Study Guide for The Art of Courtly Love
De amore et amoris remedio (Concerning love and the remedy for love) explains at great length (almost 160 pages in our text) how one can manage the seduction of a lover, extolling the value of an adulterous relationship, only to reverse positions in its short concluding book (24 pages) by asserting that “the wise man” ought to avoid “all the deeds of love” and that “God hates” those who pursue adulterous relationships. What was the medieval reader to understand? What was s/he to learn from this book? What about the modern reader?
· What does the translator of our text, John Jay Parry, think about these questions? (See the “Introduction,” esp. pp. 13-22.)
· Parry published his translation in 1941, and since then other scholars have expressed opposite and compromising positions, some seeing the treatise as “humorous or ironic” (see Don A. Monson, “Andreas Capellanus and the Problem of Irony,” Speculum 64 [1988]: 539-72; you can find the article in Jstor, http://www.jstor.org/). What evidence do you see for irony? If the medieval reader read the text ironically, what then is the modern reader to understand from the text?
· One scholar argues that the text teaches readers “strategies for reading poetic works about love” (Peter L. Allen, “Ars Amandi, Ars Legendi: Love Poetry and Literary Theory in Ovid, Andreas Capellanus, and Jean de Meun,” Exemplaria 1.1 (Spring 1989): 181-205). What strategies for reading do you see implicit in the text? If this is the correct evaluation of the text’s effects for medieval readers, then what do we moderns learn from the book?
· Find two or three scenes that intrigue you and make some notes about what you learn from each of these scenes.
· What evidence do you find in “Relations Between the Sexes” (Speed) to support one reading or another of Andreas’s treatise?