Courtly Love

Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde enable us to trace the ebb and flow of lovers. Our central concern will be Chaucer's claim that the essential story determining human joy or human misery is the exercise of desire, and that sexual lovers building on sexual desire can approach paradise.

Medieval energies focused on the nature, on culture, on individuals, and on religion. Mary, for example, is in part the exemplification of mothers.

Love makes the world go 'round. So medieval psychology works. God, of course, is love. But love manifests itself prodigiously and endemically. Take the seasons. Spring is the time of planting, of birth, of appetite, of lovemaking. Autumn is the time of harvesting, of digestion, of reflection. If God is love those now seeing in every creature the hand of God, in every individual, the seeds of love, see desire as the foundation of feeling, thought and action. Since every individual is a unique soul, desire will work in varied ways. If In the beginning was the word, language serves to build from desire lasting relationship, true love.

Medieval lyrics call attention equally to the particulars which individuate beings, and to the language which enables fruitful development of animate desire. Chaucer shares with his contemporaries a fascination with psychology, with the ways in which desires work.

Troilus and Criseyde fall in love. Falling in love, like Plato's philosophy, involves more than a new experience. Falling in love offers a conversion: in the light of new love all changes coloration, all is connected to the lovers. A religious conversion changes how all experience appears: all past events now seem to lead to this crucial event. All subsequent events will stem from this generative experience.

Chaucer's lovers are pagan: in the absence of monotheistic belief, they do not begin with an ordered world. Desire will teach them theology. Their feelings, thoughts, words and actions will refeal the power of love.

Week I

Book I -- Troilus falls in love
Book II -- Criseyde falls in love
Book III -- Lovers approach Paradise

Week II

Book IV -- Lovers Apart
Book V -- The Betrayal of Love

Lyrics

Now goeth sonne under tree
and Summer is Accomin in
 

Consider the hour of sunset. Mary, a mother, watches the sun set behind trees. As vision fades, as warmth declines, she recalls her dead son. The setting evokes passion. The passion is suffering. An observer sees her seeing a sunset. Seeing through her sadness of expression and gesture the observer enters into her vision, shares her pain. The experience precedes pity. Feeling pity without sharing the setting calling for pity is empty.

Now at the barn door mid-day in spring, share the feelings of all animate beeings: birds sing, ewe's cry for milk, calves lower, bulls kick up hooves, bucks on fresh grass fart.

Matchless maid and Rosebud on a Vine
Love appears also as maternal
Mary, approached by Gabriel, recalls the dew that appears in an infinity of infinitesimal droplets, nourishing equally the tiniest blades of grass and the trunks of oaks, the circulating blood of doves and of humans.

The Stabat Mater invites participation in the sorrows of Mary, helpless to save her child. The red dress pressing as the girl takes on attitudes is touching. Every sense wakens. Her face, flush with youth and desire just approaches blossoming (rosebud on a vine). Her lips, sensitive to sounds spoken and heard, arouses attention.

Gentle Cock and How Swift it Comes the Dawn
At Matins a would-be lover imagines himself a cock in his lady's chamber. The cockadoodle-dos, colors, postures, attitude and behavior of roosters deserves attention.

The observer of Mary's suffering is fully capable of joining lovers intent on maximizing desire, on sharing paradise. How swift it comes, the dawn anticipates the intrusion of public concerns, of realtives, associates, of business, law, religion, which will restain personal pursuit. But the cry indicates also an appreciation in the watchman of the joys lost through reasonable restarint.

Consider the appeal of sexual desire: I have a gentle cock

Consider the appeal of

The subject is love: how love originates, what conditions foster lovers and love, what characterizes the heights of love, what undermines love.

In the first week we will follow Troilous in love (Book I) and Criseyde in love (book II)

In the second week we will join the lovers in paradise.
We then share their separation and their diverging futures.

Courtly love begins with desire: consider from your past what change, what event brought joy. Think also of what event brought suffering. The first has the power to change your orientation (the direction you face, preferably East (Orient), towards light, warmth, growth. A religious conversion and falling in love change not how someting looks, but the manner in which all things appear.

how it grows, what contributes to the paradise of union, and what may undermine