The Art of Courtly Love

Andreas’s Preface provides an outline for the text as a whole. He promises to provide Walter, to whom the work is addressed, with an education about love as requested. By providing this education, however, Andreas hopes to show Walter why love is not the proper pursuit for a prudent man. The metaphors Andreas uses to characterize love indicate that he is speaking specifically about romantic and sexual love, not marriage. This form of love came to be known as courtly love, hence the translation of the book’s Latin title, De amore.

Andreas mixes a range of metaphors, all of which speak to how he describes love as a form of suffering that results from the lover being consumed by thoughts of the beloved. He speaks of the “darts of Venus” (27), a reference to the Roman goddess of sex, love, and beauty. He refers to lovers being “wounded by an arrow” of “Love” (27), personified through capitalization and associated with Venus and Cupid, typically represented as Venus’s son in Roman mythology. Cupid is usually represented holding a bow and arrow that he uses to inflict love on his victims. Walter “cannot find a cure” (27) for love, which likens love to sickness. As a man new to this form of love, Walter struggles to control his “horse’s reins,” portraying love as a beast that needs to be controlled but cannot since it entangles men “more firmly in [its] chains” (27). Love is also a “kind of hunting” (27) that derails a prudent man, consuming his thoughts and causing him suffering. From the outset, Andreas suggests that his treatise on love will serve as a cautionary tale.

The first chapters of Book 1 fulfill part of his promise to Walter. Andreas defines love as suffering caused by the lover’s persistent fear of losing his beloved. Key also for Andreas is that love should only occur between members of the opposite sex. In contrast to pagan practices portrayed in Greek and Roman myths, Andreas describes homosexuality as forbidden by nature. He also specifies that love is for able-bodied, sighted men and women between certain ages, with women being ready for love at a younger age than are men. Love can elevate one’s character, raising all to nobility by inspiring them to practice good deeds and cultivate good character. However, Andreas also cautions Walter that love is not always fair, a point he returns to in Book 3 when he explains that love can cause men to fall in love with women who are not capable of returning those feelings.

Andreas’s discussion of love in these first chapters can seem double-sided. He exclaims, “O what a wonderful thing is love” (31), and expounds on its elevating qualities. It can inspire men to good deeds and transform a commoner into a nobleman in the process. Yet lurking behind these glorifications of love is the warning of the Preface and his consistent characterization of love as suffering, unfair, and that which incites a fear of loss. He invites the reader to take a sardonic view of this romantic (and romanticized) form of love.