ABSTRACT

Denis de Rougemont was surely hoping to shock his readers when he proclaimed that, whether in the twelfth century or later, “passionate love is actually tantamount to adultery.”1 He goes on to say that artistic representations of courtly love go even further to indicate that love and marriage are incompatible (35). Of course, love has a wide range of common meanings. “The word can designate either a friendship joining two individuals of the same or different sexes, or carnal love, ‘mad passion,’ ‘guilty voluptuousness,’ as the theologians would have it, or, finally, the tender sentiment born between a man and a woman that is made both of friendship and sexual attraction.”2