C.S. Lewis, a medieval scholar, writing about courtly love says, "Real changes in human sentiment are very rare -- there are perhaps three or four on record -- but I believe that they occur, and that this is one of them."

Love in the classical period (Greece and Rome) or the European "dark ages":

1) man for man, warriors who die together fighting (Gilgamesh and Enkidu; Achilles and Patroclus)

2) love between vassal and lord

Relationships between men and women:

1) sensuality (Achilles and Briseis)

2) domestic comfort (Penelope and Odysseus)

3) madness (ate) causing disgrace (Medea who kills her three children to punish her rejecting lover, Jason; Agamemnon who sacrifices his men's lives in the Trojan War for the love of a slave girl, Chryseis)

Romantic love between men and women begins in eleventh century Provençal (South of France) love songs. It is a mistake to think that the courtly lovers of the romances in Europe are exaggerated and that their rituals are game-like. They had an enormous effect on succeeding ages. We have inherited our ideas on romantic love from these models.

Causes

1) Ovid. People of the Middle Ages read Ovid's Ars Amatoria seriously. It is a Latin work on the art of seduction, written playfully. Treating an nonserious subject seriously has always been a form of humor. This is how the classical age saw Ovid. But the Middle Ages took him seriously.

2) The Crusades. When the great lords of feudal manors went away to fight "the infidel" and capture the Holy Lands for the glory of The Church, the women had the responsibility of running the manors, which were like big businesses, in a way. For the first time, in the history of womankind, she had something important to do, other than weaving and childbirth, something to learn other than embroidery or hair dressing. These tasks and responsibilities developed the minds and characters of women and made them more interesting. A powerful woman of this time who initiated Courts of Love and the rituals of Courtly Love was Eleanor of Aquitaine who was a huge landholder in her own right, divorced from Louis VII of France, married and separated from Henry II of England.

3) Troubadours. Because these traveling minstrels were wandering around when men were rather scarce during the crusades, ladies allowed them to pay court. The minstrels entertained the socially superior ladies of the manor with love songs influenced by sensual Arabic love poetry. This new kind of Southern European poetry was called La Styl Nuova. In some instances the sensual new poetry and feeling became divine: La Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy) written by Dante in the fourteenth century inspired by his lifelong love of Beatrice, a woman he never knew, but whom he loved from the day they first met as children.