" The courteous and chivalric attitude is one of endless patience and utter selflessness in the man, involving the extinction of his own will and the sacrifice of his own being to the will of the woman as a superior being. Courtesy demands of the man complete acceptance of the fact that the object of his worship is wholly unattainable; self-indulgence in the pains of love, an emotional exhibitionism and masochism—all features of modern love-romanticism which here occur for the first time. The lover as longing and renouncing, love as something to which attainment and fulfilment are irrelevant and which is even enhanced by its negative character, a ‘love of the remote’ without any tangible or even any clearly defined object—all this ushers in the history of modern poetry. "

― Arnold Hauser , The Social History of Art, Volume 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages