Notes on The Art of Courtly Love

Introduction suggests CL not simply a literary/artistic phenomenon, but something actually practiced by a faction of ladies and gentlemen at the court, particularly of Acquitaine under Eleanor and the courts attended by her relations.

Entire document very systematic in its approach. Postulates several levels of nobility in men, several levels in women, then for each combination explores via dialogue how the man should with greatest chance of success approach the subject of love with a woman of that social level. Later explores how to retain a love already attained, signs the love is fading, etc. Who is able to love, who one should avoid loving, what happens when a love recedes, etc.

Sets up Love explicitly in parallel to Christ in various ways, creating a religion of Love. Andreas is a clergyman, and this aspect of the book is somewhat at tension with his religious duties. Yet he without apparent bias explains with examples how to attain, retain, and nourish love, how to serve in the Army of Love as if it were the army of God. In fact, it becomes a little ambiguous to whom God refers at several points in the book. 31 Rules of Love, handed in writing to be taught to men.

Allegorical treatments of Love

Palace of Love

Four gates, Love himself lives on the East. Three different classes of women guard the remaining gates:
1. To the North:
   This gate is guarded by women who admit no man, no matter how worthy he might be, into the palace of Love. They keep the door closed, and don't even learn about the postulant men at the door before refusing admission to Love's palace. These women are cursed, because they live on the left hand side of Love/God.
2. To the West:
   This gate is guarded by women who wander around outside the gates, so that any man can enter, regardless how unworthy he might be. They are not true lovers, because they live behind Love, and his gaze cannot fall on them.
3. To the South:
   This gate is guarded by women who attend always at the door, allowing only worthy men entrance to Love's court. They sit at the right hand of Love/God.

Afterlife of Ladies in Love's Service

Three concentric regions, one for each category of women above.
1. Delightfulness:
   A fertile garden with many springs and brooks marks the central region. This is where women go who followed the rules of Courtly Love. It is a place of reward.
2. Humidity:
   In the next ring, these springs and brooks overflow everything, so that it is always frigid and wet; this is where women go who gave their love too freely. It is a place of punishment.
3. Aridity:
   This is the outermost region, a place where the brooks and springs cannot reach at all; it is dry and painfully hot, and the women who reside here must sit in chairs made from shaking thorns and place their bare feet on hot stones. It is a place of torment reserved for those women who refused to participate in Love at all.

Water obviously used here in line with Weston's idea of grace/fertility but extended to love itself. Those women to refused love in life must endure without water to cool them in death. Those who granted their favors too often and too easily must endure in death with too much water. Those who behaved according to the rules, stay in Delightfulness, where the water is controlled and the climate temperate.

The Retraction

Final retraction a rhetorical commonplace, but exquisitely executed. Andreas is a chaplain, and he has lots of hard-to-ignore reasons to reject love. These range from the spiritual (issues of sin, etc) to the physical (men diminished physically by lovemaking, etc) to the social (women bad for lots of reasons -- avoid them).

This retraction a formal requirement, almost, of the "Ovidian" model. Lots of the details in Andreas' retraction apparently inherited from various religious texts and authorities. See Chaucer's retraction. Cat Stevens?