Fiction & the Status Quo

As we consider Capellanus' Art of Courtly Love, it's important to remember that the kind of love he's describing is one that exists in fiction and not so much in reality. Whether it was written as a satire that mocks the conventions of courtly love or a serious discussion of what makes the ideal fictional love, it's definitely focused on literature and not on the real world.

And when you're diving into a work of literature, I think the most important question to ask is always, "what does this text's audience 'gets' from this?" Why is/was it appealing to a particular group of people? How does it enforce or challenge the status quo? What does it make people think about? Does it encourage them to make their own lives better or simply allow them a bit of "escape" from a lousy lot in life?

We can't always know what an author intended to achieve with a particular work (in fact, I usually avoid spending too much time thinking about that, so I'm not too fussed about whether Capellanus is satirizing or not), but if something has survived and continued to be circulated a few hundred years later, it's safe to say that it meant something to the people who read and enjoyed it. We don't tend to save the stuff that's not important to us (well, unless we are crazy hoarders and then all bets are off).

As I mentioned in class last Thursday, we need to move past the initial reaction of "I get this - I can relate to this" and try to understand the parts that seem inexplicable or just plain weird to us. And there's plenty of weirdness to go around here, right?

I'm pleased to see that the issue of love between people of the same sex has come up in several blog posts thus far - it's an important human rights issue in our own time and place and so we ought to give it our consideration. So how do we cope with the fact that this form of love is excluded by Capellanus? 

For many reasons, we can't simply say, "well, this is the past and the past was ignorant and judgy." Sexual orientation as a marker of personal identity is a modern concept. Sex between people of the same sex certainly happened, but it wasn't a matter of seeing oneself as "homosexual" or "heterosexual" or anywhere else on that spectrum. Love between men was celebrated in the ancient world. And it was understood that men could develop close bonds with other men and women could develop close bonds with other women. 

So why exclude it here? There are lots of possibilities, but here's one. This is about giving women a bit of power and a chance to be involved in a "man's world." It's about saying that even though women and men are different in lots of ways, it doesn't prevent them from developing a close and loving relationship with one another. When most marriages were matters of practicality or politics, the idea of romantic love between men and women is actually a pretty radical and unexpected notion. Women like Marie de Champagne, who was Chretien de Troyes' patron, were left alone for years at a time to govern their husbands' lands when said husbands were away on pilgrimage or crusade. But they were not always accorded the respect of being treated as an equal, as someone with rights, as someone with whom a man should even bother to have a serious conversation with.

Then what about excluding blind people? (As someone with truly horrific vision who started wearing glasses at age 2 and contacts at age 3, I bristle at this one myself - I certainly would have been labeled as "blind" in the 12th century!) What reasons can you come up with, other than an assumption that love is a shallow or wholly physical thing? 

There are no "right" or "wrong" answers here. (Well, OK, there are some wrong answers, but all reasonable hypotheses are welcome!) I encourage you to think about it and to suggest an answer in Thursday's class. Or if you aren't perplexed by this issue, then come up with an answer to another question you were left with as you read through Capellanus. And please continue to challenge yourself in this way as we tackle each of our readings this semester.