Zora Neale's Courtly Love

The allure of wanting to read a romantic novel with the theme of courtly love is appealing to many readers and exists even in today's modern times as a popular genre. Was it truly a practice of some of the ladies and knights in the courts during the middle ages? or just a parody of it’s writers and their imagination. Whether or not Courtly love was a real practice or just a fantasy during the middle ages, is commonly debated among scholars for the past century. The debate centres on whether it was a common practice of its time, or was it actually just the fantasy of writers of that period with relations between the text and reality of their day, a way to romanticize a darker, less understood time.

In order to better understand some of
The term and Paris's definition were soon widely accepted and adopted. In an article by John C. Moore called “Courtly Love”: A problem of terminology”, he mentions a list of the four distinctive traits of courtly love that Paris writes and that appears in most literary writings on the subject of Courtly love. He writes that “1) It is illegitimate and furtive; 2) The lover is inferior and insecure; the beloved is elevated, haughty, even disdainful; 3) The lover must earn the lady's affection by undergoing many tests of his prowess, valor, and devotion; 4) The love is an art and a science, subject to many rules and regulations-like courtesy in general”. ( Moore.John) An example of these distinctive traits can be found in the story of Lancelot and Guinevere, where Guinevere is married to King Arthur and she has an affair with her husband’s chief knight,
Under the explanation of courtly love in the online search page of Wikipedia, it brings up the concluding fact that one was proceeded by the other and that evidence shows us that is does become a reality after all. “There are no historical records that offer evidence of its presence in reality. Historian John Benton found no documentary evidence in law codes, court cases, chronicles or other historical documents.[40] However, the existence of the non-fiction genre of courtesy books is perhaps evidence for its practice” (wikipedia; courtly love) This tell us the practice of courtly love was perhaps a process of the ideologies of its time, that with the revelation of this type of non-fictional literature, it began to open up the popular idea of this conception of