Such courts determined rights and wrongs of lovers' lives and argued over the disposition of loyalties, balancing hypothetical troubles. Courtly love may perhaps have been the greatest change in Western culture between the fall of Rome and the rise of the Renaissance. It put women on pedestals and glorified amorous passion in a way that was anathema both to Classical civilization and Christian salvation. Its doctrines were codified in Tractus de Amore et de Amoris Remedia , nominally by Andreas'. Capellanus but actually dictated by Eleanor's daughter Marie.
Love is all powerful, and a man's chief obligation is obedience.
By the time of Shakespeare, however, the songs of courtly love had a different burden. Courtly love was becoming romantic love, prelude to marriage, not a discord after it. Besides, the pedestal had proved an uncomfortable vantage. In addition, courtly love, which had begun as a literary movement, had become a literary convention, ripe for parody, the lover as rich a maker of laughter, as he had previously been a matter for sighs. And like most literary conventions, courtly love was in danger of seeming merely conventional, something learned in the study, not lived in the world, a kind of inky inexperience waiting to be washed away by the tempestuous seas of real emotion.