By Maria Padhila
I hope you will excuse me getting medieval on you. But whenever I do research into times and places apart from the USA in this century, I’m struck by how much we accept the current dominant relationship structures as a fait accompli, as natural as the blooming of a jonquil. People get married, and it’s two people, and it’s a man and a woman, and it’s for life, right?
Well, ’twas not ever thus, and in times when people lived even closer to the Christian biblical and church authorities, it seems to have been less thus than any other time.
I’ve been doing research on troubadour poetry and of course the viewpoint on relationships during the 12th and 13th centuries in what is now Southern France struck me.
If you have about five hours or are planning a trip to Languedoc, open a bottle of wine or enjoy a bowl of berries and play on this website. It’s highly accessible where many others on the subject are scholarly, and the primary sources are in Occitan, and if you think I can read that, you must have drunk that wine already.
While the troubadours also excelled at political satire, they’re most remembered for singing about looooveee. So much of our present concepts of “romance” come from these times and the development of rituals of “courtly love.”
But the actual romantic rituals of the time had little to do with the Valentine’s Day/soulmate/eternal bliss/suburban status quo model many of us accept as the heights the heart can reach. It makes an interesting study in how relationship forms evolve to meet the needs of those in power and the forces of changing environment, health and cultural encounters.