The age of chivalry now arrives, the epoch of =minne=[138] (=love=) and =gallantry=. What a new and remarkable change in the spiritual physiognomy of love! This also has left deep traces in the love of modern civilized man; this period represents an important stage in the developmental history of individual eroticism. In the middle ages the honour of the knight and the love of woman, “the most beautiful radiance coming down to us from the life of this wonderful period,” as Wienberg says, belong together. Since that time man’s honour has been associated in a peculiar manner with woman’s love. Boldly but aptly the far-sighted Herder has described the knightly minne (love) as a reflex of the Gothic. The same immeasurability of the imagination, the same indescribable sentiment, constructed the huge cathedral, and disclosed the unrivalled worth and beauty of the beloved--created minne and its outward expression, gallantry. In deifying supplication, the knightly spirit elevated the beautiful sex to the heavens, =raised woman far above man=, and placed man far beneath woman. The knight sacrificed himself for the mistress of his heart, subjected himself to her judgment before the _cours d’amour_ (courts of love), and in the lists. He became the =slave= of love and of the beloved woman; he wore her fetters, he obeyed her slightest nod, he endured chastisement and pain for her sake. But was this all reality? Was it not rather pure imagination? There was, indeed, as Johannes Scherr says, a worm at the heart of all this romanticism. The ideal deification of woman did not affect a corresponding elevation in her true social position; minne was but too often a mere “pose,” and was often associated with unbridled sexual licence in relation to women of lower degrees. The domination of the imaginative element characterized the aberrations of minne, debasing itself for the honour of the beloved. The masochistic element concealed in all love was here for the first time elevated into a system. We shall return to this subject in the chapter on “Masochism.” And yet there is another side to the matter, and by the spirit of chivalry there was aroused a nobler view of woman’s nature. “The cause and the secret of this dominance (of women) is this, that woman, with her complete, noble womanliness, entered wholly and fully into life; that she controlled a kingdom which was hers by right, the world of feeling and emotion, but controlled this kingdom and no more. As mistress of feeling, as guardian of feeling, she brought poetry into life; and into art she brought that lofty impetus, the above-described fanciful ideal or feminine tendency, which, when observed and perceived, reacts on the emotional mood of the observer.”[139]