Love in the Premedieval and Medieval Era
This chapter furthers the historical analysis of love among a number of civilizations throughout the world during premedieval and medieval eras that succeeded the ancient civilizations discussed in Chap. 3 . Through various historical texts, this chapter
- PDF / 250,149 Bytes
- 28 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 103 Downloads / 206 Views
Love in the Premedieval and Medieval Era
4.1 Eastern and Middle Eastern Cultures of Love Early Indian History of Love There were three sociohistorical developments in South Asia around the first millennium ad: • the emergence of regional kingdoms with a strong geographic identity, • the development of devotional religion (bhakti), • the Islamic conquest and subsequent creation of an Indo-Islamic culture. These large events, with significant regional variations, led to the emergence of literature in the regional languages and produced new concepts of love (Orsini 2006, p. 27). The courtly culture evolved in these regional kingdoms and reproduced high literary forms (in Sanskrit or Persian as in the case of the Deccan) through rewritings of classical stories, all the while taking pride in local traditions and idioms. That shaped the hybrid cultural forms like Hindustani music, Sufi romances in regional languages, and Persian retellings of Indian love stories. Sexual love and passion in ancient India carried multiple meanings and was valued positively many centuries ago, at least for certain classes of people in certain contexts: the king, the householder and his wife, as well as a courtesan. Ascetic or moralistic condemnation of love and sexuality was present but in one strand of tradition in South Asia. The early set of concepts, genres, and aesthetics about love evolved in the Prakrit dialects and in Sanskrit (Orsini 2006). Ali (2006) examined the issue of courtship in its literary and political dimensions in the Gupta epoch (fourth–seventh centuries CE), the Golden Age of India, known for scientific and artistic endeavors that crystallized the elements of Hindu culture. Aesthetics and poetry of urban and courtly society presented the various
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 V. Karandashev, Romantic Love in Cultural Contexts, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42683-9_4
69
70
4 Love in the Premedieval and Medieval Era
ways, both direct and indirect, in which emotions (bhava) can manifest themselves. Love became the focus of emotional and aesthetic sophistication. As Ali (2006) argued, in the courtly society, a desire and one’s mastery over it became topics for talking about relations between the king and his courtiers and among the courtiers themselves. Ali (2006) analyzed the concept of medieval love as it was represented in the plays of that time. The erotic love embodied in these plays was a very complex one, closely interweaving ideas of erotic excitation, conjugal and domestic harmony, and political and worldly accomplishment into an apparently seamless ideal. Such an ideal could not be captured by a single term love, but rather involved a range of affective states and emotions. At one level, courtship followed the “stages of desire.” In this representation, erotic desire was viewed as a sort of sickness, often characterized in poetry as originating from the arrows of the God of Love, Kamadeva. Attraction was understood here as a kind of psychological and physical affliction, taking the form firs
Data Loading...
