Courtly Love in Perspective: The Hierarchy of Love in Andreas Capellanus

A constant thorn in the side of those who try to understand courtly love is Andreas Capellanus' De Amore. This disconcerting treatise provides us with the only true art of courtly love that we possess, but it also contains a very harsh attack against love. The antithetical attitude towards love is all the more astonishing because Andreas, although a churchman, devoted far more space to the instruction on how to love and the praise of love than to the attack on it. Explanations for this anomaly have ranged from one extreme to the other: Andreas was sincere only in the section devoted to the praise of courtly love (Books I and II), whereas the third book represents a later—forced or willing—recantation; or, Andreas had been obliged for unknown reasons to compose a treatise on love, and appended the third book to correct any misunderstanding regarding his personal opinion on the matter. Recently some scholars have tried to find explanations for the treatise that deny in effect the existence of a conflict between the two parts. D. W. Robertson, Jr., for example, finds ironic overtones in Books I and II that betray Andreas' disapproval of courtly love; the third book is a forthright condemnation. I shall return to Robertson's thesis below. In the most thorough analysis to date of Andreas' treatise, Felix Schlösser has come to the conclusion that there is in fact no compromise between the two parts, and that Andreas did not really try to find one; the type of love attacked in the Reprobatio is totally different from the courtly love described in the rest of the treatise. Schlösser concludes that Andreas did not seek to reconcile courtly love with the teachings of the Church, but rather let the world of courtly love and the world of Christian dogma stand side by side, each absolute in its own sphere; both are confined to predetermined areas and do not overlap. Thus the attack from the point of view of the Church in Book III is directed against the same type of love Andreas condemns in Book I when he considers peasants, prostitutes, gold diggers, and the like.