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Metaphors and Social Realities Revealed in the ntury Courtly Love

  • Korean Review of French History
  • Abbr : KRFH
  • 2008, (18), pp.5~30
  • Publisher : KOREAN SOCIETY FOR FRENCH HISTORY
  • Research Area : Humanities > History

유희수 1

1고려대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to examine the metaphoric expressions and their relations with the social realities revealed in the 12th-century courtly love. The literary source to which we make reference is Lancelot or the Knight of the Cart by Chrétien de Troyes. The courtly love is a feminine version of the vassalage in which knight serves dame(in general his lord’s wife) by dedicating his valour and love to her. In compensation for this service, dame extends her favors to him, such as looking at him or listening to him or infrequently kissing him. Dame is not the object of sexual conquest but of cult so that the courtly love can be called an eroticism of the control of desire. The results of this study confirm that there are complicate relations between the metaphoric expressions and the social realities. The courtly love is not an apology of adulterous love nor a reflection of the amelioration of feminine condition, but an expression of the dream of hypergamy for young knights. It is also a phenomenon contemporary with the rise of the anxious hopes that the knights entertain in order to be enrolled into the vassalage in the late 12th century when the castellanies are being integrated into the principality or the kingdom.

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