박윤희, 궁정식 사랑의 노래: 유혹의 언어
Yoon-hee Park, Courtly Love Poetry: Language for Seduction



Abstract 

Courtly Love is a forbidden affair usually between a noble bachelor and a married lady. That is why the relationship is aristocratic, secret, platonic or adulterous. However, though illicit, in courtly love a woman, as an ennobling spiritual and moral force, can exert a favorable influence on men, a civilizing effect on knightly behavior. In essence, courtly love is a contradictory experience between sexual desire and spiritual fulfillment. Nevertheless, many readers are suspicious of the motives because courtly love is a product of medieval Europe that is characterized by its misogyny.

"With the word the garment entered," Tertullian declares, implying that language is a kind of decorative covering like flamboyant dress. Medieval and Renaissance courtly love poems, written mostly by male poets, present a uniform situation in which a forlorn lover is desperately trying to woo his cruel but idolized mistress. However, poems written by women poets reveal that such tears and sighs are nothing but crocodile tears. Isabella Whitney's dejected heroine warns, “Beware of fair and painted talk, / beware of flattering tongues”; Aphra Behn's libertine confesses, "I never vow’d nor sigh’d in vain, / But both, tho’ false, were well received; / The fair are pleased to give us pain, / And what they wish is soon believed: / And tho’ I talk’d of wounds and smart, / Love's pleasures only touch’d my heart."

Key Words

courtly love, love poetry, sonnet, sexual object, language for seduction