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ORIGINAL: Faramir

I can see it being a good model for a Female Dom/Male Sub with a chastity thing going on. He loves here in kneeling admiration, serves her, but she is unattainable, perhaps wed to another and thus he is denied consumation.

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ORIGINAL: MellowSir

Well there ARE the rare exceptions lol, nowadays you're lucky if the people are even kind to each other, never mind the romantic side of things, how many couples have you seen that when they're out together, the attention is sorely lacking, a flower sent every now and then is a good thing, have the heart and all else follows.....

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ORIGINAL: juliaoceania

By and large this was a patriarchal society, which valued women based upon birth, ability to produce children, or as servants. Women just were not the equal of men.

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ORIGINAL: LadyHeart

My understanding of courtly love is that it was an ideal. All those beautiful sentiments were addressed to someone who was by definition unattainable. It was an elaborate game in which everyone knew the rules. The whole point of the Launcelot fiasco was that it trespassed across the boundaries and entered real life. In that, I can see a lot of correlations with BDSM. As long as it remians a game and everyone knows the rules, it is "safe." Once it enters everyday life, kingdoms can fall....
:))
LH

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ORIGINAL: welshwmn3

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ORIGINAL: juliaoceania

By and large this was a patriarchal society, which valued women based upon birth, ability to produce children, or as servants. Women just were not the equal of men.

I know you are talking about a more western european model, but there were civilizations in that time frame where men and women were valued the same.  The Mongolian Nation, under Ghengis Khan, for example, had both men and women in their armies (as warriors, the women weren't just around to feed the army) when they went out to conquor the whole world.  Yes, once a woman became a mother, she was respected more, and that was due to her procreative abilities.  But she wasn't valued ONLY for being a mother.

Also, the Norse valued women as highly as men.  Most of the household goods was owned by women, including the house itself.  If a woman was married and decided to divorce her man, all she had to do was put his personal belongings on the doorstep (and personal belongings meant his clothes, shoes, weapons, everything else was hers).

I know there were other cultures where the woman was respected and valued as much as the man (and not just for her ability to tend house and bear children), but I don't know as much about those cultures as I do about Mongolian and Norse/Viking.

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ORIGINAL: Faramir

A 12th Century poet, Chretien de Troyes, took the Arthur stories from their Celtic/British (The Mabinogi and Geoffrey of Monmouth) setting and added in a series of stories about a Gaullic knight, Lancelot.  He both added in the story of Marc, Trastan and Iseult, but also borrowed and replciated the narrative, motifs and tropes of that story and added it in to the Lancelot-Guinivere story.  Thus a Brythonic/Cornish/Gaullic hybrid story emerges from Chterien, that becomes the very popular 13th Century Vulgate Cycle.

The courty love, the illicit/pure, fleshly/spiritual contradiction of courtly love is thus a product primarily of Chretien's writing.  Later, in the prose additions that make up half the Cycle, the Christian mores that condemn the love between Lancelot and Gunivere emerge, but in the 12 century poetic stories, the love does not have that guilt association.  You cna read any number of his stories, but the most familiar and popular is The Knight of the Cart.
....

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ORIGINAL: MellowSir

Nothing wrong with showing some class, there sure seems a lack of it in today's world...holding the door for a woman, romance, etc etc. 'Tis a pity that it all seems to be about control and sex, where's the seduction? And what's wrong with flowers lol.... it's about treating a woman like a lady(sometimes lol), rather than a piece of meat or a toy, any ass can do that. And poetry? rapidly becoming a lost art in a relationship, those that don't have it and never have are usually the first to criticize it as well.....and forget actually serenading a woman, doesn't happen any more.....

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ORIGINAL: Aileen68

Courtly love is just way too romantic for me...nothing mushy or sweet.  I think I'd laugh if a man sent me a romantic poem or whispered sweet nothings in my ear.