This essay reads the Roman de la Rose as taking up Ovid’s playful association of sex with the origins of human society. Jean de Meun’s Rose returns repeatedly to the narration of political origins – the fall from a Golden Age – imagining an idyllic communal past before it was shattered by conflict over wealth and women. These stories frame erotic desire as inevitably linked to the law and to possession, associating eros with desire for private property. I argue that Aristotle’s Politics functions as an unacknowledged literal referent that troubles the poem’s allegorical treatment of justice and social origins. Whereas Golden Age fables typically speak in unmarked terms about human comity and common possessions, Aristotle and medieval Aristotelian commentaries speak in terms of gendered power dynamics, masculine ownership and the fate of women as property. The Rose reveals the literal truths of scholastic philosophy to be in conflict with mythic truth, while anatomising the necessarily gendered dynamics of human sociality. In a political sphere in which women are considered in the same category as property, the heterosexual desire for possession will always be political. The Rose also leads us to consider whether the political, in turn, is always erotic.

This essay tells one strand of a story in which philosophies of happiness and arts of love mixed and mingled— in both philosophical and literary traditions. The very idea of a philosophical art of love leads us back to Ovid, whose Ars amatoria (Art of Love, composed c. 2 CE) plays upon a vigorous tradition of instruction about love (“erotodidaxis”) already existing across the discourses of elegy, philosophy, drama and erotic treatise. As scholars have long noted, in Ovid's hands— and with his signature irony— erotic instruction engages in political and ethical questions as much as amatory matters. In contrast to the genre of the love elegy, Ovid's Ars amatoria does not create an opposition between love and civil life, but rather “sets up love as a serious ethical concern” (Green 2006, 7). Ovid portrays sexual pleasure as the root of human civilization and the height of fulfillment— the highest reward for self- knowledge. The Latin and vernacular literature of Western Europe in the later Middle Ages inherited Ovid's version of the erotodidactic tradition, and this essay explores some medieval transformations of the “art of love” as they relate to discourses of happiness. Ovid's Ars amatoria itself was widely read, commented upon and variously adapted and translated into Western European vernaculars (Minnis 2001, 35–81). I am most interested here in the absorption of Ovidian erotodidaxis into philosophical discourse.

A striking example of such absorption occurs in the twelfth century, when Andreas Capellanus wrote a widely circulated Latin treatise, De amore, clearly modeled to some extent on Ovid's text, with the narrator adopting the pose of the praeceptor amoris. The De amore— a treatise partly in the form of a scholastic quaestio dedicated to another man on the subject of heterosexual love and possibly written at the request of Marie de Champagne in the 1180s— had wide enough (and controversial enough) circulation to be included in a list of condemned texts by the bishop of Paris in 1277; Andreas's work is one piece of evidence among many that the genre of the “art of love” had already been assimilated to the forms of scholastic philosophy.

Historians have traditionally credited the 1277 condemnations of “radically Aristotelian” theses with marking a shift in focus in scholastic philosophy at the close of the thirteenth century. Aristotle's emphasis on contemplation as the highest kind of happiness allowed for occasionally dangerous-seeming claims about the role of the intellect as a privileged faculty of the soul, or the superiority of the life of the philosopher. In the wake of controversies surrounding the “intellectualist” understanding of happiness, theologians debated the emphasis on reason, teleology, and rational pleasure along with the relative roles of the will and the intellect as seats of enjoyment. John Duns Scotus, William Ockham, and other late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century philosophers made reason the handmaiden of the will, questioned Aristotelian teleology, and continued debates about the nature of enjoyment as the highest good. While there is thus a true “anti-intellectualist” strain in the narrow sense of the intellect as a mental faculty, however, the period is not at all anti-philosophical or anti-Aristotelian. And “independent thinkers” such as Godfrey of Fontaines maintained an opposition to the condemnations of 1277, arguing for the superiority of the intellect over the will. Any resistance to overemphasis on the intellectual faculty may be described more justly as a critique of radical medieval Aristotelians rather than a critique of Aristotle himself.

A theologian directly affected by the condemnations – denied his licentia docendi because of controversial claims in his commentary on the Sentences – Giles of Rome went on directly to produce one of the most influential works of political Aristotelianism, his De Regimine Principum (c.1277–80).

The story of the impact of the late medieval Latin translation of Aristotle has been told and retold for the fields of medieval philosophy and theology. This book tells the story for the medieval English literature of love. The existence of such a narrative might seem unlikely, given the distance between the discourses of a highly specialized, university-centered, Latinate medieval philosophy and an entertainment-oriented, court-centered, vernacular poetry, but it is the late medieval configuration of ethics that brings these two worlds together. Medieval commentators considered poetry to be an ethical genre, typically referring to poetry's interest in human behavior and moral choices to justify this classification. As the field of philosophy constituted by both practical and abstract considerations of virtuous action, desire, and relationships, it is even now not terribly controversial to claim that moral philosophy is involved with the same kinds of human experience as poetry. Yet the medieval emphasis on love as a central ethical concern meant that – from the moment of the “birth” of the vernacular literature of love – philosophy and poetry were yoked together in often surprising ways by a shared language of longing, despair, pleasure, and union. Vernacular poetry constituted a site for thinking through ethical problems such as conflicting loyalties, conflicting emotions, and the necessity for self-sacrifice within the larger context of the pursuit of erotic enjoyment; clerkly ethical concerns with spiritual culpability and love of God were transformed and given voice in a context of pursuits of human justice, love, and happiness.