Dante
...Criseyde, Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and Laura... Intense love of man and woman is a central subject in European literature. As the names above indicate, too, there is no clear distinction made between people who had historical existence and those who have only ever existed in imaginary fictions. This paper traces the development of literary portrayals of love during the High Middle Ages, from the 12th to the 14th centuries. Modern European love literature began with crafted lyrics and fictional narratives about power and oppression, identity and difference, but later we find writers who claim to be writing about their personal experiences.
In the middle ages and the renaissance, the male lover is usually the central figure; in many cases the woman does not even realize how much she is loved. In many works, the initial focus is on the conflicts in the male psyche. The ideal of love looked for, if not always found, is a situation where the woman and the man experience identically strong feelings for one another. Once the male has expressed his feelings, the central conflict within the woman centers on how she should respond, given her position in society.
Society is present because the women and men represented in this literature, and for whom it was written, are economically and politically powerful, part of the ruling class usually, and therefore concerned with their fragile reputation. Conflict between the private and the public provokes a demand for secrecy. The lovers find themselves isolated, enclosed in a private world of intense and conflictual feelings; this aspect of romantic love may even be partly responsible for the development of western individualism.
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The Troubadours
It began in southern France when some poets began to wrestle with the Problem of the...
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