Ulrich Suffering

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What is Love? (Baby don’t hurt me) The ideal love in Europe during the middle ages has had a large influence on the ideas of love we have today. The stereotype of the knight in shining armor who must overcome herculean challenges to be with his true love has worked itself into every façade of our pop culture, with the idea being portrayed in movies and literature. The foundation for the ideal love is in the purity of the admirers motive’s and the devotion to the admired. The personal account of Ulrich von Liechtenstein and the romantic writings of Andreas Capellanus complement each other to paint us a picture of the idea of medieval love. The devotion required and the challenges that must be faced are embodied by the Austrian knight Ulrich …show more content…
Instead, according to Capellanus, time should be spent excessively pondering the person of affection. An obsession with the loved one is the sign of true love, this obsession brings about suffering because, “The lover fears, that he may offend his loved one in some way; indeed he fears so many things that it would be difficult to tell them.” However it is not just a suffering of the mind, which is part of the ordeal to achieve the purist of loves, but also the suffering of the body, which is equally as important. As Ulrich recounts, besides those wounds self-inflicted, he suffered injuries in his jousting, as he poetically puts it, “The good man cut me in the chest so strong and skillful was his joust; through shield and armor went the thrust.
As the European ideal love involved lots of devotion and suffering there was still a certain amount of leeway granted to the nobles. Capellanus writes it is acceptable for a man to be unfaithful, because he is “driven to it by an irresistible passion”, so long as the feeling is one of physical lust, not of emotional value, and the woman is of base birth. As he makes clear in his rules for love, “It is not proper to love any woman whom one should be ashamed to seek to marry.” But marriage