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eventually crystallized into a literary tradition” (1). However, the human soul can only be
entertained by banquets and duels for so long, and soon the Romanticist movement picked up the
chivalric code and applied it to the one thing of which even modern audiences can’t get enough:
relationships. As the statutes of the chivalric code were applied to interactions between knights
and women, the courtly love tradition was born. This was guided by many of the same attributes
that guided the chivalric way of life, such as passion and gentleness, without the basis of
Christian piety. Therefore, “in theory this love was frankly sensual and adulterous” (2), to put it
mildly. What began as a way of life based on chastity and piety was quickly translated into
something else entirely.

It is somewhat confusing to think that knights, who were intended to be the most pious,
would engage in acts that modern Christian theology would consider sinful. However, it pays to
remember that in these times, marriage was a social contract rather than a spiritual one. In the
religious world, marriage held more weight as a sacrament than as a living example of an
individual’s faith, and as William George Dodd states, “the characteristics, indeed, of the knight
and the lover in mediaeval times were identical, since every knight was supposed, when young,
to be in love” (233). Knights grew to be seen in a dual role as both lovers and nobles. Soon those
who associated most often with knights, such as dukes and other members of the court, began to
follow this social model. Furthermore, common persons saw knights as a type of role model, a
goal for men to achieve in their own character. As the courtly love tradition became synonymous
with knights, the interest and behavior of the public gradually shifted in that direction. Bernard
O’Donoghue defines Romanticist love in this way: “Love is a certain inborn suffering derived
from the sight of and excessive meditation upon the beauty of the opposite sex, which causes
each one to wish above all things the embraces of the other and by common desire to carry out