Romantic (Courtly) Love

Romantic (Courtly) love is the over-riding theme of this work, and the entire action uses allegory to describe the process of falling in love and paying court to a young woman.

Allegories of this nature were very popular when this work was written, and like other works, the Romance of the Rose contains a discourse where Cupid explains the responsibilities and duties of a lover, both in respect to the service he has to pay to Love in the abstract and to the woman he loves. This first discourse was very probably intended as a "stand-alone" passage that would be studied by those who took a fashionable interest in courtly love and its rules.

The relationship between the God of Love (Cupid) and the lover is modeled on a feudal relationship, where the lover surrenders to Cupid after being "wounded by his arrows" (i.e. after...