Capellanus - the Art of Courtly Love

This book manages to deconstruct itself completely in the last ten or so pages. After devoting a sincerely huge amount of time to instructing a young man in the "arts" of love, the author goes into an extended rant about how love leads men into sin and how ALL women are guilty of ALL seven deadly sins, therefore making it seem ridiculous to fall in love with them. I can't take him fully seriously in the last part, though, as it seems to be a polemic added on by the author to make his church higher-ups a bit happier with him for having otherwise written the definitive work on courtly love - he's too over the top to be serious, and flat contradicts almost the entire book.

Most of the book is focused on how men of particular classes (provided they are at least middle class and not of the peasantry) get women of particular classes (provided the women in question are also not peasants - one doesn't need to woo a desired peasant; one need only rape her when wanted) into bed (nicely tortured sentence, methinks). It's relatively repetitive, yet entertaining in that the examples Capellanus provides do not always end up with the man in question succeeding in his attempt, or in even getting some sort of hope that the woman in question might actually eventually fall for him - in the final example (higher nobility male with higher nobility female), the woman argues against loving the male because he is A) a member of the church and she B) is already in love with someone else.

The book has a sincere need to enforce the reigning class structure of the day. Much of this preoccupation comes across in the dialogues, where the classes of the people in question are discussed. Though the book allows for a greater role of nobility of character, rather than merely noble birth, the fact of not having noble birth is enough to keep someone in their particular rank no matter how noble their character may be, and it still remains that a nobleman is still noble when an asshole. The text doesn't seem to want to change this at all, and claims that the orders of nobility are in place as they are because people were sorted out among the noble and non-noble in the beginning of humanity - a person's place in society as determined by birth is nearly always reflected by their character as well. Except that this gets contradicted quite often. The main theme is that people should be brought to do good deeds regardless of class status, though class status seems sometimes to inform how good the possible deeds are that one might be able to do.

Love in this text and in the sense of courtly love (of the type that carries through all the romances) seems to function as the basis of a vaguely non-Christian type of morality. Though the book states often that people who shun the Church are not fit to be participants in Love's court, most of the precepts of the book (that love can only take place in adultery, or that the fit object of love for a lover (note gender- the lover is always male - the female is pretty much entirely passive in this whole thing except that she can choose which amongst her suitors she might give her love to) is always another man's wife) have to do with the Lover being a good person, and most of all a generous person, willing to give aid and alms to any and all who need it - avarice is constantly held up as the worst of the deadly sins, and it is constantly reiterated that avaricious people have no place in Love's court. This seems to give people a non-Christian basis for charity (which will be interesting to compare to all the religious bases for charity and when one should and should not practice charity that come up in the late Ricardian and early Tudor periods). So while romance works are often opposed to religious texts, it seems that some of the main goals - that one should always strive to be a good person - stay true regardless of whether one is serving God or serving one's Beloved. Though it should also be noted that there's a huge gender-based double standard, and that men are allowed a lot more leeway in their actions than are women, who are either blamed as the basis for all evil in the world, thought to be wholly evil in themselves, or at least are not allowed to cheat on their lovers in the same way that men are occasionally allowed a brief dalliance with someone's handmaid.

It strikes me, then, that reading the last, hugely misogynistic, section of the Art of Courtly Love may be instructive in that it gives an idea as to what clerical objections to courtly texts and romances might be. One could also read it as a parody of clerical objections, since Capellanus more than once refers to love affairs of his own.