There has undoubtedly been a break in the twentieth century with the tradition of romantic love which arose in the
later phase of
medieval culture, flourished in the «courts of love» in the fifteenth century, gave birth to the literature of the romantic movement, reached conventional respectability and domestication in the nineteenth century, and now seems out of date.
Like the
late -
medieval humanists and Reformers, they search the sources for indications of present direction in «an effort to combat the
culture of political despair, spiritual pessimism, and moral relativism in order to preserve the hard residue of humanistic values... against the barbarian threats of Nazism and Stalinism.»