Courtly Love - Research Paper Example

Christianity advocated for real love between two individuals of opposite sex who eventually ended up marrying and establishing a family together, while prohibiting any form of love, passion or desire by the married couples outside of their marriage. On the other hand, the concept of Courtly Love introduced a completely different perception of love, requiring that married ladies could still develop passion and have romance outside of their marriage, as long as they did not violate the rules of chastity and infidelity (Donaldson, 16).

The fundamental principle of Courtly Love was that marriages were arranged, and had nothing to do with love, as long as such marriages brought wealth and power, as well as other material benefits to the participants and their families. Nevertheless, while the Courtly Love was a noble idea meant to allow married people, especially ladies to experience love and romance that they did not get out of their marriages which were not based on love, it eventually resulted into illicit and tragic love affairs that did not follow the laid down rules, as exemplified by William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”. . Most of such ladies were engaged in marriages for the convenience of their families in protecting their material wealth and power, as opposed to marrying out of love, thus living in marriages that had no happiness and where intimacy and romance did not fully exist, because the marriage partners did not have strong feelings for each other (Capellanus, 44).

It is through the rise of the concept of Courtly Love, that such ladies were allowed to develop passion for the knights and courtiers who served within the kingly courts, given a leeway by the rule that marriage did not stop them from loving again and engaging in passionate romance with the knights and the courtiers, as long as they adhered to the rules of maintaining chastity and avoiding infidelity (Boase, 31). Nevertheless, with the leeway to engage in passionate romance and to love the knights and the courtiers, it was inevitable for such romances to develop into real feelings of love and lust for sexual engagements, which eventually saw such ladies engage in illicit love affairs with the knights and courtiers, thus breaking the rules of fidelity and chastity, and eventually ending up in tragedies (Jackson, 243).

William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” is one of the love literatures that were inspired b the concept of Courtly Love, which depicts the love triangle involving the ruling house and other revered families fighting for the love of 13-year old Juliet (Shakespeare, 23). The literature is motivated by the arranged marriage concept of the middle ages, where Count Paris, who is a member of the ruling family, seeks to marry Juliet out of an agreement reached