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strictly gendered division of responsibilities. Men loved. Women were loved. The vector of desire was supposed to go one way. Courtly love was never fully mutual and wasn’t supposed to be consummated. In the troubadours’ songs and poems and in medieval literature, the protagonist of the courtly love story had to either remain contented by the mere presence of his beloved, orsuffer the misery of rejection.
    Courtly love was fin amour— emotional, “fine” love—in contrast to marriage, which was not based on romantic feeling. Most unions were arranged before the intendeds reached puberty, and the purpose of marriage was to increase property holdings and sustain bloodlines. In courtly love, the besotted knight, who could not marry or own property in his prime soldiering years, politely yet fervently pursued his married lady beloved. He hoped for permission to kiss her hand or sit beside her for a few moments. The lady might express some degree of affection in return, or even allow him tosee her naked body without touching it. Secret trysts did sometimes occur. But knights never expected to entrance a lady away from the bonds of marriage.Courtly love gave the knight a higher purpose in life.
    For all its adulterous and subversive elements, courtly loveserved the needs of the court. The lady eventually had to spurn her knight’s love, sending him, as historian Barbara Tuchman describes, into “moans of approaching death from unsatisfied desire.” Then he would be off on his steed to perform heroic deeds of valor in her honor, seeking to regain her attention and advance his status in the court. The court benefited from a warrior whosublimated his desire into prowess on the battlefield, and the marriage of the lady and her lord remained intact, his bloodline secure.
    But the idea that the unrequited lover had a mission that made his life more meaningful took hold in the medieval imagination. Unrequited love became the fashionable theme of the era, practically a cliché. From this cultural backdrop emerged literature’s most renowned bard of unrequited love, the Italian poet Dante Alighieri. Dante first spotted Beatrice Portinari in 1274, at a flower festival in their hometown of Florence. They were still children; she was eight, and he was nine. But he knew he was fated to love her. As he recounted in his verse autobiography, La Vita Nuova , “Here is a God stronger than I, who shall come to rule over me.” He pursued her in a wistful, boyish way, often going to places around Florence where he thought he might see her. When he was eighteen, she greeted him on the street, filling him with elation and providing the spark that night for the ultimate trippy unrequited love dream: A “lordly figure” held a naked Beatrice wrapped in a crimson cloth. He had a flaming object in his hand. “Behold your heart,” he announced to Dante, then commanded Beatrice to eat it. Reluctantly, she did. The figure, weeping in grief,ascended with her to heaven. Dante woke up in anguish and began to write one of themany love sonnets he would compose in her honor.
    Dante’s unrequited love for Beatrice shaped his life’s work. He was undaunted by the fact that they rarely saw each other, or that their parents had arranged for them to marry other people, or thatshe once got miffed at his lover’s games (he pretended for a time to love another woman in order to screen his passion for Beatrice). The impossibility of their love stirred him rather than dissuaded him; he eventually decided he didn’t want to try to see her, because he would just fall apart in her presence.He preferred instead to write “words of praise” about her. His passion endured after her tragically early death at twenty-four. In his masterpiece The Divine Comedy, Beatrice becomes an angelic Christlike martyr figure who guides him through heaven. His unrequited love wasn’t really about a flesh-and-blood person. It was about devotion to an ideal, a way to glimpse