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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 July 2016
Near the end of the twelfth century, the scholar and statesman Peter of Blois felt compelled to bring together the wisdom of ancients and moderns on the subject of love and friendship. He was reluctant to publish his synthesis, for he was afraid that his reliance on other authors would bring charges of fraud. Sure enough, it has. Unfortunately, he relied too heavily on one modern in particular, St. Ailred of Rievaulx; and, like many undergraduate papers, his treatise is a better example of plagiarism than of synthesis.
1 This paper was presented in an earlier form at the Conference on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University in March, 1966. I wish to thank Hofstra University and the Frank L. Weil Institute for Studies in Religion and the Humanities for the financial assistance which made my research possible.Google Scholar
2 De amicitia Christiana et de charitate Dei et proximi tractatus duplex PL 207.871–957, especially 871.Google Scholar
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4 Pétré, Hélène, Caritas: Étude sur le vocabulaire latin de la Charité Chrétienne (Louvain 1948) 96–98 et passim; Dublanchy, E., ‘Charité,’ DTC 2217; amor and caritas in Blaise, Albert, Dictionnaire Latin-Française des Auteurs Chrétiens 78, 133; charité in Walther von Wartburg, , Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (Berlin 1940) 376–377.Google Scholar
5 Dumeige, Gervais, Richard de Saint-Victor et l'idée Chrétienne de l'amour (Paris 1952) 3. Unless otherwise indicated, translations in this paper are my own.Google Scholar
6 Note that this paper does not take up the major controversies about love in the Middle Ages. Recent reviews of those controversies can be found in two superb works: D'Arcy, Martin C., The Mind and Heart of Love, rev. ed. (New York 1956) passim and in Dronke, Peter, Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric, 2 vols. (Oxford 1965–1966) 1. 46–56 et passim. Google Scholar
7 Cf. de Ghellinck's, Joseph grouping of the Latin writers of the twelfth century into chapters entitled ‘Le groupe scolaire,’ ‘En marge des groupes scolaire,’ ‘Le groupe monastique et pastoral,’ etc. ( L'Essor de la Littérature Latine au XII e siècle , 2nd ed. [Brussels, Bruges, Paris 1955]).Google Scholar
8 Quoted by Butler, Cuthbert, Benedictine Monachism (London 1924) 86.Google Scholar
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10 Butler, , 89–92. For a list of twelfth-century monastic writers on love, see Wenner, Francis in ‘Charité,’ Dictionnaire de spiritualité, 571–572. See also Leclercq, Jean, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, trans. Catharine Misrahi (New York 1961) 233–286.Google Scholar
11 For the poets of Chartres, see Raby, F. J. E., A History of Christian Latin Poetry from the Beginnings to the Close of the Middle Ages , 2nd ed. (Oxford 1953) 297–303; Raby, A History of Secular Latin Poetry in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (Oxford 1957) 2. 8–22; Green, Richard A., ‘Alan of Lille's De Planctu Naturae,’ Speculum 31 (1956) 649–674.Google Scholar
12 The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (first published 1952; Dame, Notre 1964) 83.Google Scholar
13 Valency, Maurice, In Praise of Love (New York 1958) 143. Myrrha Lot-Borodine divides the spectrum into three groups: ‘l'amour abandon,’ ‘l'amour courtois,’ ‘service d'amour’ (De l'amour profane à l'amour sacré [Paris 1961] 30–49).Google Scholar
14 I have avoided the terms naturalistic and naturalism, terms even more ambiguous than courtly love. A naturalistic view of love would apparently be like the one described above, one which approves, or at least accepts without disapproval, the physical, non-rational aspects of love, both the sexual impulse and its attendant erotic pleasure. It still remains that this ‘naturalistic’ love can combine with any number of other attitudes and ideas. Hence the momentary fixation of amorous youth in springtime and the calculated eroticism of the sensualist is called naturalistic. The age-old religion in which love is one form of the generating power of the universe — Venus in the service of Natura — can also be called naturalistic. The differences among them, however, should not be obscured by the ‘naturalistic’ attitude they share. A useful book by Aldo D. Scaglione creates unnecessary confusion by failing to distinguish clearly among the many different meanings of nature and naturalistic (Nature and Love in the Late Middle Ages [Berkeley and Los Angeles 1963]). He says, ‘For the medieval Christian, as for the Renaissance reformer, nature has degenerated with the original sin and has thus become the realm of Satan, although one can also identify a medieval Christian stream … which emphasized a view of nature as the realization of God's creative activity in forms and patterns’ (p. 8). In fact, nature meant many different things to medieval people. Nature was all created reality, a pagan goddess to be attacked, a creative force in the service of God, a principle of being — as in the ‘human nature’ of Christ. For Scotus Eriugena, nature included even God (Frederick Copleston, A History of philosophy 2. part I [first published 1950; Garden City 1962] 133). Others of Scaglione's categories are as imprecise as ‘naturalistic,’ e.g.: ‘… one begins to perceive the ripening of a naturalistic current [in twelfth-century Chartres] which had … developed … independently from, and in constant rivalry with the “Gothic” spirit of the time as embodied in the two chief manifestations of this “Gothic” spirit, the religious and the courtois. … The heart of the matter is, from a sociological viewpoint, that the religious and courtly attitudes were the most direct expressions of the two ruling classes, the clergy and the nobility, whereas the naturalistic spirit throve in the wake of the progressive affirmation of the new bourgeoisie, the third estate’ (pp. 33–34).Google Scholar
15 See Michel, A. in ‘Trinité,’ DTC 1707–30.Google Scholar
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17 The Art of Courtly Love, trans. Parry, John J. (New York 1941) 72; Latin text in Capellano, Andrea, Trattato D'Amore, ed. and trans. Battaglia, Salvatore (Rome 1947) 102. Google Scholar
18 Yvain , trans. Comfort, W.W. in Arthurian Romances (London and New York 1914) 259; Old French text in Christian von Troyes sämtliche Werke , ed. Foerster, Wendelin, 5 vols. (Halle 1884–1932) 2. vv. 6051–52.Google Scholar
19 See Burnaby, John, Amor Dei: a Study of the Religion of St. Augustine (London 1938) 85–92.Google Scholar
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21 ‘Gottfried's Tristan,’ The Germanic Review 29 (1951) 17. See also Frappier, Jean, ‘Vues sur les conceptions courtoises dans les littératures d'oc et d'oil au xiie siècle,’ Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 2 (1959) 146.Google Scholar
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32 Trans. Comfort, 183: ed. Foerster, , 2. vv. 241–244.Google Scholar
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36 Burnaby, , 105, 115.Google Scholar
37 Sententiae PL 192.817. This ordo was taken from St. Ambrose (see Delhaye, Philippe, Pierre Lombard: sa vie, ses oeuvres, sa morale [Montreal and Paris 1961] 70–71).Google Scholar
38 For example, in Lombard's Sententiae PL 192.918.Google Scholar
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41 Le Bras, , 2129–2151.Google Scholar
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47 For example, see Denomy, A.J., ‘An Inquiry into the Origins of Courtly Love,’ Mediaeval Studies 6 (1944) 184–187. Painter suspected that Andreas was joking (French Chivalry 119). Robertson, Durant W. Jr., offers an extensive argument that the Be amore is a satire in A Preface to Chaucer (Princeton and London 1963) 391–448. Dronke says that the view which accepts the De amore as ‘a devout exposition of courtoisie’ is ‘astonishing but almost universally held’ (1. 84–85). Robertson considers the third book, which rejects the ‘courtly’ ideas of the first two books, to be a sincere expression of Andreas' views. Felix Schlösser considers the work a serious treatise, but seems to have doubts about the third book. He says, ‘wenn es ihm mit seiner Verdammung ernst war …’ (Andreas Capellanus: seine Minnelehre und das christliche Weltbild um 1200 [Bonn 1960] p. 375). It seems to me that the entire work can be considered as a piece of sophisticated humor, produced for the same audience who enjoyed the goliardic poetry, and aimed at the two extremes, the one which said all good comes from love and the other which said no good comes from love.Google Scholar
48 See Luck, Georg, The Latin Love Elegy (New York 1960) 12–16.Google Scholar
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54 Acta Sanctorum, Aug. II (Paris and Rome 1867), 178.Google Scholar
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56 Quoted by Burnaby, , 90.Google Scholar
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