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The Lay of Sir Launfal by Marie de France : The author, Marie de France, that written this story and all her other stories have some sort of theme of love and chivalry. This story in specific emphasizes on a relationship that is unconventional between Launfal and his maiden. The circumstances that they have to actually be together is what makes this story interesting and unique. With the dynamic of the two characters it was quite obvious that they had two different perspectives regarding chivalry but without it, the entire purpose of the story would be lost. With one of the main themes to this story being chivalry it is very simple and obvious to connect to love as they go hand in hand with one another, but with the outcome of the story it more so shows that there is a true meaning of chivalry and love within each person depending on their definition of these two themes.

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An example of what Middle Age Literature would look like 

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The Doubt of Future Foes by Queen Elizabeth: Along with love also comes loyalty. In this poem Queen Elizabeth is expressing her truth that she will do all that is in her power to keep her crown as there had been a threat for somebody else to take over. She expresses the challenges and insecurities that she has had being a woman on the throne but also let's her people know that she is confident as well. In some instances this shows that as a woman and with people having doubts of her, she does not need to be loved and does not to be a person's first choice, but more rather so they have to put their loyalty and trust in her that she will lead her people in the right direction. The connection this has to love is quite interesting yet powerful at the same time. The theme of love comes into play as she directs her people in the direction of loyalty over love. As a woman she lets it be known that love is not what will help her be a powerful leader but the people's loyalty and support.

On Monsieur’s Departure by Queen Elizabeth: The theme of love that is being showcased in this poem is unrequited love. The poem takes us through the journey of Queen Elizabeth’s different aspects of humanity and emotions as she has to mask her grief because of her role as a ruler. It provides insight on the consequences of unrequited love as she expresses her vulnerability and internal conflict dealing with the loss of her love.

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The Passionate Shepherd to His Love by Christopher Marlowe: This specific poem by Christopher Marlowe is the epitome of how love is, in most cases, portrayed as. To give a little bit of background to the poem, it focuses on a Shepherd writing a poem to his lover and it focuses on the life that they could have as it shows the simplicity, peacefulness, and innocence. In the poem the words used to the life that the Shepard and his love could be living, not only that but he also includes all the things he is willing and able to do for her in hopes of persuading his lover to live with him. This poem specifically connects to the theme of love because it puts a spotlight on what love could potentially be. Almost as if that was the feeling of love in someone’s dreams.

The Doleful Lay of Clordia by Mary Sidney Herbert: The author of this poem, Mary Sidney Herbert, writes her poem in a not so traditional way that romance is usually portrayed. The purpose of of this is for readers to understand that even though she is suffering the loss of a loved one it can still be romantic in a way that she loved that person so much, it broke her in unimaginable ways. Not only that but because this poem is written in a more feminine way, it makes us feel her emotions in a more passionate and dramatic sense. Now this shows the theme of love that even through pain and grief it is still able to express love even in those unimaginable times. Tying this in with the theme of love is actually quite simple, it resembles the type of love that will last an eternity, kind of like the saying till death do us part.

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Understanding the author's reasoning and purpose behind literature is just as important as understanding the literature itself. To give some history behind love especially in The Tudor Age, as a good portion of the literary pieces that has been chosen is during this time period, this provided website will give you some insight and a better understanding of how romantic relationships played a role in government and power, but also in literature which in some cases are actual pieces and experiences that writers during this time period have gone through. What is great about this website is that it includes a section about Queen Elizabeth and gives us more information on her life back that could give us a better understanding of her literary pieces that were included!

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When, in the latter part of the 12th century, Chrétien de Troyes wrote this powerful account in his poem Lancelot, he was giving voice to an ideal taken up by almost every other writer of the Arthurian stories, from Thomas Malory in the 1460s to Lerner and Loewe in the mid-20th century, when they wrote the musical Camelot.

What is courtly love?

But the idea of what a later age dubbed "courtly love" goes far beyond the Arthurian tales. This creed of love was heard in the songs of the troubadours and given formal shape in the courts of what we now call France. It began as a literary fantasy, centred around the image of service - a knight, or young noble lover, kneeling in devotion before a lady he may never even attain - which fascinated the aristocracy. Triggering a huge outpouring of poems, songs and novels, courtly love was described by medievalist and writer CS Lewis as a movement compared to which " the Renaissance [was] a mere ripple on the surface of literature".

Yet in reality, its tropes did not stay confined to the page. Indeed, the image of a man in service to his lover is a picture we still all recognise today. Take, for instance, the popular TV adverts "The lady loves Milk Tray", where a heroic man went to ludicrous lengths to bring his lover her desire: a box of chocolates. Enshrined in many of our traditional ceremonies and courtesies, its basic tenets have come to inform our whole idea of romance.

But we aren't the only society to be influenced by courtly love. Time and again, medieval monarchs made political capital from the fantasy. And certainly the ideas of chivalry, and of courtly love, were co-opted into the service of the Tudor dynasty. Henry VII used the Arthurian legends to bolster his fragile new dynasty; Henry VIII called on courtly tropes to woo Anne Boleyn. Their daughter Elizabeth found there a language to sanction her controversial female monarchy.

Adulterous passions

One of thorniest issues in the creed was whether courtly lovers should surrender to their passions. It had been at the court of Marie de Champagne, Eleanor of Aquitaine's daughter by Louis VII of France, that de Troyes had written of Lancelot and Guinevere, on the instruction, he said, of his patroness Marie. He did so in terms that saw their adulterous passion honoured for its ardour: this, at a time when church and state alike demanded the harshest penalties for real adultery. Yet de Troyes' Lancelot genuflects on leaving Guinevere's chamber, as if at a holy shrine.

It was probably also at Marie's court that one Andreas Capellanus (Andrew the Chaplain) wrote his De Amore ( On Love), in which he laid down the rules for a spiritual, courtly passion: "You must maintain chastity for your lover," and "remember to avoid lying completely." Andreas's ideal relationship takes place between a young man and a woman already married to someone else, and of higher rank than he. As to whether the relationship was necessarily platonic... that one occupied theorists for centuries. At the end of the 13th century, in a different moral climate from that of Marie's court, the church condemned Capellanus's writings.

Andreas satirised the extremes to which this ideal of love could lead - and maybe even criticised it, too. Courtly suitors must obey their ladies' lightest command, but with women of the lower orders, Capellanus said, they should "not hesitate to embrace them by force... use a little compulsion as a convenient cure for their shyness".

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Courtly love was a movement compared to which the Renaissance was 'a mere ripple on the surface of literature'

He also described Marie and her mother Eleanor presiding over actual courts of love, adjudicating on such knotty points as whether true love within marriage was even possible. (Marie decided not, since true love was a matter of free choice, and marriage of Courtly love was a movement compared to which the Renaissance was "a mere ripple on the surface of literature" family arrangement.) Though generations of historians presented this fantastical picture as fact, few today would claim that actual courts of love existed in the 12th century.

Throughout the medieval period, the ideal of courtly love changed hue with the changing times. Different eras found either more, or less, value in the ideals of chivalry as a whole - and in the specific, potentially adulterous, fantasy of courtly love. But it never vanished entirely, thanks in part to courtly bestsellers like the Roman de La Rose (and to highly publicised debates like the one provoked by writer Christine de Pizan when she dared criticise that book, from what it's hard not to call a feminist standpoint). Dante, Petrarch and Chaucer all utilised the ideals of courtly love in different ways. And of course the endlessly reinvented Arthurian stories were brought centre stage when Thomas Malory's mighty Morte d'Arthur was printed by William Caxton in 1485 - the year that launched the Tudor dynasty.

Slaying the boar

Before the battle of Bosworth, Henry Tudor adopted as his standard the Red Dragon Dreadful, the dragon of Wales. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Malory's Morte also described how King Arthur dreamt of a fight where a dragon beat down a tyrant boar - the boar being the symbol of Richard III, Henry's great adversary. Enthroned but still vulnerable to Yorkist threat, Henry named his eldest son Arthur and ensured that he was born at Winchester, which Malory had identified as Camelot. Entertaining Philip of Burgundy, a star of the tournament (a sporting event newly fashionable again since the 15th century), he showed him the Round Table. But it was Henry VII's son who was besotted with the courtly side of the chivalric fantasy.

Henry VIII's court relished acting out the fantasy of love. Watched by his wife Catherine of Aragon, Henry rode in the lists under the name Sir Loyalheart, her Coeur Loyal. Perhaps courtly love had been co-opted into the service of wedded affection - "I love true where I did marry," Henry wrote. But the creed was still ill-equipped to cope with the realities of an ageing wife and years of failing to produce a surviving male heir.

When Henry finally made Anne Boleyn his wife, the patterns of courtly love had another dangerous game to play

There had always been a darker side to courtly fantasy. When in 1513 Henry went to fight in France, he took with him Charles Brandon, and there the Netherlands regent Margaret of Austria became embroiled with Charles in a scandalous story. It started with after-dinner courtly play: Brandon swearing to be Margaret's servant, and she to be his good mistress. But soon Brandon was showing off the ring he had snatched from Margaret, ignoring the discretion that was supposed to be a hallmark of the courtly lover. As a result, she reported horrified, the tale was being spread even by "merchant strangers" in the streets.

Less than three years later, Brandon made an unsanctioned marriage with Mary Tudor, Henry VIII's younger sister. She - educated like Henry in the old romantic stories - had extracted from her brother an extraordinary promise that if she furthered his policies by marrying the aged Louis XII of France, she might make a second marriage "as mine own heart and mind should be best pleased".

There was one important spectator of all these adventures: a young Anne Boleyn, sent in 1513 to serve Margaret of Austria, and then to France, to Mary Tudor's court. It was some seven years before Anne returned to England, but then her first recorded appearance was in another piece of love pageantry.

The "Siege of the Chateau Vert" in 1522 - the same year Henry had the Winchester Round Table revamped to reflect the Tudor story - saw knights representing the chivalric virtues attack a castle of ladies. The king's sister represented Beauty, and Anne Boleyn was Perseverance. At the tournament beforehand Henry had jousted under the device of "the heart of a man wounded" - prophetically, as it would turn out.

The letters Henry VIII wrote to Anne show him delightedly flexing his muscles as a courtly suitor. Though king, he writes to his "mistress... to acquit myself of the duty of a true servant", or declares that "my heart and I surrender ourselves into your hands". He asks whether he can truly call Anne his mistress since that "denotes a singular love, far removed from the common". As the years wore on, Henry's goal would change from making Anne his mistress (in either the courtly or the sexual sense) to making her his wife. But then, the patterns of courtly love would have another dangerous game to play.

It is still debatable what - after barely three years of marriage - really lay behind the downfall of Anne Boleyn. Was it the "pastime" - the music, dancing, poetry and flirtatious talk - in Anne's chamber, the ritual tribute of other men's admiration that might be paid to any courtly lady? Had she failed to understand the difference between fantasy and reality, the role of a mistress and of a wife? Or instead was it all a matter of court faction, and Henry's desperation for a son? (This would not be the first time the tropes of courtly love, or the charge of a woman's sexual incontinence, had been used to cloak hard political reality.) But the courtly ethic that actively suggested extramarital affairs was surely a weapon in Thomas Cromwell 's hands, and it lent colour to the charges levelled against Anne.

As Anne speculated that she might be allowed to retire to a convent and recalled predictions that a queen of England would be burned, it is hard to believe that she did not remember stories of Guinevere, sentenced to the flames or to a nunnery. Henry's unusual decision that she should die by the sword may itself have been influenced by the fact the sword was a symbol of chivalry. Perhaps that's why courtly tropes don't feature so strongly in his subsequent marital history - although he did attempt to surprise Anne of Cleves in disguise at Rochester as part of a courtly game, but unfortunately it was one she had no training to play.

The courtly queen

Even Henry's daughter Mary I would show a flash of more generalised romanticism, telling her parliament she should not be asked to marry a man she did not care for, saying: "Where private persons... follow their own private tastes, sovereigns may reasonably challenge an equal liberty." Her marriage to Philip of Spain, though political, saw her "extraordinarily in love". But it was under Mary's half-sister, Elizabeth, that the fantasy of courtly love reached its apogee.

The universal assumption during Elizabeth's early reign was that she too had to marry. But when it became apparent that she was treading a more controversial single path, the challenge was to find an acceptable language, a coding, for her unmarried female monarchy. At almost every point the rules of courtly love matched the relationship between Elizabeth and her courtiers - explaining as nothing else has done how such extravagance could be accepted so readily.

The courtly lady was meant to be capricious and demanding, testing her lover's unquestioning devotion. Caprice and demand were Elizabeth's specialities. The theory made the homage paid by favourites like Leicester and Hatton, Ralegh and Essex seem admirable, rather than absurd, and gave an acceptable gloss to Elizabeth's own flirtatious behaviour. The role reversal implicit in a creed that seemed to give power to the woman is echoed in the complex position of a reigning queen.

True, the original heroines of the courtly love story married - but then, Elizabeth would figure herself as married to her country, displaying the ring that symbolised the union. And if the courtly lady was supposed to be of higher rank, and thus able to dispense patronage, no one had more patronage at her disposal than the queen.

Even more significantly, the courtly lady was supposed to provide a superior moral example which, if her adorer learnt from it, would improve his knightly status. Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier was translated by Sir Thomas Hoby three years into Elizabeth's reign, urging that the courtly lady should be loved by the perfect courtier "and that she should love him in turn, so that both may attain absolute perfection". You could not get much higher, morally, than a woman who the ritual of the coronation had allied to God. In the courtly poetry of 14th-century Italy, Beatrice and Laura had acted as spiritual lodestars for Dante and Petrarch, and the role was ideal for a queen giving spiritual example to her country.

Though courtly ideals had little currency under Elizabeth's successor, James, the idea of the queen reigning over hearts never entirely died away. In 1865 Ruskin urged women to be "queens to your lovers; queens to your husbands and your sons; queens of higher mystery to the world beyond". If the Tudors both exploited and embodied this enduring ideal, that may be one reason we are still so fascinated by their story.
Sarah Gristwood is the author of The Tudors in Love: The Courtly Code Behind the Last Medieval Dynasty, published by Oneworld. This article was first published in the October 2021 issue of BBC History Magazine

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Tudors in love: what were the dynasty's romantic secrets?

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Sarah Gristwood reveals how the Tudor monarchs exploited the medieval obsession with courtly love - a romantic creed inspired by the idea of valiant knights risking their lives to woo fair ladies - to further their own agendas

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The 17th Century: The Age of Revolution (1603-1688) 

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The 17th Century: The Age of Revolution (1603-1688) 

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To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell: There are two types of love, genuine love and love that is filled with lust. In this poem we know that it is directed to his mistress and with who it is being addressed to, the love that is being portrayed is described in a type of physical love. A point that Marvell tries to get across is that physical relation is necessary for love and that lovers should find happiness in being physically close to one another. In this story the importance of love is different than the traditional love that usually felt emotionally, the theme of ideal love in this story is portrayed as physical love.

Paradise Lost by John Milton: The two characters who are widely known for their story Adam and Eve portray a love story that signifies a journey that most relationships have. They go through the many phases such as falling in love, having issues, and resolving those issues and creating an even deeper meaning of love. The theme that Paradise Lost posses is the journey of love. Throughout the story and obstacles that Adam and Eve faces within the story takes every theme of love that six other stories teach us. We get a glimpse of lust, vulnerability, chivalry, innocence, eternal and ideal love. One of the many purposes of Paradise Lost is to show a cycle, and a cycle that the story does a great job of revealing is the journey of love.

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Within the website, that has been provided, explores how romance in English Literature started. The article goes through when and where romance as a literary device had begun to be incorporated in these writings and the influence it's had over the course of literature as well. It gives specific time periods, some being ones that we have discussed over the course of the class, and why it was popularized as well. It gives great background information if one was curious of why the themes of love are so popularized not just during this literacy period but in past literacy eras as well!

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Romance | Definition, History, Examples, Components, & Facts

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romance, literary form, usually characterized by its treatment of chivalry, that came into being in France in the mid-12th century. It had antecedents in many prose works from classical antiquity (the so-called Greek romances), but as a distinctive genre it was developed in the context of the arist…