Domnei: A Comedy of Woman-Worship

Produced by Suzanne Shell, Anuradha Valsa Raj, and Project
Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders
Domnei
A Comedy of Woman-Worship
1920
En cor gentil domnei per mort no passa .
SARAH READ McADAMS
The complication of opinions and ideas, of affections and habits, which prompted the chevalier to devote himself to the service of a lady, and by which he strove to prove to her his love, and to merit hers in return, was expressed, in the language of the Troubadours, by a single word, by the word domnei , a derivation of domna , which may be regarded as an alteration of the Latin domina , lady, mistress.
—C. C. FAURIEL, History of Provencal Poetry .
A Preface
By Joseph Hergesheimer
It would be absorbing to discover the present feminine attitude toward the profoundest compliment ever paid women by the heart and mind of men in league—the worshipping devotion conceived by Plato and elevated to a living faith in mediaeval France. Through that renaissance of a sublimated passion domnei was regarded as a throne of alabaster by the chosen figures of its service: Melicent, at Bellegarde, waiting for her marriage with King Theodoret, held close an image of Perion made of substance that time was powerless to destroy; and which, in a life of singular violence, where blood hung scarlet before men's eyes like a tapestry, burned in a silver flame untroubled by the fate of her body. It was, to her, a magic that kept her inviolable, perpetually, in spite of marauding fingers, a rose in the blanched perfection of its early flowering.