Saint Valentine's Day or Valentine's Day is a holiday on February 14. It is the traditional day on which lovers express their love for each other; sending Valentine's cards, donating to charity or gifting candy. It is very common to present flowers on Valentine's Day.
The term amour courtois ("courtly love") was given its original definition by Gaston Paris in his 1883 article "Études sur les romans de la Table Ronde: Lancelot du Lac, II: Le conte de la charrette", a treatise inspecting Chretien de Troyes's Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart (1177). Paris said amour courtois was an idolization and ennobling discipline. The lover (idolizer) accepts the independence of his mistress and tries to make himself worthy of her by acting bravely and honorably (nobly) and by doing whatever deeds she might desire. Sexual satisfaction, Paris said, may not have been a goal or even end result, but the love was not entirely Platonic either, as it was based on sexual attraction (see section on sexuality below for further views).
The term and Paris's definition were soon widely accepted and adopted. In 1936 C.S. Lewis wrote the influential The Allegory of Love further solidifying courtly love as "love of a highly specialized sort, whose characteristics may be enumerated as Humility, Courtesy, Adultery, and the Religion of Love".
Later, historians such as D.W. Robertson in the 1960s and John C. Moore and E. Talbot Donaldson in the 1970s, were critical of the term as being a modern invention, Donaldson calling it "The Myth of Courtly Love", because it is not supported in medieval texts. However, even though the term "courtly love" does only appear in just one extant Provençal poem (as cortez amors in a late 12th century lyric by Piere d'Alvernhe), it is closely related to the term fin'amor ("fine love") which does appear frequently in Provençal and French, as well as German translated as hohe Minne. In addition other terms and phrases associated with "courtliness" and "love" are common throughout the Middle Ages. Even though Paris used a term with little support in the contemporaneous literature, it was not a neologism and does usefully describe a particular conception of love and focuses on the courtliness that was at its essence.
