The Art of Courtly Love

The Art of Courtly Love’s Latin title—De amore, meaning concerning love—reflects the books central theme and purpose: to engage in a sustained inquiry into the nature of love, how to preserve it, and why to repudiate it. While the text’s table of contents expresses the content and subsequent themes, the purpose of Andreas’s inquiry is a subject of debate. Scholars question to what extent the book is meant to be descriptive, didactic, parodic/satiric, or some combination of these. The book’s approach to love lends itself to multiple interpretations.

Andreas’s book is believed to have codified the system of manners that came to be called “courtly love” (the term itself was coined by Gaston Paris in the 19th century). Although the book was likely composed between 1186 and 1190, some believe it depicted life in the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine from 1169 to 1174. In this sense, the book can be said to be descriptive.

While scholars are unsure of how and why this tradition developed, it may have arisen in and spread from Eleanor’s court and went on to influence Western literature for centuries. Scholars debate the extent to which courtly love existed as a social practice, with some believing it may have been more a subject for poetry and song than lived experience. In either case, Andreas’s work engages elements associated with what we know as courtly love: love as ennobling and idolizing, knights striving to make themselves worthy through bravery and honor, sexual attraction but not necessarily consummation, jealousy as essential, and love as extramarital. 

The characterization of Andreas’s book as descriptive does not account for elements of didactic literature evident in his text. In his Preface, Andreas claims to be addressing the book to Walter, a protege who has fallen in love and asked for advice. Walter’s identity has never been proven. He may be a fictional invention to provide interest or context for Andreas’s inquiry, a characteristic element of didactic literature since antiquity. From the outset, Andreas tells Walter that his affection for his protege compels him to provide the information he seeks, but Andreas hopes that learning about love will demonstrate that it is best repudiated.

After an extensive discussion of love’s ins and outs in Books 1 and 2, Andreas concludes with a blistering critique of love and the eternal torture to which it leads. To further encourage chastity, Andreas enumerates women’s many vices and evils, an approach associated with appeals to the celibate life during the Middle Ages. Andreas contrasts women’s inconstancy with God’s enduring love, the only one worth striving for since it brings honor and glory in this life and the next. The rules of love, covered in such intricate detail in the majority of the work, ultimately serve to exemplify how love brings men to ruin. This accords with some scholars’ belief that Andreas intended to point out the upper class’ materialism and superficiality.

While the text can be read as both descriptive and didactic, the text can also be interpreted as satiric or parodic. The influence of Ovid is evident throughout as Andreas refers to or directly quotes him repeatedly, especially in the first two books. Some scholars find early origins of courtly love in Ovid’s works on love—The Art of Love, The Cure for Love, and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Metamorphoses and The Heroines. Andreas borrows motifs and ideas from Ovid, including love as warfare, the need for jealousy, the importance of keeping affairs secret, and the notion of pining for a lover. Some modern scholars tend to interpret Ovid’s works as parodies of the technical discourses of his time that were not meant to be taken seriously. That Andreas also intends the rules of love to appear ridiculous seems evident in the contradictions inherent in them. Lovers are instructed to be honest, except when they’re testing their beloveds with trickery and dishonesty. Lovers should keep themselves chaste for their beloveds, except when men are being forgiven for “play[ing] in the grass” with a “strumpet” or “serving girl” (161) or instructed that it is acceptable to rape peasants. Lovers should be generous, except that love cannot be bought or sold.

How to interpret the third book, which mirrors appeals to celibacy found in religious discourse of Andreas’s time, is a source of speculation and debate among scholars. Its content is histrionic in tone and characterized by extreme language. Love causes men to lose “all [their] usefulness” (187). It estranges men from their friends, forces men into “cruel service,” leads to poverty, dishonesty, homicide, war, and “intolerable torments” (190-91). Andreas writes that “every woman is a drunkard,” “[e]very woman is also loud-mouthed,” “no woman knows how to keep a secret,” “[e]very woman in the world is likewise wanton,” and “prone to every sort of evil” (207-08). He adds that “there is not a woman living in this world, not even the Empress or the Queen, who does not waste her whole life on auguries and the various practitioners of divination, as the heathen do” (208-09). Considering the text was likely composed at Marie’s request, the condemnation of Empresses and Queens is curious and raises the question of whether this condemnation of women is meant to be taken at face value or is parodic.