e is good in court and good in bed because he is just plain
good. He is a worthy man to begin with, in this morality of
skill, and his boast about knowing the ropes at court was
never meant as a proof that he deserves love. But here, in
this new song, the lover has to win a certain approval
before he can get anything else. And that is no arbitrary
requirement. He has to prove his standing in life, his authenticity as a courtly man, his human reality. The
"setting" now is hardly distinguishable from the
experience. The movement of lust has been detoured from the
straight path to its object; it has to travel along the
lines of a different energy, namely, the force with which a
man holds on to his place in a community (Goldin 10).
All of these elements are at work in Dante's Divine Comedy, where the beloved is formally connected not only to the Platonic theory of ideal forms but also to the ideal of the whole of Christian life, which is the salvation of the soul, achieved via
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