Courtly Literature: “Yesterday” is Today

Abstract

Any specialist in courtly literature who has been the captive audience of an easy listening program in a waiting room or an oldies radio station in a car can attest that the art of the troubadour and the trouvère remains with us today. Jongleurs of recent decades have followed closely in the footsteps of their medieval forebears by exploiting, with greater or lesser success, the language of amorous obsession and lamentation that has been the focus of abundant scholarly analysis since the late nineteenth century. This chapter—“Courtly Literature: ‘Yesterday’ is Today”—examines how, whether in Kenny Rogers’s crooning “Lady, I’m your knight in shining armor and I love you,” Elvis’s begging “Don’t be cruel to a heart that’s true,” the Temptations’ rejoicing “When it’s cold outside, I’ve got the month of May,” or Percy Sledge’s reminder that “When a man loves a woman, can’t keep his mind on nothing else,” courtly conventions can be discerned in abundance. The “power of love” is extolled in more than one recent song of that title, and “the book of love will open up and let us in” if only we “take these broken wings and learn to fly again.” Bette Midler consoles the despairing that “far beneath the bitter snows lies the seed that … becomes the rose,” while Seal, in “Kiss from a Rose,” admits “you remain my power, my pleasure, my pain.” It goes without saying that nobody expresses love and loss more plaintively than country music artists. Given the multitude of contemporary examples, there can be little denying that the voice of “yesterday” lives on today, as reflected in Paul McCartney’s ballad of that title. We, too, are inclined to ask, as he does in another of his compositions, “You’d think that people would have had enough of silly love songs, but … I see it isn’t so. And what’s wrong with that?”