The Art of Courtly Love
What is love? The question as to what love is, is an age-old question that men and women have pondered since the beginning of time. Dictionary.com tells us that love is "A deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness." We still wonder if love can be described in a simple dictionary definition. In The Art of Courtly Love Capellanus gives us a straightforward definition much like this one in the beginning of the book. It says "Love is a certain inborn suffering derived from the sight of and excessive meditation upon the beauty of the opposite sex. Which causes each one to wish above all things the embraces of the other and be common desire to carry out all love's precepts in the others embrace. As we read on there are many more definitions, some more complex, some that would be seen as ridiculous in the twenty-first century and some that contradict them selves. Capellanus leaves it up to his readers to decide for themselves the true definition of love. Before we look at what love is, how to approach it and how to keep it Capellanus gives t
What is love? This question cannot be answered using any book and certainly not in The Art of Courtly Love, or one hundred other books written by different people on the subject. Love is something different to every person who experiences it. You can give advice on how to obtain love and try to explain how it feels to be in love. But, the main problem in The Art of Courtly Love is that love is written about as something that people choose to do or can be persuaded to do while it is not. Love is something that just happens to people What one must do to keep love I think is where Capellanuses chief contradictions fall into place. On page 151 Capellanus says that love, in order to remain strong, and must remain hidden. On the same page he also says that a lover must be wise all the time, do nothing annoying or disagreeable and agree with what his lover wants, even if he knows it is unreasonable. I agree that love can be pain, suffering and carry unequal weights in each lover's hand but these statements seem to make love out to be something fictional, instead of the true emotional fixation that love is. I do agree in the theory that absence does make the heart grow fonder but I do not think that that absence is the only way that love can last. I also agree that a man should occasionally succumb to the wishes of his lover, no matter whether he agrees or not but if he is to do this all of the time it will create a monopoly in the relationship that need not be there. Even taking into consideration the time period in which The Art of Courtly Love was written does not help justify these fallacies that Capellanus states to be the sole way to retain love. Also, when approaching love a man must be aware of his social class and the social class of his love interest and act accordingly to those classes. It would take to long to name how each social class should act toward another social class but, for example a man who is of a higher nobility wil
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Approximate Word count = 1323
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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