What Was Courtly Love?

It used to be called courtly love. Now it’s a felony.

Courtly love was a medieval practice. It grew up in Southern Europe, and eventually morphed into what we call courtship. That is, courtship leading to marriage. 

Keep in mind, for most of human history and certainly for people in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, marriages were arranged. 

When marriage was arranged, adultery was more easily tolerated. Having mistresses, concubines and courtesans was the norm. But then, with the advent of courtly love women entered the adultery game.

When men rode off to fight the crusades, they left their homes and properties to their wives. Said wives, being fully empowered, used their newfound freedom to seduce the young males who remained behind. They were too young to fight the crusades but were not too young to fall in love.

These newly empowered women invented courtly love, an erotic seduction ritual whereby a young male, generally teenaged, would perform a series of ordeals in order to win the favors of his beloved, a woman that he often called his Lord. 

These young men kept chronicles of their exploits in a genre of romantic poetry. They were called troubadours. Today we call them guitar heroes.

Courtly love was frankly adulterous. Yet, by the terms of the contract the two lovers never consummated their passion. They showed the truth of their love by sleeping in the same bed and not touching each other.

Assuming that you believe what they said. Some scholars have pointed out that the courtly lovers, especially the male troubadours, had a serious incentive to deny any carnal knowledge. If they had admitted to consummation they would have been risking their lives.

So, nowadays we are seeing a rash of incidents where older married female teachers have seduced boys of high school age and have been caught in the act. Some of them have been imprisoned.

One remarks that the other side of the equation, male teachers seducing female high school students seems less prevalent, perhaps because it is more obviously criminal.

The tabloid press happily reports all of the cases, for the obvious reason, that the women in question are good looking. If you were a seventeen year old male who was the object of the affections of a comely twenty-seven year old, tell me that you would have turned her down.

Obviously, age does matter here. If the boy in question is closer to twelve, evidently the calculus changes considerably.

As it happens, psycho therapist Stacy Kaiser specializes in the field. She calls these women sexual predators, which is less gracious than calling them courtly lovers. Said women are now considered to be rapists. They are occasionally spending their days in prison. 

Kaiser is appalled that we do not understand how deranged these women are and how much they are damaging the teenage males in their charge. 

True enough, some of the boys in question suffer emotionally from their encounters. One does not, from Kaiser’s account, know why this is the case. It might be that they feel responsible when their teachers get caught and get convicted and get imprisoned. It could be that they are told that they must be feeling very badly for having had sex with an attractive teacher. 

At the least, we must recognize that adolescent boys are far more likely to take such actions in their stride than are teenage girls. Obviously, Kaiser, good feminist that she must be, considers that such seductions are always bad and even criminal.

You do not have to have lived too long to understand that men and women do not react the same way to sexual encounters. Evidently, this disparity counters feminist ideology which states that men and women are precisely the same, but no one with a brain really believes it.

One might read Donald Symons’ book The Evolution of Human Sexuality to gain a minimal understanding of the differences between male and female sexuality.

Anyway, Kaiser goes all moralistic on these women, whom she, purportedly a professional, holds in contempt:

Crippled by their insecurities, these perpetrators seek relationships that enable them to manipulate others – giving them a sensation of control that they otherwise are incapable of achieving in their everyday lives.

The two women I counseled were utterly remorseless over their actions. Their only regret was not being able to continue their relationships.

Dare I point out, consulting with two patients does not offer anything more than anecdotal evidence. And, dare I mention, the concept that Kaiser introduces, “control” is positively meaningless. Psycho therapists overuse the word and have reduced it to so much blather.

Understand this. When courtly love began in medieval Europe marriages were arranged. They began their seductions because they had been abandoned by their husbands, often for years on end.

We ought to notice that the older, more experienced women involved in courtly love were functioning as teachers for younger less experienced boys. As though that is a crime. 

Arranged marriage continued until the Protestant Reformation and Puritanism. Then, for Martin Luther and his followers, marriages were considered to be expressions of love. Once that was the case, as you see with the scarlet letter, people were far less tolerant of adultery. 

The change took place, I will posit, because Luther and his followers had been excommunicated. Thus, they were no longer required to remain celebate, but they lacked social standing, wealth or prestige. Thus, the bases for most marriages were precluded and they fell back on a default position-- romantic love. Previously, romantic love was relegated to adulterous relationships.

As for teacher-student relationships, one should not ignore the simple possibility that the women in question find it exciting to teach boys how to have sex. And they might find it exciting to transgress, to do something that is somewhat forbidden.

Besides, didn’t feminism teach them that they should never compromise their sexuality and that they should express it openly and fully.

Dare we mention that we do not have enough material from enough cases to know how these women’s husbands were treating them. Surely, that has some importance here.

In her Daily Mail article psycho therapist Stacy Kaiser continues to express her contempt for these women:

The women I counseled told me that they felt 'real connections' with the boys they targeted.

Some offenders claim to 'fall in love' with their victims and even purport to be 'dating' them.

That's nothing more than delusional thinking - a way to justify breaking the law and traumatizing a vulnerable person.

An adult cannot have a meaningful or mature relationship with a minor, as children and teens do not have fully developed brains - and victims are influenced by fear, coercion and deceit.

Obviously, this is not delusional thinking, though Kaiser does not seem to know what the word means. Any serious study of female sexuality will explain that when a woman has carnal relations she feels connected and she feels that there is an emotional component. Such is not always the case for the males in question.

One is impressed by Kaiser’s ability to attribute the most sordid and pathetic motives to the boys in question. I will not share the head shots of the women in question, but if you find the Daily Mail article and examine them, you might not think that this is all about fear, coercion and deceit.

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