During the 12th and the 13th century, the concept of love was seen as "Courtly Love" also called Refined Love. This had nothing to do with marriage. In fact, most accounts state that it wasn't possible to experience courtly love with your spouse. This does not mean married people were excluded from courtly love; they just experienced it with someone 'outside' their marriage.
courtly love was all about romance (the cheesier the better), but sexual contact typically had nothing to do with it. Most of us consider sexual acts to be something shared between lovers. But at medieval court, the term 'lover' referred to the person with whom someone danced, giggled, and held hands; procreation was a spousal duty. To do otherwise was to break the rules of etiquette.
In the Middle Ages, Europeans saw love and marriage as two important, but very different, parts of life. noble marriages were often arranged by the parents in order to increase the status and wealth of each family. They were about political and financial gain, rather than how the couple felt about each other. Once a strategic marriage was arranged and consummated, courtly love brought romance into the courts and people's lives without vows of fidelity being broken.
During the Renaissance, Poets described love as an overpowering force, both spiritual and sexual. For most people, however, marriage was a more practical matter. As the basic building block of society, it involved the expectations of families and communities, not just the wishes of two individuals. Although marriage was the normal state of life for most people, many remained unmarried for either practical or religious reasons.
he idea of romantic love took shape in the centuries leading up to the Renaissance. The literature of the Middle Ages developed the concept of courtly love, as mentioned above treated the beloved as a pure ideal. Two Italian writers of the 1300s, Dante Alighieri and Petrarch drew on this tradition in their poetry. Each of them presented a beloved woman as a source of inspiration and a symbol of female perfection. European poetry in the following centuries followed their lead, treating love as an experience above and beyond ordinary life. Some poets saw sexual desire as a vital part of love, while others presented love as pure and selfless emotion.
Renaissance thinkers viewed "platonic" love as the highest and noblest form of love. This concept of love was based on the ideas of the Neoplatonists, a group of philosophers who had given new interpretations to the works of the ancient Greek thinker Plato. They saw love as a path to the divine, which was the source of the beloved's beauty. Italian writer Baldassare Castiglione discussed Platonic love in the fourth part of The Book of the Courtier (1528).
Another idealized view of love appeared in pastoral* poetry, which focused on the loves of shepherds and nymphs*. Poets presented the countryside as a place of simple pleasures and honest feelings, far removed from the ambitions and deceptions of urban life. However, not all Renaissance literature portrayed love as idealized or romantic. Opposing views appeared in bawdy* stories, which focused on crude sexuality, and in writings that attacked women as wicked temptresses who led men astray.
Sometimes, various conflicting views of love appeared in a single work of literature. The Decameron, a collection of short stories written by Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio around 1350, contains many tales about love, ranging from stories of deep devotion to lively accounts of sexual affairs. In a similar collection from the 1500s called the Heptameron, by Margaret of Navarre, the storytellers reflect on the meaning of love, its effect on Christian virtue, and its relationship to marriage.
In the view of marriage, Love had little to do. Most people believed that the perfect love of the poets could not exist alongside the everyday concerns of marriage. The reality, of course, was more complicated. Although practical matters played a major role in marriage, some rebels insisted on marrying for love.
Love in poetry during the Renaissance often expressed sexual or romantic passion, but it could also serve a variety of political, social, and religious ends literature and poetry evolved still further and took on a decidedly romantic aura. A more personal style developed, and poems clearly became a way for a poet to reveal his feelings to the one he loved. In the mid-to-late 16th century, there was a virtual flowering of poetic talent in England, influenced by the art and literature of the Italian Renaissance a century before. examples of such poetry are Christopher Marlowe's "Who Ever Loved That Loved Not at First Sight?", Sir Walter Raleigh's "The Silent Lover, Part 1" and Ben Jonson's "Come, My Celia".
Conclusion
during the pre Renaissance period there existed Courtly Love which was most often practiced outside marriage, then during the renaissance the concept of love evolved into more of sexual desires, this also gave a bad idea about women with claims that they were the leading factors responsible to lead men astray, and trap them in lust.
Refrence:
https://www.thoughtco.com/renaissance-love-poems
https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/love-and-marriage
https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/love-poetry-in-renaissance-england
https://www.eng-literature.com/2018/12/show-ideas-of-love-marriage-during-Renaissance.html
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