72 In the letter to his father of 10 July Jack had mentioned the ‘mediaeval idea of love’ he was writing about in The Allegory of Love. The technical name for this idea is ‘courtly love’, and the definition which Lewis provides in the first chapter of his book will help the reader understand it. ‘Everyone has heard of courtly love, and every one knows that it appears quite suddenly at the end of the eleventh century in Languedoc…The sentiment, of course, is love, but love of a highly specialized sort, whose characteristics may be enumerated as Humility, Courtesy, Adultery, and the Religion of Love. The lover is always abject. Obedience to his lady’s slightest wish, however whimsical, and the silent acquiescence in her rebukes, however unjust, are the only virtues he dares to claim. There is a service of love closely modelled on the service which a feudal vassal owes to his lord…The whole attitude has been rightly described as a “feudalization of love”.’