ABSTRACT
It’s easy to understand the university students’ responses to this Quiz item. As we saw in Chapter 2, the myth of Cupid’s arrow appears in many different cultures at many different times. It describes something archetypal. It’s not to be dismissed lightly after millennia of enculturation. Add to that the timeless and yet so untimely template for so many of our unwritten rules for wooing and being wooed-the 12th century courtly love traditions “that permeate our novels, films, music, and psyches” (as the publisher reminds readers on the jacket of medieval scholar Andrea Hopkins’ The Book of Courtly Love: The Passionate Code of the Troubadours). And as Hopkins herself explained; “Courtly love-is always at first sight” (1994, p. 17). Remember, too, that these
codes of chivalric love were completely idealized models that forbade actual physical contact because they were constructed to deal with the emptiness of aristocratic loveless marriages. If anything, we’ve perverted this “chaste” concept.
