The Tudor Court was a rarefied environment filled with striving young men, perhaps as many

as a thousand of them. The only women around were those from the Queen's small household.

And the other thing to notice that many of these male courtiers were particularly young

in their 20s often when they came to court.

And so something had to be done to channel all those unconcernated sexual energies and

to fill those bored hours. And men chose, therefore, following the game of courtly love,

a mistress whom they served faithfully and exclusively, and they would do this by dancing

and by writing amorous poems to her and by giving her gifts and singing her songs.

The dynamic of this game of courtly love was very much one in which the energies were

all on the side of the man. But the woman could respond with agency, so she might choose

to acknowledge her suitor or might sustain him completely. And actually the themes of

unrequited love and longing and discontent of the suffering are very conventional when

it comes to courtly love poetry, for example.

Courtly love has been described by Nicholas Schoelman, one of Thomas W. Wright's biographers,

the indoor or feminized division of Shavouric games. And it is a kind of Shavouric code of conduct.

Sarah Gristwood, who has written lots about the Tudor period, I particularly recommend to you

her book Game of Queens, The Women Who Made 16th Century Europe, or her Blood Sisters, which was

about the women behind the Wars of the Roses, and she also wrote a very good book about our

Bella, the granddaughter of Bess of Horwick. Her new book is called The Tudors in Love,

and it explores this convention of stylized ritual flirtation at the heart of the Tudor court.

And she starts by taking us all the way back to the troubadours of Southern France and the stories

of L'Oxlot and Gwynethyne.

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