Our Love is a photograph by Kathy Bassett which was uploaded on January 11th, 2014.
Title
Our Love
Artist
Kathy Bassett
Medium
Photograph - Photography - Fine Art Montage
Description
We have a groovy kind of love.
For this was on Saint Valentine's Day, when every bird cometh there to choose his mate.....This poem was written to honor the first anniversary of the engagement of King Richard II of England to Anne of Bohemia. A treaty providing for a marriage was signed on May 2, 1381. (When they were married eight months later, they were each only 15 years old).Readers have uncritically assumed that Chaucer was referring to February 14 as Valentine's Day; however, mid-February is an unlikely time for birds to be mating in England. Henry Ansgar Kelly has pointed out that Chaucer could be referring to May 3, the celebration in the liturgical calendar of Valentine of Genoa, an early bishop of Genoa who died around AD 307. Jack B. Oruch says that date for the start of Spring has changed since Chaucer's time because of the precession of equinoxes and the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in 1582. The weather would correspond to the modern February, a time when some birds have started mating and nesting in England.Chaucer's Parliament of Foules is set in a fictional context of an old tradition, but in fact there was no such tradition before Chaucer. The speculative explanation of sentimental customs, posing as historical fact, had their origins among 18th-century antiquaries, notably Alban Butler, the author of Butler's Lives of Saints, and have been perpetuated even by respectable modern scholars. Most notably, "the idea that Valentine's Day customs perpetuated those of the Roman Lupercalia has been accepted uncritically and repeated, in various forms, up to the present".
There were three other authors who made poems about birds mating in Saint Valentine's Day around the same years: Otton de Grandson from Savoy, John Gower from England, and a knight called Pardo from Valencia. Chaucer most probably predated all of them, but, due to the difficulty of dating medieval works, we can't know for sure who of the four had the idea first and influenced the others.Medieval period and the English Renaissance[edit]
Using the language of the law courts for the rituals of courtly love, a "High Court of Love" was probably established by princess Isabel of Bavaria in Paris in 1400. It was founded on 6 January, the festivity of a Bavarian Saint Valentin, with The Charter of the Court of Love. The court dealt with love contracts, betrayals, and violence against women. Judges were selected by women on the basis of a poetry reading. It was probably based on the poems of Grandson, and not on the poems of ChaucerIt is possible that the actual Court never existed and that it was all an invention of the princessThe earliest surviving valentine is a 15th-century rondeau written by Charles, Duke of Orl�ans to his wife, which commences.
Je suis desja d'amour tann�
Ma tres doulce Valentin�e...
�Charles d'Orl�ans, Rondeau VI, lines 1�2
At the time, the duke was being held in the Tower of London following his capture at the Battle of Agincourt, 1415.The earliest surviving valentines in English appear to be those in the Paston Letters, written in 1477 by Margery Brewes to her future husband John Paston "my right well-beloved Valentine".Valentine's Day is mentioned ruefully by Ophelia in Hamlet (1600�1601):To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day,
All in the morning betime,
And I a maid at your window,
To be your Valentine.
Then up he rose, and donn'd his clothes,
And dupp'd the chamber-door;
Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed more.
�William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 5
John Donne used the legend of the marriage of the birds as the starting point for his Epithalamion celebrating the marriage of Elizabeth, daughter of James I of England, and Frederick V, Elector Palatine on Valentine's Day:
Hayle Bishop Valentine whose day this is
All the Ayre is thy Diocese
And all the chirping Queristers
And other birds ar thy parishioners
Thou marryest every yeare
The Lyrick Lark, and the graue whispering Doue,
The Sparrow that neglects his life for loue,
The houshold bird with the redd stomacher
Thou makst the Blackbird speede as soone,
As doth the Goldfinch, or the Halcyon
The Husband Cock lookes out and soone is spedd
And meets his wife, which brings her feather-bed.
This day more cheerfully than ever shine
This day which might inflame thy selfe old Valentine.
�John Donne, Epithalamion Vpon Frederick Count Palatine and the Lady Elizabeth marryed on St. Valentines day
Uploaded
January 11th, 2014