LOVE IN THE MEDIAEVAL AGE.

Clutha Leader, Volume XXXVII, Issue 50, 20 December 1910, Page 3

LOVE IN THE MEDIAEVAL AGE.

One likes to cultivate romantic visions of ye ladyes and ye goode knights of olde dividing their time between awarding the prize at the tourney and presiding at the Court of Love, but after reading Mrs Emily James Putman's article in the current 'Atlantic Monthly' one must renounce these romantic dreams for ever. The life of the lady of the castle must have been even worse than that of a woman on a remote ranch of to-day. Most emphatically the wedded relation in the age of chivalry was no romantic one. The husband was allowed by law to beat his wife for certain offences, and it is more than likely that he did not always wait to consult the code. The law specified that he was to beat her "reasonably," and insisted that he must stop short of maiming her—a thoughtful provision that! The tendency of the Middle Age towards the neat, systematic and encyclopaedic had the curious result of making love to become a department of scholasticism, a matter of definition and rule. Ovid advises a young man to frequent theatres, whither the ladies go both to see the show and to show themselves. The whole art of love was carefully tabulated and put in code, and from it one 'earns among other things that one of the signs of a true lover_is his physical disturbance in the presence of the beloved, and that it is an axiom of the science that the sudden sight of the lady alters the lover's circulation. The spirit of the code can best be understood from a few examples, thus: 13. Common love seldom endures. 1-5. Every lover is wont to grow pale at sight of the beloved. 18. Virtue alone makes one worthy of love.

23. The thought of love makes a man sleep less and eat less. 24. Every action of the lover ends in thoughts of the beloved. 25. The true lover cares for nothing save what he deems pleasant to the beloved.

30, The true lover is for ever and without interruption occupied by the image of the beloved. No more amusing game was ever invented for the entertainment of polite society, says Mrs Putnam, than the methodical discussion of 10-/e. It -oiltains something for everyone. The earnest and the frivolous, the amorous and the cool, the devout and the careless, all were furnished with a decorous means of approach to, the most fascinating topic in the world. Among the theses most often debated by the learned in love were those dealing with the relative desirability of a knight or a clerk as a lover; but as the clerks controlled the records of these debates they have, at any rate as far as literature goes, the best of it.