Falk’s Reviews > The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice > Status Update

"[W]hile nobles could contract marriage, the lower strata of society often saw the wisdom of working their way to it through a form of courtship. Sex crime reveals just the edges of this practice, usually when courtship gone wrong slipped into rape or when promises of marriage were broken.
If this analysis is accurate, and there is much evidence to support it, courtship may well have been more a phenomenon of the urban lower classes and more accepted at that level, where it probably had little to do with the literature of courtly love filtering down from above. Rather, the growing importance of the female partner made prenuptial contact a wise policy. If true, this reversal of the accepted vision of courtship originating with the upper strata of society suggests that we might even rethink our conceptions about the medieval tradition of courtly love. There is little doubt that much of courtly love's ideal was a noble conceit with strong ties to an intellectual tradition that can be traced through Christianity and Islam well back to the beginnings of Western thought. But there are aspects of courtly love that point suggestively in another direction. The emphasis on the lover of lower social station, the romanticization of the simple life, the idealization of sexual or spiritual relations based on sexual attraction and the female's acceptance, may all point toward an idealization of lower-class sexuality without denying that intellectual traditions
played a role in that idealization. Is it possible that our stereotypes of nonnoble life mired in ignorance and a struggle for basic subsistence misses, especially in southern France, the heartland of courtly love, a much richer social mix below the nobility that already practiced forms of courtship? A courtship that doubtless the troubadors transformed and romanticized in taking up, but nonetheless took up. It is relatively easier to point to Ovid and Plato along with the intellectual propagandists of courtly love. But the early troubadors especially were familiar with a much wider range of society than the court. There they may have found a situation that when suitably idealized meant as much to their hearts and desires as to their minds. This is largely speculation, but the Venetian situation suggests that in the area of courtship and sexuality we must be wary of the trickle- down vision of social mores. Feelings and ideas may well have moved up the social scale as well, there perhaps to be clothed in finer garb and perfumed with the scents of classical culture." (pp.157-58)

Fascinating. I never even considered seeing it this way before. But he makes a very good point!