Editing Courtly love (section)

==={{lang|pro|Midons}}===
Courtly love in [[troubadour]] poetry is associated with the word {{lang|pro|midons}}.{{sfn|Lewis|1936}}{{sfn|Boase|Bornstein|1983}} {{lang|pro|Midons}} comes from the [[Latin]] phrase "my lord", {{wikt-lang|la|mihi}} {{wikt-lang|la|dominus}}.{{sfn|Monson|2007}} The {{lang|la|mi}} part is alternatively interpreted as coming from {{wikt-lang|la|meus}}{{sfn|Monson|2007}} or {{lang|la|mia}}, though the meaning is unchanged regardless.{{sfn|Bogin|1980|p=50}}

Troubadours beginning with [[William IX, Duke of Aquitaine|Guilhem de Poitou]]{{sfn|Bogin|1980|pp=49–50}} would address the lady as {{lang|pro|midons}}, flattering her by addressing her as his lord and also serving as an ambiguous code-name.{{sfn|Boase|Bornstein|1983}}

{{blockquote|By refusing to disclose his lady's name, the troubadour permitted every woman in the audience, notably the patron's wife, to think that it was she; then, besides making her the object of a secret passion—it was ''always'' covert romance—by making her his lord he flashed her an aggrandized image of herself. She was more than "just" a woman: She was a man.
|author=Meg Bogin{{sfn|Bogin|1980|pp=49–50}}
}}

These points of multiple meaning and ambiguity facilitated a "coquetry of class", allowing the male troubadours to use the images of women as a means to gain social status with other men, but simultaneously, Bogin suggests, voiced deeper longings for the audience: "In this way, the sexual expressed the social and the social the sexual; and in the poetry of courtly love the static hierarchy of feudalism was uprooted and transformed to express a world of motion and transformation."{{sfn|Bogin|1980|p=56}}