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Moving right along to the theme the holiday now carries, a number of songs come to mind: "Love Stinks", "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?", "Hopelessly Devoted to You", and to the period enthusiast we must not forget Shakespeare who wrote the sonnet: (credit of course goes to William Shakespeare and this version rightfully attributed to my yellow and black "Cliffs Notes" 1988 version.)
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest;
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
I am sure each of us has a favorite ballad or poem that edifies what love represents to us. Love, the strongest of human emotions, is difficult to explain and yet uniquely understood by those struck by the fiery dart of passion ejected from the bow of Cupid. His accuracy must be questioned, as must his motive. Oddly enough, Cupid, son of Venus, is another Roman God who actually has nothing to do with Saint Valentine or the god Lupercus. How he became entwined with Saint Valentines Day is a mystery and the cherub now bears the blame for a number of sins attributed to the emotion of love on this day to commemorate the beheading of a Roman Bishop in 270 AD who was more interested in forsaking sin than in true love.
Saint Valentine was later sainted for his act of defiance of Roman law. He was executed for performing marriages for young Roman men during the reign of Claudius II. It seems that Claudius felt that the service of the Roman Empire was a nobler cause than love, and troops for the ever-expanding Roman Empire were in high demand. The married persuasion tended not to respond well to calls for patriotic duty, instead having been seriously conditioned into the service of their wives, so in an edict Claudius declared it unlawful for anyone to be newly married. Bishop Valentine did not want young men living in wanton sin by having sex outside the bounds of marriage, so he routinely performed marriage ceremonies in spite of the edict. When Claudius found out about Valentine, he first tried to convert him to paganism. But Valentine reversed the strategy, trying instead to convert Claudius. When he failed, he was stoned and beheaded in February.
Although the church had banned the lottery for women, the mid-February holiday in commemoration of St. Valentine was still used by Roman men to seek the affection of women. It became a tradition for the men to give the ones they admired handwritten messages of affection or betrothal or outright bribes of dowry, containing reference to Valentine's name. The Valentine card grew out of this practice. Charles, duke of Orleans, sent the first true Valentine card in 1415 to his wife. He was imprisoned in the Tower of London at the time.
Today enthusiasts of the holiday who happen also to be caught up in the reenactment of the historical middle ages enjoy Saint Valentines Day as a time to reflect on the virtues of Courtly Love. Oddly, courtly love was not founded on any virtue at all but instead on the practice of playing into the hands of an adulterous affair between the nobles.
Courtly Love, known in medieval France as "fine love" or fin amour, originated with the so-called troubadours of the late eleventh century. Gaston Paris first used the term in an 1883 article to describe the 'culture' of love and system of love and adoration developed in Northern France during the late 12th century. So the term was never actually used in the Middle Ages by most people. The system promoted a suave and risqué new form of paganism which they called Gai Saber; literally, "the happy wisdom"; these colorful figures from the Provence region of southern France effectively challenged and sought to redefine traditional Christian ideals of love, marriage, virtue, manhood and femininity. Under the sponsorship of powerful nobles like Eleanor of Aquitaine and Marie de Champagne, their influence spread throughout France and eventually into England and Germany. By the middle of the 13th century, the troubadour philosophy had become practically institutionalized throughout the courts of Europe, and "fine love" had become the basis for a glamorous and exciting new style of life of extramarital affairs.
Properly applied, the phrase l'amour courto, is identified an extravagantly false and stylized relationship; a forbidden affair that was characterized by five main attributes. In essence, the relationship was aristocratic, ritualistic, secret, adulterous and literate. A Latin work from the late 12th-century, "Art of Courtly Love", by Andreas Capellanus has sometimes
been taken as a serious treatise describing the "rules" of courtly love. It was supposedly written for Countess Marie of Champagne, daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine, and the person to whom Chrétien de Troyes dedicates The Knight of the Cart, the romance in which the love of Lancelot for Guenevere is first introduced. Most scholars admit however that the work is not a serious treatise but a satire mocking the conventions of courtly love, written within a university environment hostile to the conventions of courtly love literature. Sarcasm it seems is not a new art form and the piece can be considered an exemplary example of what not to do in the world of chivalry and courtly behavior.
No work is without merits and to steal a phrase, "I am not entirely worthless, I can always serve as a bad example." So, let us look at the five traits of a courtly love relationship from the book. Now today there is not the ritualistic beheading for getting caught playing such games of love, but to many beheading might be a more painless method than failure to reach a mutually agreed settlement in a divorce court. Remember, if you do the crime, you might do the time.
The elements of "Fine Love" that institutionalize the practice as we understand it today:
Aristocratic: Noble lords and ladies practiced courtly love; its proper setting was the royal palace or court. Therefore, the game was for the wickedly rich and powerful who could afford to scoff in the face of the church and all Christendom. These people were usually the victims of arranged marriages and never were afforded the opportunity of listening to the beckoning call of their own hearts.
Ritualistic: Couples who engaged in a courtly relationship usually exchanged gifts and tokens of their affair. The lady was wooed according to elaborate conventions of etiquette, courtship and courtesy and was the constant recipient of songs, poems, bouquets, sweet favors, and ceremonial gestures. Some of them very public and disguised as acts of love for their country. And in return for all these gentle and painstaking efforts on the part of her lover, she need only return a short hint of approval, a small shadow of affection. After all, she was the exalted 'domina', the commanding mistress of the affair; and he was but her 'servus', a lowly but faithful servant. Man, talk about a sadistic relationship!
Secret: Remember where I mentioned beheading? A very good reason to keep things secret! Courtly lovers were pledged to the strictest secrecy. The foundation for their affair, indeed the exciting source of its special aura and electricity, was that the rest of the world was excluded. In effect, the lovers composed a universe unto themselves, a special world with its own places. Whence we have words like rendezvous. This same motive fuels the affairs of today; sort of the adrenaline rush before the tragic letdown.
Adulterous: "Fine love" by definition is extramarital. One of its principle attractions is that it offers an escape from the boring routines and the confinements of a noble marriage that was typically little more than a political or economic alliance for the purpose of producing an heir. The troubadours themselves ridiculed marriage as little more than a glorified religious swindle. In its place they exalted their own ideal of a carnal relationship whose ultimate objective was not crude physical satisfaction that could be delivered by any prostitute, but a sublime and sensual intimacy of a forbidden relationship.
Literate: Before it established itself as a popular real-life activity, courtly love first gained attention as a subject and theme in imaginative literature. Viral knights and their passionately adored ladies were already popular figures in song and fable before they became the reality of imitators in the palace halls and boudoirs of medieval Europe. Even the word "romance" comes from Old French romanz; the name for a narrative poem about chivalric heroes. Only later was the term applied to the distinctive love relationship commonly featured in such poems. To engage then in courtly love, one must have been well read in the popular literature that supported the activity. To be well read, one must have been well educated. To be well educated, one must have been well to do. This clearly indicates that "Courtly Love" was not the game of the gentry, but a high stakes game of "footsie" between two parties who had quite a lot to lose.
And so we come to the end of our story of Courtly Love and the Saint Valentine. It seems that the tragedy of courtly love is best exemplified in the tale of Guinevere and Lancelot. A kingdom ruined because of forbidden love; Yes, a house fallen, a king scorned, a fairy tale ended and a very happy lawyer somewhere in the picture I am sure. So, it is best to remember that St. Valentines Day is not a celebration of Love as much as a commemorative of good Christian virtue. For you very early period types, you may better enjoy the early roots of the holiday and ask your significant other if you can draw again from the lottery box! Have a Happy Valentine!
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