“The Unequal Scales of Love”: Love and Social Class in Andreas Capellanus’s De Amore and Some Later Texts

Abstract

Early literature is full of instances in which poets (usually male) complain of the unfairness of love, that they have not been treated according to their deserts. Gower’s Amans performs impeccably all the courtly rituals appropriate for a lover, only to be assured of the inappropriateness and folly of his actions because he is old. In Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan, both the poet and the addressee, evidently, have that disadvantage, and, in addition, are of unprepossessing appearance. Since they are “hoor and round of chap” it is likely that they will get no “mede” for their “labour” (31–33).¹ In 1619, Ben Jonson in My Picture Left in Scotland complains that his love poetry is not working as it should because the lady has realized that he is forty-seven years old, is gray-haired, and has a “mountain belly” and a “rocky face”—“And all these through her eyes have stopped her ears.”²

Précis: Andreas Capellanus claimed that “all are equal in love’s court.” But the hierarchical nature of medieval society meant that this precept regularly collided with ideas about social class and the desirability of forming relationships within one’s own social stratum. This chapter explores the way this paradox is handled in the De Amore and in a number of later texts.