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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hella_Tellah" data-source="post: 4661559" data-attributes="member: 52669">Because courtly love, mercenaries, and attitudes toward sex are very similar topics...<img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/erm.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":erm:" title="Erm    :erm:" data-shortname=":erm:" />  Keep up the good work, SHARK.  All three are good threads for those of us who like setting detail and huge, Gygaxian tables.I took a class a few years ago on the history of love in the arts, and courtly love was a pretty large portion of the course.  One of the major points I got out of the class was that love has been portrayed almost exclusively as a Very Bad Thing in Western literature.  Most "love stories" have been fables on the danger of falling in love and the importance of duty.  One of the first works to question this was also one of the first European novels, <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/467" target="_blank">La Princesse de Clèves</a> by Madame de Lafayette.  My professor contended that it's the earliest popular work he can find that suggests that it might be better to marry someone you love.I've had a couple of plots revolve around this idea of the folly of youthful love versus the importance of duty, and found that my players really got into it.  It's kind of fun to roleplay characters whose values are very different from those of modern, Western people, and they took to it pretty well.</blockquote>

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