No Side-Hugs or Supervision? Cool.

                Call me weird, but the first thing I considered when I finished this essay was the definition of “courtly.” I mean, we live in a world where “courting” means side-hugs, no hand-holding (EVER), and constant supervision (thanks a lot, Duggars).  So that was my rather uneducated misconception.  And Capellanus talks A LOT about sex in “The Art of Courtly Love” (and my definition of “courtly” does NOT, under any circumstances have anything to do with sex except for the prohibition of it.) So I was pleasantly surprised when the first sentence I read was, “Love is a certain inborn suffering derived from the sight of and excessive meditation of the beauty of the opposite sex…” (Capellanus).  Now, I think that is simply beautiful; and so is the rest of the sentence, which indicates that this meditation “causes each one to wish above all things the embraces of the other and by common desire to carry out all of love’s precepts in the other’s embrace” (Capellanus).  I really wasn’t expecting to have my mind blown so quickly.

                Mostly, I loved that I found so many similarities between this and our modern conceptions of how we should love.  That being said, I think this guy is one of the reasons why so many women harp on being romantic and all that sappy stuff.  Capellanus describes love, and its rules, in a rather blunt way, but in the same respect, it is also beautiful. 

                My favorite chapter is the one in which he describes, of all things, the TYPES of people who should love.  One difference is that “after the sixtieth year in a man and the fiftieth year in a woman…the natural heat begins to lose its force…” (Capellanus).  This just seems funny to me, because love is all about sex? Um, I think that’s what we’re currently trying to get away from, but it still amuses me.  Similarly, he talks about how no boy under the age of eighteen can be in love because he’s too caught up being clumsy and embarrassed by his genitals.  YES.  It’s so funny how even then men were men and boys were boys.  I was pleasantly comforted by the fact that these people (or their beliefs, rather) weren’t so much different from those we have now.  To put it into perspective, I think it really makes reading the work of this time a lot less daunting.  As long as we can put it into a historical perspective, the basic rules and ways in which they conducted themselves can be translated into something we can understand.  A lot of their social beliefs are the same as ours.  Or rather, they are the ones who paved the way for some of the social constructs we have today.  Pretty cool.