‘What life is there, what pleasure without golden Aphrodite?’ The pragmatics of courtly love

Abstract

This article focuses on two major works: A. Veselovsky’s From the history of personality: The woman and medieval theories of love [Iz istorii lichnosti: zhenshchina i starinnye teorii lyubvi] and C. S. Lewis’s The Allegory of Love, a study of courtly love. Their comparative analysis offers a compelling vision of the pragmatics of courtly love, sheds light on its origins, and emphasises its immense influence on world literature. By examining the sources and characteristics of courtly love, the article sets out to describe its evolution in later periods — in works by Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and then Shakespeare, whose Troilus and Cressida seems to mark the ultimate demise of the tradition. Questioning the latter suggestion, the author attempts to establish whether the rules of courtly love still hold sway in our daily life. Tracing the vestiges of the tradition, the author hypothesises that the relationship between man and woman as we know it is determined by the same old courtesy.