Porter selects some literary works to highlight in the presentation of the courtly love tradition. Contemporary critics claimed, probably with some truth, that this literary game could serve as an excuse for illicit love. The literary model, however, eventually influenced the behavior of knights toward ladies at court and quickly spread to northern France and Germany as a popular literary theme. Porter makes very clear that this expression of love was by nature stylized and literary and was an element in a game at court not necessarily linked to reality. These poets described their love in terms of feudal service and sang the praises of a single lady whose identity by necessity remained unknown since by tradition she was married. However, Provençal is just one dialect of Occitan). These extant examples of affection between individuals contrast sharply with the stylized literary expression in poetry and courtly romance that originated in southern France in the first part of the twelfth century among the troubadours who sang in Occitan (Porter uses "Provençal" to describe their language. However, in other works, Christine was quite adept at expressing the conceits associated with "courtly love" and Le Livre du duc des vrais amans cannot be considered evidence as solid as the two others of an expression of love between two historical figures. The example would be a tempting one to select since it gives an account of the love of an unmarried man in love with a married woman. Porter's third example is less convincing since she chooses Christine de Pisan's Le Livre du duc des vrais amans ( The Book of the Duke of True Lovers) also from the fifteenth century thought to be based on the relationship between Marie, wife of Philippe d'Artois, Constable of France and Jean Duc de Bourbon, who married Marie after Philippe's death. During the negotiation for their marriage, Margery writes affectionately to John calling him "my right well beloved Valentine," the first recorded example of this term of endearment. In the late fifteenth century, one thousand letters passed between John Paston II and his wife Margery that demonstrate the depth of feeling they felt for each other in the midst of business details that had to be communicated. For example, about 1500 Pierre Sala presented to Marguerite Bullioul, his future wife, an elegant and luxurious book of illustrated poems that he had written to communicate his feelings to his beloved. In order to demonstrate the difference between literary convention and reality, Porter gives evidence of some of the few examples of genuine affection between medieval European men and women that have survived to our day. And most importantly, Porter adds a visual dimension to the discussion of "courtly love" by including beautiful reproductions of over sixty illuminations from forty different manuscripts that compliment the text and contribute to an understanding of the medieval perception of the poetry and romances that gave birth to and perpetuated the tradition of this new type of love. In this book of only sixty-four pages, Pamela Porter, former Curator of German and Scandinavian Manuscripts at the British Library, gives a brief overview of the medieval phenomenon now known as "courtly love" and puts it into a meaningful historical context with modern society as the reference.
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