ABSTRACT
My subject is courtly love, that strange doctrine of chivalric courtship that fixed the vocabulary and defined the experience of lovers in our culture from the latter Middle Ages until almost our own day. Some of its traces still survive-or at least they do in the old Andy Hardy movies. If you are old enough to have seen some of these films, or young enough to stay up for the really late, late movie, you will surely recall the obligatory scene, around reel two, when a despondent Andy (the younger Mickey Rooney), murmuring the name of the girl next door (Judy Garland), slowly leaves the table, his food untouched. Lewis Stone, stern but kindly Judge Hardy, frowns and turns to Mrs. Hardy: "What on earth's gotten into that boy? He doesn't eat. He doesn't sleep. He just moons around like a sick calf." And Mrs Hardy - Fay Bainter - smiles with motherly understanding: "Pshaw! Can't you see the boy's in love?" And of course we can. Some, of an older generation than mine, may even have shared some of Andy's emotions, for the pangs of unrequited love and the suffering that necessarily accompanies it have been part of Western courtship for centuries.
