Arrival of Courtly Love

Courtly love appeared in twelfth-century Europe as a dissent from the emotional regime established by the Gregorian Reform, by setting the lady, instead of God, as the object of worship. From a game-theory perspective, courtly love and hedonism correspond to Nash equilibria, in contrast to Christian marriage, whose stability is threatened by sex-as-appetite on one side and devotion to God on the other, and whose maintenance depends on moral control. The Church developed fear and shame, which are counter-emotions to desire-as-appetite. Courtly love restored the thrill of forbidden adventure. It also shared traits common to innovations in the natural world: it added complexity (by increasing costs, emphasizing courtship, self-restraint, and extremes of suffering); it was made possible by the plasticity of mating relationships; it introduced a small disorder in the ordered regime of Christian marriage; it demanded an adaptive effort, requiring the man to face ever more perilous trials and the woman to appear ever more attractive. Though obtained as a small deviation from the existing emotional regime, it had thoroughgoing and long-lasting consequences for social control and for the political power of the Church. It also deeply modified the dynamic of longing in ego's representation. By taking the temporal form of a capture, it contrasts with twelfth-century Bengal, where love was characterized by maintenance in an indefinitely repeating worship, by the absence of a here-now versus target-later dualism. It also contrasts with eleventh-century Heian Japan, where love was intermingled with the melancholy of an impossible return, which is the antithesis of the concept of capture

Aesthetics · Lust · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Theology · Worship · Chinese history and philosophy · Law · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy · Psychology

• Learning Hygiene

  Noël Bonneuil, Elena Fursa•The Journal of Interdisciplinary…•2016

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