http://www.millersv.edu/~english/homepage/duncan/medfem/clove.html

Courtly Love: A Male or Female Game?

By: Karen Ann Divver

Over the years, historians have begun debating over the subject of courtly love. Some historians have tried to dispel the belief that courtly was a female phennomenon and have begun to believe that courtly love was "a masculine game of power, property, and violence." To prove their point, they looked into non-courtly love texts and to see how those texts treated women.

The majority of what the historians looked at was rape laws and courtroom records of rape trials in northern France. They found that the legal practices of the fourteenth century were based on the literture of the thirteenth century which could have been justified by twelfth century lawbooks. (If you find that hard to understand, I did too at first. Just think of it as the present finding its roots in the past...or history repeating itself.) The males tried to mystify rape as a romance or a game, but as we all know, you can't pull the wool over women's eyes so easily and they read the texts very differently.

Work used:

Gravdal, Kathryn. Poetics of Rape Law in Medieval France.from Rape and Representation.New York: Columbia U, 1991.

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