“Courtly Love” by Professor Gabriel O. Emerson, Associate Professor of Italian Studies, University of Toronto.

Sex and love are not the same.

I’ve lectured on this subject in the past and usually, my claim is accepted without argument.  What’s more difficult to defend is the claim that one can enjoy romantic love without engaging in sex.

Most people would point out that when you fall in love with someone, you want to have sex with them.  Many times. Or constantly.

It isn’t easy to understand why a pair of romantic lovers would forego sex and remain in love.  But I study the life and works of Dante Alighieri, who was enmeshed in a non-sexual romantic relationship with a woman, Beatrice Portinari, that lasted for years. So as much as I find it difficult to believe that one can have romantic love without sex, I’m forced to confront that reality on a daily basis.

“In that part of the book of my memory before which little can be read, there is a heading, which says: ‘Incipit vita nova: Here begins the new life’. Under that heading I find written the words that it is my intention to copy into this little book: and if not all, at least their essence.” (La Vita Nuova, Dante Alighieri, Book I, Trans. A. S. Kline.)

So begins Dante’s account of how his new life began when he met Beatrice at the tender age of nine. He declares that since that moment Love governed his soul.

The courtliness of Dante’s love is understandable when he’s young but when he meets Beatrice again when they are both adults, it’s much more difficult to understand.  In fact, Dante describes their meeting like this, “She greeted me so virtuously, so much so that I saw then to the very end of grace.”

We could, perhaps, dismiss Dante’s fascination with Beatrice as a kind of religious experience, given his language. But he goes on to describe a vision that he has in which she is naked and wrapped in a crimson cloth, and held in the arms of man who declares himself to be Dante’s lord.

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