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.

No Side-Hugs or Supervision? Cool.

                Call me weird, but the first thing I considered when I finished this essay was the definition of “courtly.” I mean, we live in a world where “courting” means side-hugs, no hand-holding (EVER), and constant supervision (thanks a lot, Duggars).  So that was my rather uneducated misconception.  And Capellanus talks A LOT about sex in “The Art of Courtly Love” (and my definition of “courtly” does NOT, under any circumstances have anything to do with sex except for the prohibition of it.) So I was pleasantly surprised when the first sentence I read was, “Love is a certain inborn suffering derived from the sight of and excessive meditation of the beauty of the opposite sex…” (Capellanus).  Now, I think that is simply beautiful; and so is the rest of the sentence, which indicates that this meditation “causes each one to wish above all things the embraces of the other and by common desire to carry out all of love’s precepts in the other’s embrace” (Capellanus).  I really wasn’t expecting to have my mind blown so quickly.

                Mostly, I loved that I found so many similarities between this and our modern conceptions of how we should love.  That being said, I think this guy is one of the reasons why so many women harp on being romantic and all that sappy stuff.  Capellanus describes love, and its rules, in a rather blunt way, but in the same respect, it is also beautiful. 

                My favorite chapter is the one in which he describes, of all things, the TYPES of people who should love.  One difference is that “after the sixtieth year in a man and the fiftieth year in a woman…the natural heat begins to lose its force…” (Capellanus).  This just seems funny to me, because love is all about sex? Um, I think that’s what we’re currently trying to get away from, but it still amuses me.  Similarly, he talks about how no boy under the age of eighteen can be in love because he’s too caught up being clumsy and embarrassed by his genitals.  YES.  It’s so funny how even then men were men and boys were boys.  I was pleasantly comforted by the fact that these people (or their beliefs, rather) weren’t so much different from those we have now.  To put it into perspective, I think it really makes reading the work of this time a lot less daunting.  As long as we can put it into a historical perspective, the basic rules and ways in which they conducted themselves can be translated into something we can understand.  A lot of their social beliefs are the same as ours.  Or rather, they are the ones who paved the way for some of the social constructs we have today.  Pretty cool.  

Considering Capellanus

After reading a bit of Capellanus’ The Art of Courtly Love, I’ll have to admit that I am most certainly intrigued…

There wasn’t too much of the text that lost my interest and I was pleasantly surprised to see just how many thought-provoking similarities there were between Capellanus’ definition of love and our modern understanding of the term. Going into the reading this week with the expectation of seeing many stark differences was a great outlook to have as it allowed me to take better notice of the similarities that I honestly wasn’t expecting to find. For instance, the notion that “the easy attainment of love makes it of little value [while] difficulty of attainment makes it prized,” (Capellanus) is clearly something that we still witness / value in our society today. Especially speaking as a female, there have been countless times throughout my life that the term “playing hard to get” has come up in some sort of context or another (and I say especially speaking as a female because – at least from my perspective – this term is usually reserved for / said in reference to a woman). The notion that a lover’s value (specifically a woman’s) increases alongside the level of difficulty it takes to win their affection, a notion that is still very much alive and well today, comes directly from the concept of courtly love.

Indeed looking back at the readings for this week it becomes clear that the ideals of the medieval period still play an incredibly integral role in how our modern society constructs and stereotypes gender roles. For example, the classic 21^st century cliché of a “whipped man” and a “controlling wife” are again direct products of courtly love. The ideal male lover of the medieval age was expected to serve his lady who, as Dr. Thompson points out, was often depicted as “cold and cruel.” This was honestly the part of the reading that stuck out to me the most, as I wasn’t previously aware that our modern concept / stereotype of a subservient or “whipped” male – and by association the “controlling” female - was a product of courtly love (now I know who to blame).

However while I wasn’t expecting to notice so many similarities at the start of my reading this week, I’m certainly glad that I did. These similarities unexpectedly drove me deep into thought and I spent a much longer time than I ever originally intended considering the ways in which our society still reflects the remnants of medieval courtly love as opposed to all the ways in which the two are so starkly different. At first I thought that the differences would be more intriguing; that their examination and consideration would be the best way for me to begin to develop an understanding of courtly love. That clearly wasn’t the case. I actually found it much harder to connect with or relate to the differences. To my surprise it was the similarities between Capellanus’ medieval definition of love and my modern understanding of the term that provided the most useful for consideration.