=Courtly Love=
Courtly love is a tradition of lyric poetry that developed in Provence, southern France, in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries and which spread throughout Western Europe in the Middle Ages. It embodies a whole philosophy of love and represents an elaborate code of behaviour which governs the relations between 'aristocratic' lovers, turning the more bodily and erotic aspects of love into a spiritual experience and the most elevated of passions. The courtly lover both idealizes and is idealized by his beloved and subjects himself entirely to her desires. However, there is an inherent impossibility, an obstacle to the fulfilment of love, in the very structure of courtly love. As it developed, courtly love often entailed the love between a single knight and a married woman. The most famous example of this in English literature is the love between Lancelot and Guinevere in King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. This love cannot be consummated in a physical sense and, if it is, disaster and death ensues. Courtly love therefore involves the agonies of unfulfilled love, but the lover remains true to his beloved, manifesting his honour and steadfastness in an unswerving adherence to the code of behaviour.
What Lacan finds of interest in these chivalric romances is, first, its symbolic aspect. Courtly love is 'a poetic exercise, a way of playing with a number of conventional, idealizing themes, which couldn't have any real concrete equivalent' (1992 [1986]: 148). Nevertheless, these symbolic conventions do have real concrete effects and even continue to organize 'contemporary man's sentimental attachments' (1992 [1986]: 148). First and foremost of these is 'the Lady', an impossibly idealized figure for which no real equivalent exists. Lacan writes:
