The advent of “the courtly” marks a turning point in European literary history – a “beginning” in culture or civilization, rightly celebrated. Yet, as long recognized, something about it isn't quite kosher.

Expressions like “courtliness,” “courtly literature,” “courtly love,” or the shamed, self-annulling citational periphrasis “the literature once called ‘courtly,’” have currency in both medievalist and modernist discourses. They purportedly ground the sublimity of literary representations by referring to a historical institution that guarantees the historical existence of the substance designated – manners, literature, love – by connecting representations and a historical institution – standing in for “reality.” The verbal coupling [courtly + noun], its essentialization [courtliness], or even the reference by ellipsis, suggest a conceptual identity derived from lexical contiguity allowing semantic seepage from court to text – or vice versa.

Might the usage suggest examination of historical courts? Might such examination discover that the semantic content assumed for “court” disfigures it? Is “courtly” an unexamined ontological warrantee, a seeming historical reference turning into an alibi for the slide into cultural ruminations or a dehistoricized Lacanism built on metonymic strategies of evasion: not false, but as extravagantly anamorphic as the skull in Las Meninas?