October 2014 Leadership Reflection

Leadership Reflection for October 2014

Leadership in the Home: Family Relationships

      In my writings about leadership, I usually expound on how we can exercise leadership through exerting a positive influence in our workplace, often with reference to great leaders of the past and present and the lessons that they have to teach us. I’m going to make a departure from this customary point of view by sharing something with you about how the way we exercise leadership at home – in our family relationships – can transform society in a positive way. In honor of Sweetest Day (coming up on Saturday, October 18^th), I’m going to expound on the medieval ideals of “courtly love” and how its practice changed how people thought about love and family relationships, both within and beyond their households.

        One major assumption behind the ideals of “courtly love” was the equal partnership of men and women in building a better society and handing down these chivalric values to future generations. In the egalitarian ideals of “courtly love,” we can glimpse a foregleam of the women’s rights movement that was spearheaded by such luminaries as Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) in the United Kingdom and Sojourner Truth (1797-1883) in the United States. The ideals promulgated by the troubadours of medieval Europe have ultimately led to the opening of leadership roles to women in many levels of society, 800 years later.

The Occitan Culture of Love

By Rob Chappell, M.A., JSMT Advisor

Reprinted (and Slightly Revised) from Cursus Honorum (Course of Honors) VII: 3 (October 2006)

        With Sweetest Day (the third Saturday in October) just around the corner, let’s take a few moments to reflect on where the Western world got its basic ideas about romantic love. An overview of this topic could fill an entire book, but in brief: our Western notions of romantic love really began to take shape in 12th-century Occitania, a once-autonomous region in southern France that included the French Pyrenees and the Riviera.

        The spark that lit the flame of the Occitan “Culture of Love” was its cosmopolitan outlook. Occitania was a multicultural melting pot during the High Middle Ages, and its vibrant society was rather progressive for its time. In 12th-century Occitania, for example, religious tolerance was extended to all Christians (both Catholics and Cathars), Jews, and Muslims; and women were allowed to own property, engage in commerce, enjoy literary activity, and rule sovereign territories on their own. Within this tolerant atmosphere, the arrival of new belief systems (such as Catharism) from Eastern Europe, the importation of sophisticated love poetry from the Arab world, and the recovery of Classical Latin texts on the ancient Roman art of love profoundly impacted all levels of Occitan society: the nobility, the newly emergent middle class, and the peasantry.

        A new breeze was blowing in this open-minded corner of Europe that would forever change the Western outlook on romantic love. Instead of treating women as property that could be carried off or bartered away at will, the “Culture of Love” placed women on an equal par with men. Gentlemen had to practice “courtly manners” to woo the ladies of their choice, and “being courtly” included such things as serenading ladies from beneath their windows and exchanging gifts as tokens of love on a regular basis. To be successful suitors, gentlemen also had to become well versed in the Seven Liberal Arts, undertake heroic deeds of chivalry, and compose love poetry!

        The “Culture of Love” and its lofty romantic ideals quickly spread to royal courts and noble households across Europe. A new generation of love poets – the French troubadours and German Minnesingers – introduced their audiences to the new ideals of courtly love by composing and performing versified stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. The chivalrous characters in these popular stories modeled the “art of courtly love” and held forth a new set of ideals for people to emulate.

        The “Culture of Love” has been preserved for us in countless Latin and vernacular books and songs from the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Here are some links to online resources about the “Culture of Love” that is still influencing us today, eight centuries after its zenith in Occitania.

·        Courtly Love: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/140814/courtly-love à This article summarizes the origins and spread of the culture of courtly love in Occitania and how its ideals have influenced Western civilization ever since.

·        Dante’s La Vita Nuova (The New Life): http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Italian/TheNewLife.htm – Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) narrates his own experience of courtly love with Beatrice Portinari in this autobiographical masterpiece, composed in both poetry and prose.

·        Eleanor of Aquitaine: http://www.royalty.nu/Europe/England/Angevin/Eleanor.html – Eleanor, originally Duchess of Aquitaine (1122-1204), became Queen of England, chief patron of the troubadours, and mother of King Richard the Lionhearted!