convention of the suffering lover and the scornful, dismissive beloved.

And, you know, they're sort of continually moaning and complaining about her not paying him the necessary attention.

But that's also part of the game.

I mean, this is kind of a game of courtly love by the 16th century.

And men pick a woman whom they serve in the language of courtly love.

And that's the one to whom they write their poetry and they sing their songs and they give their gifts.

And I also took a medieval literature class.

I read Andreas Cappellanus, Courtly Love, as well as Mort Darthur and a few others.

So where does Atlantis first show up?

Plato.

The myth that love poetry was entirely metaphorical comes from Puritans writing in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

In 1881, Gaston Perri coined the term amour courtois, meaning courtly love.

His idea was that these love poems depicted an idealized romantic fantasy, or that they were a form of escapism, whereby people could play-act having affairs as they remained chaste.

In the English-speaking world, the myth of courtly love was popularized by none other than C.S. Lewis, the popular children's author of the Chronicles of Narnia series.

Both Perry and Lewis imposed a puritanical understanding on the troubadours based on their interpretation of the work of Châtien de Troyes.

It is telling that they chose this figure since Chrétien de Troyes was not a troubadour but a trouvaire.

Had Perry and Lewis read the works of Guillaume, Duke of Aquitaine, wherein he regales his audience with his many ideas about lady parts and how to handle them, it's likely they would have come to different conclusions.

God forbid that they ever read Marc Abreu.

Obviously, we are, but the str- the extraordinary thing about it is that we recognize in our lives, in the magical world of film, that is to say, the world of illusion deliberately promoted by film, uh, and in fiction, we recognize the absolutely central significance of this distinction.

That's what's so wonderful and amazing about the essay by Žižek you'll be reading for next week called Courtly Love, which I d- which I love, uh, and which, uh, which, which is headlines, which features readings of a series of films, uh, in which the Lacanian distinction between the impossibility ever of achieving the big other...

By the way, there seem to be-- there are times in various kinds of fictional plots in which you can actually have the object of desire, but what always happens in plots like that is that the unconscious, the psyche, finds ways of rejecting it.

You know, "I can't have that, it's my brother," or, "I can't, uh, I, I can't have that." It is, in one form or another, forbidden, right? In other words, it is, it, it, it, in, in actuality, in the way in which the psyche works, uh, according to the structure of the films, uh, Žižek undertakes to analyze, and he's so profuse in examples that he really does leave us feeling that there's a kind of universality in what he's saying.

There's clearly something there about that connection.

The 12th century was a really special time because when we reach the 11th and 12th centuries, the material gets really rich because across medieval Europe, and especially in France, we've got the devotion to the Black Madonna and Our Lady, as we spoke about, the building of the great Gothic cathedrals, troubadour poetry and courtly love, and then the grail romances.

They're all popping up.

You can't keep it down.

Whoever thought it up, you know, it was a wonderful idea.

Because it's a magical fascination for people.

And the grail literature grows inside this world of troubadours and courtly love.

And there's this other place where the feminine figure we've been following appears again as the lady.