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The annotated edition of the English poets, by R. Bell
The annotated edition of the English poets by R Bell Author:Robert Bell Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 107 THE COURTS OF LOVE. There is no feature in the history of Western civilization so striking in its character, or important in its results, as that respe... more »ctful and profound devotion to the female sex which appears to have first sprung up in the south of France, and which found its earliest poetical expression in the lays of the Troubadours. At what period this signal change in the position of women took place, investing them with a sovereignty from which the poetry of subsequent ages has drawn its chief inspiration, and which modern gallantry has permanently confirmed, cannot be accurately determined. Many circumstances prepared the way for its gradual adoption; and there can be no doubt that the ameliorating influence of the Christian dispensation directed and encouraged the tendency towards that revolution in the relation of the sexes which, passing from one stage to another, attained its highest development in the ordinances and ceremonials of chivalry. Traces of this spirit may be discerned so far back as the tenth century; but it is in the Proven9al poetry, which dates from the early part of the twelfth century, that we must look for the evidences of the time when it became intimately blended with the usages and manners of the people. In the poetry of the East, and of classical antiquity, love is one of many elements; in the poetry of the Troubadours it is the essential ingredient. A still more remarkable distinction presents itself in the treatment of the passion by the Provencal writers. The love of the oriental and classical poets, voluptuous and imaginative, abounding in the sense of the beautiful, sometimes severely chaste, and occasionally even moral, reflected states of society in which women either held an inferior, and, not unfrequently, a degraded place, o...« less