|
Faramir -> RE: Courtly Love (6/11/2007 9:41:46 AM)
|
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.
I don't see courtly love being super useful as a model for a Male Dom/Female Sub couple, as the essence of it is an unnaitnabel (?) woman higher in place than the one who courts here--then again there is the implication that the love, phsyical and erotic as it is, is not to be consumated. That's the the tension.
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.
|
|
|
|
