Cultural differences make any universal definition of love difficult to establish. Expressions of love may include the love for a soul or mind, the love of laws and organizations, love for a body, love for nature, love of food, love of money, love for learning, love of power, love of fame, and love for the respect of others. Different people place varying degrees of importance on the kinds of love they receive. Love is essentially an abstract concept, easier to experience than to explain. Many believe, as stated originally by Virgil that "Love conquers all", or as stated by The Beatles, "all you need is love". Bertrand Russell describes love as a condition of 'absolute value', as opposed to 'relative value'.
Courtly Love comes in the basketIn essence, courtly love was a formalized system of admiration and courtship, modeled after feudal obligations of fealty translated to the part of a "gentle" knight towards an unavailable lady, usually a person married to someone other than the admirer, and generally of higher status. Courtly love was the idea that a noble man would dedicate his life to the love of a lady. Such a love could not exist within marriage, it was believed, but had to be love from afar � at least in the view of the purists. Although many accounts insisted that love between a married couple was impossible, because they were bound to honor and serve each other, the cases proposed to "Courts of Love" showed women insisting they had not lost their knights' love by marrying them.
Particular standards of etiquette and custom were attached to courtly love, though these varied somewhat with region and time period. Sometimes the ideal love was chaste or Platonic admiration, with no intimation of actual affairs. In other cases, at least the intention of consummation is expressed, if only to lament the impossibility of the act. This ritual of walking the knife's edge between admiration and consummation is still seen in such Western European social practices as the seating of ladies at table next to gentlemen who are specifically not their husbands. In cultures not much influenced by the courtly love tradition, this would seem to be a scandalous, insulting invitation to disaster.
It was (sometimes hotly) debated whether jealousy had any place in the pageant of courtly love, with proponents of both sides of the issue. In most cases, to have the object of admiration is seen as raising and ennobling the holder of the passion and/or gives a feeling of solitary possession to the lover over the contested mate.
Courtly love was perhaps most commonly expressed in the compositions of the troubadours and poets (later reflected in such forms as the sonnet), though it found expression in such other customs as the crowning of a "Queen of Love and Beauty" at a tournament, or the formal though unofficial "Courts of Love" presided over by prominent nobles, usually women. During later phases of the Middle Ages the practice increasingly became the topic of satire; the second half of the Romance of the Rose, the part written by Jean de Meung, is considered by some to be a parody on the subject, although it was actually written in the middle of the period. Whether parody or not, the Romance made a lasting impression and its imagery and characters continued to appear in works throughout the medieval period and into the renaissance. While some feel that Courtly Love was primarily a literary convention, occasions such as Philip le Bon's Feast of the Pheasant in 1454 relied on parables drawn from courtly love to incite his nobles to swear to participate in an anticipated crusade and numerous actual political and social conventions were largely based on the formulas dictated by the "rules" of courtly love well into the 15th century.
More recent writers, taking literary conventions at face value, have postulated that courtly love may have involved elements of what would today be called fetishism and masochism.
Such a courtly love had a civilizing effect on knightly behavior, beginning in the late 11th century; it has been suggested that the prevalence of arranged marriages required other outlets for the expression of more personal occurrences of romantic love. New expressions of highly personal private piety in the 11th century were at the origins of what a modern observer would recognize as a personality, and the vocabulary of piety was also transferred to the conventions of courtly love.