Andreas Capellanus and De amore: the code of courtly love

Among the texts that shaped the medieval idea of love, the most systematic is a Latin prose treatise written by a cleric named Andreas, who calls himself a chaplain. The De amore, also known as De arte honeste amandi, most probably dates from the 1180s. Very little is known of the author's life: in all likelihood he worked in the circle of the court of Champagne.

A famous definition

The treatise opens with a definition destined for a long career: love is «passio quaedam innata procedens ex visione», an inborn passion arising from sight and from immoderate thought about the beauty of the other sex. Love, then, enters through the eyes and grows in the mind, which never stops imagining the beloved. It is a conception close to the medical theories of the time on lovesickness.

The first book contains a series of model dialogues between men and women of different rank: a commoner and a noblewoman, a nobleman and a woman of higher station, and so on. In each dialogue the man tries to win the lady with refined arguments, and the woman answers with equal skill. They are rhetorical exercises that reveal how far love was, for that society, also a matter of hierarchy and language.

The ladies' judgements and the rules of love

The second book explains how love is preserved, increased or ended, and reports a series of judgements of love attributed to great ladies of the time, among them Marie de Champagne, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Ermengarde of Narbonne. They are disputed cases settled as if in a court of law. That these rulings were really pronounced is unlikely: they are almost certainly a literary fiction imitating legal language.

In the most famous, Marie de Champagne maintains that true love cannot exist between husband and wife, because spouses are bound by obligation, while lovers grant each other everything freely. The book closes with the thirty-one rules of love, delivered by the King of Love to a Breton knight. The first reads: «Causa coniugii ab amore non est excusatio recta», marriage is no valid excuse for not loving.

The retraction and the condemnation

The third book surprises the reader. Andreas declares that he taught the art of love only so that its addressee, a young friend named Walter, might know it and therefore avoid it. There follows a long condemnation of profane love, accompanied by pages of bitter polemic against women. The model is plain: Ovid too had followed the Ars amatoria with the Remedia amoris.

Interpreters have long debated which of the two parts expresses the author's real thought, and whether the treatise should be read as serious, ironic or didactic. Certainly the Church regarded it with suspicion: in 1277 the bishop of Paris, Étienne Tempier, when condemning a long list of philosophical theses, also explicitly mentioned a book on the god of love, generally identified with the De amore.

Andreas's treatise was translated into several vernacular languages, including French and Tuscan, and circulated widely. It is not a manual of love as actually practised at court, but the courts' intellectual self-portrait. For literary historians it remains an essential document for understanding the language of the troubadours and the vocabulary that would pass, transformed, into thirteenth-century Italian poetry.