The Art of Clerkly Love: Drouart la Vache Translates Andreas Capellanus LUCAS WOOD Abstract Within the frame of a largely faithful Old French verse adaptation of Andreas Capellanus’s treatise De amore, Li Livres d’Amours (1290) by Drouart la Vache uses the processes of translation and textual emendation to reorient its source’s ironic and at times highly critical account of love. Identifying the authoritative magister amoris with the lover, Drouart affirms the value and probity of love as a way of life, but redefines the love in question as “amour pure”: a virtuously chaste, though still erotic, passion associated by Drouart with the traditionally suspect figure of the amorous clerk, whom the translator vindicates and glorifies. Although Drouart’s play to make love compatible with clerks’ religious vocation is not entirely unproblematic, it marks an important turn in De amore’s reception history toward an attempt to harmonize Christian morality with the profane ethics of refined love. Over the course of the last few decades, Andreas Capellanus and his famous treatise on love have become increasingly difficult to read, which is probably a good thing. Once routinely cited as a codification of the ideological principles informing the vernacular literature of “courtly love,” Andreas’s late twelfth-century or early thirteenth-century Latin De amore1 is now recognized to be, for better or for worse, something far more challenging. The work’s theory of love is at least highly original and perhaps sui generis, if indeed any coherent theory or ideology of love, “courtly” or otherwise, can be distilled from it. Elliptical, internally heterogeneous, and often self-contradictory, its discourse splinters into the voices of proliferating fictional interlocutors and an ambiguously multifaceted authorfigure who can neither unify nor authorize the doctrines expounded in Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 40 (Reinhold F. Glei and Wolfgang Polleichtner, eds.), Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. 113 114 Medievalia et Humanistica the text. In his various personae, “Andreas” praises, blames, and pragmatically analyzes human desire and its slippery language, constructing and deconstructing models of erotic relations and their rhetoric in ways that indefinitely defer hermeneutic and moral certainty. Especially disconcerting is the about-face executed in book III of De amore, which vituperatively and misogynistically condemns the love described and to some extent vindicated in the first two books.2 The text’s provocative discrepancies lead most critics to adopt at least one of two basic defensive postures: either the work is a fascinating but disjointed summa or “jumble of sentiments explaining, defining, arguing about . . . refined love”3 in the Latin and vernacular traditions, or it is wholly or partly ironic, “ludic,” or “comic.”4 In its various versions, the popular thesis of partial irony disciplines the unruly text by identifying one strand of its argumentation as a master discourse that undermines or invalidates the other. A third possibility is that De amore is really a metadiscursive reflection on amatory fictions5 or even a subversive critique of all “sacred and secular institutions (the authorities that conscript desire, erotic or otherwise) and the [social and discursive] mechanisms that create and maintain them.”6 In the absence of conclusive reasons to discount any of these readings, it is extremely difficult to establish what Andreas really thinks about whether, how, and by whom the game of love ought to be played. If the questions posed by Andreas’s text remain unresolved, this mosaic of interpretive perspectives suggests that reading De amore may always, to a greater or lesser degree, involve rewriting it, synthesizing its apparent contradictions to produce a serviceable ethics. Indeed, not only critics but also “the many [medieval] copies, translations, and imitations of the text respond to its provocative structure in multiple ways, each of which remakes the De amore and in a very material sense answers its quaestio” concerning the nature and value of love.7 It is therefore surprising that Drouart la Vache, who produced the first more or less complete vernacular translation of De amore in 1290,8 continues to be so grudgingly credited as a critical reader of his source. Drouart’s Livres d’Amours (or, in its explicit, Li Roumans d’Amours)9 capably transposes Andreas’s Latin prose into Old French octosyllabic couplets that can and often do convey the sense of the original despite the constraints of meter and rhyme. However, Drouart deliberately reshapes his material in various ways, starting with the suppression of all references to De amore, Andreas Capellanus (both author and character), and the Latin text’s inscribed addressee, Gualterius (or Gualterus). The translator abridges De amore’s book III and the lengthy dialogues of book I, omits both of Andreas’s courtly exempla, and replaces the original preface and conclusion with new ones of his own, as well as deleting, modifying, The Art of Clerkly Love: Drouart la Vache Translates Andreas Capellanus 115 displacing, and adding other short passages. Drouart’s attitude toward his source clearly situates the Livres d’Amours within the “mixed genre of recasting/adaptation/translation”10 frequently used by medieval writers to simultaneously transmit and appropriate older texts, adapting them to new cultural contexts, literary tastes, and ideological ends. Some attention has been paid to Drouart la Vache as a modernizer of De amore, but the translator-remanieur’s relationship with the academy has been inauspicious from the start. Li Livres d’Amours was no sooner identified by Gaston Paris in 1884 than summarily condemned by the eminent medievalist as “médiocre,” distinguished by “aucun trait ajouté à l’original et qui ait de l’intérêt pour les mœurs et les idées de l’époque où vivait le traducteur.”11 Although Robert Bossuat’s 1926 edition and study of the poem demonstrate that it does substantially refashion its source text, Bossuat portrays Drouart as a workmanlike adaptor, responsive to the literary vogues of his day and to the tastes of a late thirteenthcentury “public moyen” seeking entertainment over edification, but still undoubtedly mediocre.12 This portrait of the versifier as a vulgarizer persists in representations of Drouart as a frivolous amateur, a derivative trivializer either of the noble and subtle doctrine of courtly love or, for more recent critics, of Andreas’s enigmatic rhetorical and ethical gambits. Correspondingly, the Livres d’Amours is generally held to be at best an adaptation with no systematic agenda beyond an aspiration to increased accessibility, concision, and consistency,13 or at worst a product of self-conscious epigonism without a raison d’être, half-heartedly papering over “l’absolue gratuité de son entreprise”14—an enterprise undertaken, just as an uncomprehending Drouart is imagined enjoying De amore, “primarily for the laughs it provides.”15 There can be little doubt that an important aim of the Livres d’Amours is to recast De amore in a form both more accessible and more agreeable to a late thirteenth-century francophone audience or that this involves identifying and attempting to eliminate or downplay the internal contradictions of Andreas’s text so as to render it more univocally didactic (and, concomitantly, more favorable to the love it teaches). Within the frame of this general project, however, the Livres d’Amours undertakes a much more complex engagement with De amore and with the questions it raises concerning the nature, value, and proper practice of love. Conflating the persona of the authoritative magister amoris with that of the lover, Drouart figures his (re)writing of the treatise as a form of love service. Accordingly, he distances himself from the misogynistic and anti-erotic discourses in De amore, but not in order to endorse a simplistic, positive view of love reductively gleaned from the first part of the Latin text. Where Andreas ironically juxtaposes condemnations 116 Medievalia et Humanistica of love with neutral and positive portrayals of it, Drouart translates book III’s anti-erotic palinode as a critique of carnal lust that complements, rather than contradicting, his overarching advocacy of an ideal of “pure”—that is, chaste, albeit still sexual and not spiritual—love adapted from one of De amore’s dialogues. In Drouart’s hands, the concept of “pure love” vindicates not only profane love but also the vulnerable figure of the amorous clerk, the bilingual man of letters whose mastery of erotic theory and practice, the author argues, is compatible with his moral obligations as a man of God. If a new self-contradictory textuality arises along with the logic that turns the Livres d’Amours into a manual of and manifesto for, not “courtly,” but clerkly love, Drouart is content to leave his claims suspended in a realm of pleasurable indecision, protected by the atmosphere of enjoyment—of writing, of reading, of love—that, as much as its didactic content and indissociably from it, his translation exists to convey. I. Teaching Like a Lover The enduring image of Drouart as a fatuously chuckling vulgarizer derives from the translator’s 105-line prologue to the Livres d’Amours. The poet describes his first encounter with De amore in the context of a presumably fictional outing to the countryside undertaken “por esbanoier” (“for recreation,” v. 31) with a friend. Upon the pleasure-seekers’ return from their rural locus amoenus, they drop in on a powerful acquaintance who shows them a wonderful Latin book, to Drouart’s great delight: Quant je l’oi veü et il en ot .I. poi leü, la matere trop durement me plot, sachiez, certainement, tant, que j’en commençai a rire. (vv. 47–51) [When I had seen it / and he had read a little of it, / the subject so greatly / pleased me, you see, without a doubt, / that I began to laugh.] Sargent correctly contends that Drouart’s rire indicates enjoyment and approval rather than a perception of Andreas’s book as humorous or patently ironic.16 Still, the terms in which the volume’s owner then requests a French translation do suggest that the text delights at least as much as it instructs: Compainz, je vous pri et commans que le translatés en rommans, si ferez trop grant cortoisie, car la matere est renvoisie et assés de biaus mos i a. The Art of Clerkly Love: Drouart la Vache Translates Andreas Capellanus 117 [Friend, I pray and enjoin you / to translate it into the vernacular; / it would be a deed of great courtesy, / for the subject is a joyful one, / and it is full of fair words.] Drouart has previously admitted to taking immediate, irrepressible pleasure in the craft of poetry for its own sake. He confesses in his first few lines that J’ai si apris a rymoier, que je ne m’en puis chastoier por nul home qui m’en repregne; encor weil je, aveigne qu’aveigne, tranlater en françois .I. livre, qui enseigne comment doit vivre cil qui veut amours maintenir. (vv. 1–7) [I have so learned to rhyme / that now I can’t help doing it, / whoever might reproach me for it; / come what may, I want / to translate into French a book / that teaches how a man should live / if he wants to uphold the ways of love.] The desire to translate and the pleasure of the text seem to precede and exceed any interest in the particular work chosen to be rimoié, and the appeal of the livre itself is subsequently articulated as aesthetic rather than intellectual or moral. Neither endorsing nor reproving love as a lifestyle in absolute terms, Drouart simply indicates that those amorously inclined will find useful advice in the text. If “amours maintenir” is to be taken in a broad sense as not just sustaining existing love (the topic of Andreas’s book II) but adopting love as a way of life, then the translator apparently sees in Andreas’s treatise nothing other than a comprehensive, straightforward user’s manual to erotic life. This is indeed how Andreas describes his own work in his preface and accessus to his book I, even though such a characterization glosses over the inconclusiveness of Andreas’s “instructive” model seduction dialogues and ignores the anti-erotic vitriol introduced in book III. But is Drouart really so inattentive or willfully reductive an interpreter of his source? For all its lighthearted tone, his prologue hints that the book’s contents may be no laughing matere after all. Later on, Drouart will not scruple to take credit for the text’s wisdom, transferring the authority of Andreas Capellanus onto his own authorial persona and often speaking directly to the reader in the first person. His vague, fictional-sounding account of the poem’s genesis invites an uninformed reader to dismiss the frame narrative and putative Latin source as literary topoi. Toward the end of the prologue, however, the usually bold remanieur takes refuge behind the mask of the servile translator. He is, he says, personally responsible for the quality of his French verse, Mais, se vos parole i oez, qui soit digne d’estre reprise, 118 Medievalia et Humanistica je m’en met en vostre franchise et en vostre correction, car je n’ai pas entencion de dire nule vilonie. Et s’il avient que je li die, por ce qu’elle a mon livre affiere, prenez vous en a la matiere, non pas a moi qui l’arai dite. (vv. 92–101) [But, if you hear anything in it / that deserves reproach, / I rely on your generosity of spirit / and submit myself to your correction, / for I do not intend / to say anything rude or shameful, / and if it happens that I do say such a thing / because it is relevant to my book, / take issue with the subject matter, not with me who says the words.] What is it in the text that Drouart deems so potentially offensive? Drouart would not be the first reader to view parts of De amore with suspicion. The treatise was famously one of only two books cited by name in Bishop Étienne Tempier’s Paris condemnation of 1277, which indicates that someone found it to be morally or doctrinally unacceptable.17 However, Drouart’s preemptive apology says nothing about Christian dogma or about the sinful nature of love, although it is noteworthy that he sets his pleasure-jaunt—apparently undertaken “par grant devocion” (“out of great piety,” v. 30)—on the Sunday after the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross and expresses, albeit tersely, the hope that God will look favorably upon his work: “Or doint Diex que ma rime plaise / a lui, s’en serai plus aayse” (“May God grant that my rhymes should please him, which will please me all the more,” vv. 77–78). What Drouart apologizes for is neither immorality nor heresy, but rather vilonie, a term that also appears twenty-five lines earlier in the context of yet another justification for his translation project. This final reason is not religious, but evidently courtly: A ce me muet meësmement cele qui j’aimme entierement et amerai toute ma vie, sans penser nule vilonie; et se je pooie tant faire que mes rimes peüssent plaire a ma tres douce chiere amie, bien seroit ma rime emploïe. (vv. 69–76) [To this end I am also moved / by her whom I love unreservedly / and will love all my life / without a shameful thought; / and if I could succeed / in pleasing, with my rhymes, / my dear, most sweet beloved, / my rhymes would truly be well used.] In the context of vernacular love literature, vilonie is a catch-all term for transgressions against the rules of polite amorous conduct. Drouart is therefore anything but a disinterested, let alone uninterested, transla- The Art of Clerkly Love: Drouart la Vache Translates Andreas Capellanus 119 tor of De amore. He endorses the practice of “amours maintenir” and is ostensibly himself a lover operating within the “courtly” system and worried about offending his lady by reproducing Andreas’s rather cynical vision of erotic relations. The fact that Drouart’s beloved is probably a poetic fiction is irrelevant, or rather, highly relevant insofar as the poet is deliberately constructing his inscribed translator-cum-author-figure as an active lover even if, as he insists, “je n’ai pas entencion / de parler ausi com amerres, / ains weil parler com enseignerres” (“I do not intend to speak like a lover; rather, I want to speak as a teacher,” vv. 134–36). In Andreas’s preface, by contrast, the magister has no need to switch personae in order to speak as a teacher rather than a lover. On the contrary, the teacher claims that “dwelling on [erotic] topics seems hardly advisable, and . . . the man of sense shows impropriety in making time for such hunting as this” (“non multum videatur expediens huiusmodi rebus insistere, nec deceat quemquam prudentem huiusmodi vacare venatibus”).18 Accordingly, he grants Gualterius’s importunate request for information about love only out of friendship and in order to help the young man endure and eventually escape his infatuation. The master mentions his personal experience of “Venus’s slavery” (“Veneris . . . servituti,” DA 0.3) but situates it firmly in the past as a source of hard-won knowledge of love’s joys and especially pains that reinforces his authority as a wise and cynical Ovidian magister amoris.19 Where lovers or potential lovers are made to speak in the dialogues of book I, their non-authorial voices are demarcated from the magister’s commentary, and their nonauthoritative, contradictory propositions are implicitly ironized. Andreas’s magisterial discourse about love is thus not conflated with the discourse of an active lover. Drouart, however, distinguishes his project from Andreas’s by gratuitously identifying himself as a lover and thus as the paradigmatic addressee of the instruction he will purvey. He even replaces the smitten Gualterius’s plea for advice with the powerful patron’s commission as the pretext for the production of the Livres d’Amours so as to appropriate unchallenged the role of amerres. In figuring himself as an author-lover, Drouart reframes Andreas’s Latin treatise to resemble more closely the model of vernacular arts d’aimer popularized in the thirteenth century by Guillaume de Lorris’s Roman de la Rose. By identifying himself as author-figure with the questing lover, “Guillaume assures at once the unity and sincerity of the poem.”20 However, like Guillaume’s continuator—and Drouart la Vache’s near-contemporary and literary influence—Jean de Meun,21 Drouart finds it necessary to reintroduce a distinction between the lover and the magister, probably for some of the same reasons. By stepping outside the persona of the lover,22 Jean de Meun liberates his discourse 120 Medievalia et Humanistica from the constraints imposed on a sworn servant of love. He opens up his text to the consideration of various arguments for, against, and around love and allows himself to engage precisely in what many medieval readers grasped as vilonie—notably by putting coilles in the mouth of Reason.23 But Drouart does not go as far as Jean in separating his two personae. Jean de Mean shows his reader that he speaks as a scholar rather than a lover even when he speaks like a lover in order to ventriloquize the fictionalized character of Guillaume/Amant, just as the magister Andreas animates the puppet suitors and ladies of his dialogues. Drouart, on the other hand, continues to speak as a lover even if, adopting a suitably didactic tone, he does not explicitly speak like one,24 and he is aware that this obligation may be problematic given the nature of the text he is about to translate. This is the first sign of the subtle but systematic rewriting to which Drouart will subject the text and ideology (or ideologies, or lack thereof) of Andreas’s treatise. How, then, should an amerres who is also an enseignerres properly talk about love? He ought to avoid vilonie, as we have seen, but Drouart elaborates further on what he as a lover-teacher finds troublesome about Andreas’s text: Se je avoie Amour descrite au plus bel que je saveroie, plus legierement parleroie, si com moi samble, de ses mours. (vv. 102–5) [If I had described love / as well as I knew how, / I would have spoken more gently, / it seems to me, of its ways.] Drouart registers discomfort with something about Andreas’s treatment of love that persists in his own Livres d’Amours, but it is unclear just what adjustments would be involved in describing love’s mores “plus legierement.” The intrinsic desirability of a writing that might be called legier— “light” in the sense of pleasant, adroit, capricious, frivolous, or even imprudent—is hardly obvious in a piece of didactic literature. Sargent suggests that Drouart is complaining about Andreas’s overly serious or stylistically heavy-handed treatment of his subject.25 However, following as it does directly upon Drouart’s request that disgruntled readers should address their complaints to the matiere rather than to the messenger since he himself intends no vilonie, it seems more plausible that the translator’s disclaimer takes issue with a different aspect of the ungentle tone and content of Andreas’s portrayal of love’s “mours”: the harsh condemnation of love as physically, emotionally, socially, and spiritually destructive that dominates book III. Drouart wishes that De amore’s conclusion had come down more “lightly” on love and on women, whose The Art of Clerkly Love: Drouart la Vache Translates Andreas Capellanus 121 hyperbolic vilification is certainly an example of the vilonie Drouart claims to eschew for the sake of his own beloved. That Drouart perceives and disapproves of a sincere denunciation of love at the end of Andreas’s text is attested by his substantial reworking of book III and especially of its conclusion. After cataloguing love’s many pernicious effects, Andreas acknowledges that although he opposed the amorous life from the beginning on practical grounds, his book presents “two differing views” (“duplicem sententiam”):26 first, the art of love requested by Gualterius, which allows its practitioner to obtain “all bodily pleasures” (“omnes corporis voluptates”) accompanied by suffering in both this life and the next, and, second, appended on Andreas’s own initiative, the reasons why the young man ought to “beware of carrying out Love’s commands” lest “the sudden arrival of the Bridegroom” find him “asleep in sins” (“Cave . . . amoris exercere mandata . . . ne in peccatis dormiendo te inveniat sponsi repentinus adventus,” DA 3.117–21). There is no internal indication that this passage is insincere, and the overarching condemnation of erotic love when it is (re)placed in a soteriological context is compatible with the statements of Andreas’s author-figure.27 Of course, as in Jean de Meun’s Rose, many implicit questions remain regarding the overall real or intended effect that study of the whole text may have on the reader.28 Nevertheless, “Andreas” explicitly stands behind the anti-courtly and Christian messages of book III and disavows any unconditional valorization of earthly love that might be derived from books I and II, and Drouart seems to have taken him at his word. In response, the Livres d’Amours replaces De amore’s conclusion with a new epilogue that attempts to avoid ideological inconsistency by qualifying overly categorical statements instead of repudiating any of them wholesale. Drouart again apologizes for anything offensive in the text, this time suppressing any mention of another author and instead asking the generous reader, “s’il trueve que g’i aie mise / chose qui doie estre reprise, / qu’il m’escuse courtoisement” (“if he should find that I have included anything worthy of reproach, to grant me his courteous pardon,” vv. 7559–61)—the adverb courtoisement reinforces the impression that what might be found reprehensible is anti-courtly vilonie—since it would be virtually impossible to execute such a long and intricate work without erring on a few points. Misogyny, however, is a charge of which Drouart’s version at least should be acquitted, since he meant to criticize only bad women: Après ce que j’ai dit des dames, vous devez des mauvaises fames entendre, qui sont diffamees; . . . car omques n’oi entencion 122 Medievalia et Humanistica que je des bonnes mesdeïsse, qu’il n’est chose que ne feïsse por les bonnes, se je savoie qu’elles dou faire eüssent joie. (vv. 7533–46) [But what I have said about women / applies, you must understand, only to / bad women, who are the ones maligned; / . . . because I never intended / to speak ill of good women, / for there is nothing I would not do / for the good ones, if I knew / the deed would bring them joy.] Where good women are concerned, book III’s critiques of women and, by extension, of love do not hold. The “bonnes dames et glorieuses” are accordingly encouraged to “maintenir bonne amour pure” (“good and glorious ladies . . . uphold good, pure love,” vv. 7537–40).29 A similar distinction between virtuous and vicious women followed by a panegyric on the excellence of the former occurs, and is translated by Drouart, at the end of Andreas’s chapter vituperating gold diggers (DA 1.9.19–20). Andreas’s hyperbolic praise of honorable women is partly overshadowed, however, by the blistering invective against duplicitous “leeches” and “scorpions” that precedes it, especially given that his distinction between deceitful and honest women is caught in what Moi calls “a particularly unpleasant paradox”: the deceitful woman is cleverer even than the devil, to the point that her guile is virtually undetectable, so that a wise man ought really to mistrust his own powers of discernment and avoid women altogether.30 Drouart’s conclusion, on the other hand, defends good women and good love unequivocally and apparently sincerely, perhaps espousing the precept, advanced by the noblewoman in Andreas’s third dialogue, that the lover “a toutes fames doit servir, / por amour d’une deservir” (“should serve all women so as to deserve the love of one,” vv. 2201–2; cf. DA 1.6.155). As Karnein has pointed out, it is possible that Drouart found a version of his self-exculpatory stratagem in his Latin manuscript source, since Johann Hartlieb’s German translation of De amore (ca. 1440) ends with a strikingly similar gesture.31 On the other hand, the two translators’ circumscriptions of their source’s misogyny differ in their precise content and wording. Hartlieb is interested primarily in assuring virtuous noblewomen—probably an important segment of his audience at the court of Albert IV of Austria—that he (or rather “Ovidius”) loves and honors them and means to vilify, as he repeats three times, only women who sell their love for money. In other words, Hartlieb elaborately vindicates good women, not good love, which he mentions only to stress the difference between devious gold diggers and “pure, honorable” (“rain, erbern”) ladies, whose “wholesome love” (“hailsam lieb”) is desirable because freely given.32 Moreover, he does little more than recall and reiter- The Art of Clerkly Love: Drouart la Vache Translates Andreas Capellanus 123 ate the distinction made by Andreas himself following the tirade against mercenary women in De amore 1.9. Hartlieb makes no mention here of the contrast between “pure” and “mixed” love (“lautter lieb” vs. “gemischt” or “gemengt lieb” in Hartlieb’s German)33 introduced in Andreas’s eighth dialogue and appropriated, as we shall see momentarily, as the central component of Drouart’s closing defense of love. Thus, whether Hartlieb and Drouart adapted similar concluding passages from their source manuscripts or simply responded independently to the problem of book III in ways inspired by parts of Andreas’s book I, nothing proves that the specific form of Drouart’s conclusion does not originate with him, let alone that it “n’est pas caractéristique de la façon dont Drouart comprend le traité [d’André].”34 On the contrary, the translator’s epilogue is one indication that, in his role as a remanieur whose literary endeavor constitutes an act of “grant cortoisie” (“great courtesy,” v. 55), Drouart renders a literary service both to virtuous ladies and to an ideal of courteous love that goes far beyond wishful thinking about how Andreas might have softened his critique of them. In addition to eliminating Andreas’s ultimate repudiation of love, Drouart reduces book III’s misogynistic arguments for avoiding love to a single short subchapter in which De amore’s constant, hyperbolic attacks on “every woman . . . without exception” (“mulier omnis . . . sine omni exceptione,” DA 3.73–74) are replaced by more vaguely categorical statements about “fame” or “la feme.” (By contrast, Hartlieb sets book III off from the rest of De amore as a separate treatise in its own right.) More significant, however, is the way Drouart qualifies the sweeping attack on love seemingly contained even in his abbreviated version of Andreas’s book De reprobatione amoris. At the beginning of book III, Andreas prepares for his concluding argument by telling Gualterius to read the foregoing treatise only for recreation and so that, knowing how to seduce women, he can get greater credit for refraining from doing so.35 Love may be enjoyable, but only a mad wretch would trade eternal bliss for the “momentary pleasure of the flesh” (“momentanea carnis delectatione gaudia”) followed by the hellfire reserved for “those whom He sees committed to Venus’ tasks” (“quos . . . agnoscit Veneris operibus obligari,” DA 3.4–5). Drouart paraphrases most of this material very faithfully, ultimately getting just as agitated as Andreas about the folly of ceulz qui, par costume, as oevres luxure s’aerdent, par qoy Dieu et Paradis perdent! Las! com je sui dolans por eus! Las! com cil est maleüreus et plus que beste, non mie hom, 124 Medievalia et Humanistica qui, pour la delectacion de la char qui plaine est d’ordure et qui par .I. seul moment dure, au feu d’Enfer se rent et loie. (vv. 6630–39) [those who customarily / burn themselves in the labors of lust, / thereby losing God and Paradise! / Alas! How I lament for them! / Alas! How unhappy is the man, / nay, no man at all, but worse than a beast, / who, for the pleasure / of the flesh, which is full of filth / and lasts only a single moment, / consigns himself to the fire of Hell.] However, he tempers Andreas’s repudiation of the parts of the poem favorable to love, remarking simply that after having spoken “d’Amours / cortoisement et de ses mours” (“courteously of love and its ways,” vv. 6573–74), he will now explain why the reader ought, for his soul’s sake, to shun “d’Amours la vie, / qui n’est pas bonne ne honeste” (“the life of love, which is neither good nor righteous,” vv. 6590–92). This phrase may appear to translate Andreas’s negative sentiments about love in general, but it can also be read as singling out erotic immorality for censure instead of disparaging love per se. The latter reading is the one Drouart goes on to endorse in his epilogue. Just as his criticism of reprehensible women did not apply to good ladies, he says, there are good and bad kinds of love. “Ou je vous ai amour blamee, / j’enten d’amour qui est mellee” (“Where I have condemned love to you, I mean mixed love,” vv. 7531–32), which is to be avoided; on the other hand, good ladies (and presumably gentlemen) should “mestre lor cure / a maintenir bonne amour pure, / par loial delectacion” (“strive to uphold good, pure love in loyal/licit delight,” vv. 7539–41). The polyvalent adjective loial connects fidelity in love, a key value within the ethical paradigm of fin’amors, to the more generally honorable or licit character of love’s delight. The enseignerres is still speaking as an amerres after all. II. “Double Amour” Drouart’s epilogue thus flatly contradicts Andreas’s own conclusion.36 It does not, however, mean that Drouart rejects the overtly Christian frame of Andreas’s book III while buying into a coherent doctrine of “courtly love” (or any other kind of love) supposedly set forth by Andreas in books I and II, as Sargent seems to think. Nor does it suggest simply that “Drouart called [Andreas’s] work cupidinous, and in his paraphrase it is so.”37 Drouart deliberately endorses a synthesis of his own making, one foreshadowed in his prologue and cultivated in both his abridgment of book III and his remaniement of the dialogues in book I. This synthesis is based on a reinterpretation and authorization of the The Art of Clerkly Love: Drouart la Vache Translates Andreas Capellanus 125 contrast between amour pure and amour mellee to which Drouart refers in the epilogue. These terms are introduced in Andreas’s eighth dialogue by a male speaker who distinguishes pure love, amor purus, from mixed or compounded love, amor mixtus: There is such a thing as chaste love, and what is called compounded love. Pure love is that which joins the hearts of two lovers with universal feelings of affection. It embraces the contemplation of the mind and the feeling of the heart. It goes as far as kissing on the mouth, embracing with the arms, and chaste contact with the unclothed lover, but the final consolation is avoided, for this practice is not permitted for those who wish to love chastely. . . . This love is recognised as having such virtue that the source of all moral worth derives from it, and no injustice springs from it. God sees in it only a minor offence. . . . This is the love, then, that I espouse, follow, continually venerate, and pressingly demand of you. By compounded love is meant that which affords its outlet to every pleasure of the flesh, ending in the final act of love. (DA 1.6.470–73)38 [amor quidam est purus, et quidam dicitur esse mixtus. Et purus quidem amor est, qui omnimoda dilectionis affectione duorum amantium corda coniungit. Hic autem in mentis contemplatione cordisque consistit affectu; procedit autem usque ad oris osculum lacertique amplexum et verecundum amantis nudae contactum, extremo praetermisso solatio; nam illud pure amare volentibus exercere non licet. . . . Amor iste tantae dignoscitur esse virtutis quod ex eo totius probitatis origo descendit, et nulla inde procedit iniuria, et modicam in ipso Deus recognoscit offensam. . . . Hunc ergo colo amorem, hunc sequor et semper adoro et instanter vobis postulare non cesso. Mixtus vero amor dicitur ille, qui omni carnis delectationi suum praestat effectum et in extremo Veneris opere terminatur.] Unlike pure love, mixed love can have negative consequences—the man’s quick overview of these refers back to the lady’s comments on the subject (DA 1.6.411–12) and forward to book III—but it is not intrinsically bad, and although pure love is of course preferable, to an important extent they overlap.39 Mixed love, too, is “a love which is true and merits praise, and is said to be the source of all blessings” (“verus est amor atque laudandus et cunctorum esse dicitur origo bonum,” DA 1.6.474). The Livres d’Amours omits almost the entirety of Andreas’s lengthy eighth dialogue, including the discussion of the two kinds of love. However, a translation of the key definitional passage is transposed into a short question-and-answer exchange between a “maistre” and his “deciple” invented by Drouart and appended to an accurate translation of Andreas’s eyebrow-raising chapter “On Loving Nuns” (men ought not seduce nuns, but Andreas himself once barely escaped deflowering one), separated from the vestigial eighth dialogue by another short chapter “On the Love of Clerks.”40 There can exist in this world, the master tells his student, Double amour, ce dois tu savoir. La premiere est pure apelee 126 Medievalia et Humanistica et la seconde amour mellee. Cil qui s’entraiment d’amour pure, dou delit de la char n’ont cure, ains wellent sanz plus acoler et baisier sanz outre couler. Et tele amour est vertueuse, ne n’est a son proime greveuse. De tele amour vient grant proece et Diex gaires ne s’en courece . . . Mais l’amour, qui mellee est dite, ou pechiet de char se dellite Et tele amour, qui n’est pas fine, en l’uevre de luxure fine . . . et Diex en est trop courouciez. (vv. 4084–106) [Two kinds of love, as you must realize. / The first is called “pure” / and the second “mixed love.” / Those who love each other purely / care not for carnal pleasure; / rather, they want only to embrace / and kiss without going any further. / Such love is virtuous / and does not harm one’s neighbors. / From such love comes great prowess / and God is hardly angered by it . . . / But the love that is called “mixed” / delights in carnal sin, / and such love, which is not refined, / tends toward the works of lust . . . / and it greatly angers God.] Anticipating the endorsement of this line of thinking in the epilogue, the master stresses that differentiating the two kinds of love is the key to understanding “sainement / ma doctrine qui pas ne ment” (“correctly my doctrine, which never lies,” vv. 4107–8). The crux of this doctrine is that while mixed love is forbidden to clerks and nuns and presumably reprehensible in others, pure love, “sans qui nus hom ne puet bien faire, / ne bien govrener son affaire” (“without which no man can act well or properly manage his affairs,” vv. 4119–20), is an absolute good; “de moy deveëe / ne sera a nule personne,” the master affirms, “car, si com j’ai dit, elle est bonne” (“I will not forbid it to anyone, for as I said, it is good,” vv. 4112–14). Although the definitions of the two types of love are very similar in French and Latin, Drouart makes no mention of any “modest” nude contact following upon the pure lovers’ hugs and kisses. This is consistent with his programmatic radicalization of the moral contrast between chaste, pure love and mixed love. For him, the latter is no longer a relatively praiseworthy fusion or continuum of physical and higher passions, but rather a sinful capitulation to luxuria. The elimination of nude contact as a discrete stage of love also brings Drouart’s description closer to the version of the gradus amoris (hoping, kissing, hugging, and finally sex) he translated earlier,41 thus highlighting the revision that turns the fourth stage of the ascent to what was formerly called “bonne amour” (“good love,” v. 1173) into a step off into the abyss. Such a revision may already be foreshadowed in the definition of love that opens The Art of Clerkly Love: Drouart la Vache Translates Andreas Capellanus 127 the Livres d’Amours. In Andreas’s transparently euphemistic formulation, the lover yearns for “the embraces of the other sex, and to achieve the utter fulfilment of the commands of love in the other’s embrace by their common desire” (“alterius potiri amplexibus et omnia de utriusque voluntate in ipsius amplexu amoris præcepta compleri,” DA 1.1.1). Where the famously controversial adaptation of this sentence uttered by Jean de Meun’s personified Reason—whose characterization of love as a maladie finds its way into Drouart’s translation—has the lovers “acoler et . . . baisier, / pour euls charnelment aaisier” (“embrace and . . . kiss in pursuit of carnal pleasure”),42 Drouart’s lover innocently desires “plus l’acoler et le baisier / que lui d’autre chose aaisier” (“embraces and kisses rather than seeking other pleasures,” vv. 145–46). In any case, love without sex, Drouart’s maistre insists, is good for everybody, whereas the only alternative, love for the sole sake of sex, is unconditionally bad.43 Indeed, while Drouart continues to refer to mixed love as a type of amour, it seems doubtful whether it even qualifies as “love” at all. One of Drouart’s rules of love is, after all, that “mestre en amer ne puet sa cure, / qui est plains de trop grant luxure” (“he who is full of excessive lust cannot devote himself to love,” vv. 6561–62), a significantly stronger formulation of Andreas’s rule (really more of an observation) that “the man affected by excessive sensuality is usually not in love” (“Non solet amare quem nimia voluptatis abundantia vexat,” DA 2.8.48). The ambiguity surrounding the term “love” sometimes raises questions in Andreas’s text as well, but Drouart functionalizes it in his translation of book III so as to give credence to his epilogue’s assertion that only mixed love—that is, carnal love—is criticized in the Livres d’Amours.44 Drouart’s reprobatio chapter starts out by explaining that the fact that previous chapters have “loee bonne Amour vraie” (“praised good, true love”) does not mean “que maintenir Amour doiés” (“that you should uphold the ways of love,” vv. 6576–80). Because the French text, unlike the Latin, continues to characterize the love discussed earlier as good and true, this sentence evidently uses the term “amour” in two different senses: bonne Amour vraie, whose well-deserved praise is not retracted, and another, carnal kind of (so-called) love that is really mere luxure. Without explicitly distinguishing amour from baser passions, Drouart inveighs specifically against “cele ordure / que chascuns apele luxure” (“the filth that is called lust,” vv. 6623–24)45 and connects it to “la delectacion / de la char qui plaine est d’ordure” (“the pleasure of the flesh, which is full of filth,” vv. 6636–37), stressing the inherent foulness of Andreas’s more neutral “pleasure of the flesh” (“carnis delectatione gaudia,” DA 3.5). Reproducing a formula used by Andreas, Drouart proceeds to introduce various reasons why “bon fait Amours fuïr” (“it is good to flee love,” 128 Medievalia et Humanistica v. 6751) or “por quoi Amours est deffendue” (“why love is forbidden,” v. 6792). However, these phrases tend to preface morally innocuous negative consequences of human passion. Amours, for example, causes war, strife, adultery, and perjury and makes lovers servile, antisocial, profligate, sickly, lazy, unreasonable, disreputable, and miserable. These are debatable, secular reasons why love might be undesirable, not theologically authoritative proof that it is evil. In the Latin text, they are not differentiated from more powerfully Christian arguments against love, and both types of arguments use amor and other terms like luxuria and delectatio as near-synonyms. When Drouart engages in earnest with the problem of sin, he suppresses the introductory formula referring to love and fulminates specifically against lust. Thus, where Andreas writes that “the sin of love” (“crimen . . . amoris,” DA 3.13) is graver than other crimes because it alone pollutes the soul as well as the body, Drouart proposes that “luxure d’omme ou de fame” is “li plus ors pechiez / qui soit” (“lust in both men and women . . . the foulest sin there is,” vv. 6739– 45). Andreas advises avoiding amor completely on the grounds that since carnal continence is considered a virtue, “sexual indulgence and the pleasure of the flesh” (“luxuria . . . et carnis voluptas,” DA 3.24) must be vices; Drouart substitutes “cele science” (“this science”) for amor, but retains “luxure” (“lust,” v. 6865–69) as the vice in question. And where Andreas’s salvo against fornication produces the general conclusion that “every wickedness is the outcome of love” (“omnia sequantur ex amore nefanda,” DA 3.48), Drouart’s version inserts extra lines condemning sex for pleasure even within marriage but then restricts Andreas’s statement about love’s dire consequences to “tele amour” and “tele vie” (“such love . . . such a life,” vv. 7102–7) before enthusiastically seconding the Latin text’s exhortation to chastity. Throughout his denunciation of “love,” then, Drouart translates Andreas’s Latin so as to leave open the possibility that only unchaste or mixed love is morally reprehensible, while chaste, pure love is exonerated of sinful luxure. This possibility is actualized in the epilogue, where the “loial delectacion” recommended to all “bonnes dames” (“loyal/ licit delight . . . good ladies,” vv. 7537–41) must be contrasted with “la delectacion mauvaise” (“evil pleasure,” v. 7136)—that is, “les delectacions / de la char” (“the pleasures of the flesh,” vv. 7111–12)—which was the subject of the reprobatio. Moreover, if the reversal of Andreas’s negative stance regarding love is bound up with Drouart’s self-appointed role as the champion of cortoisie against vilonie, then the vilonie rejected in the Livres d’Amours includes both ways in which the morality of love can be misapprehended, namely the belief that all forms of love (and all women) are bad and the equally unrefined notion that crude sexual The Art of Clerkly Love: Drouart la Vache Translates Andreas Capellanus 129 love is good, as well as the related idea that love is by definition at least partly carnal—all of which are positions to be found in De amore. This is why Drouart, who represents himself as a lover, could wax dramatic about his pity for (mixed) love’s deluded servants. When he says in the prologue that he loves his lady wholly and for life “sans penser nule vilonie” (“without a shameful thought,” v. 72), he means not only that his love is polite but also and primarily that it does not involve lust or, a fortiori, illicit sex. And this, presumably, is why Drouart thinks that his (re)writing project will please both his lady and God, whom the translator also loves “loyaument” (“loyally”) in this life and hopes eventually to join in heaven (vv. 7591–606). Pleasing everybody, however, is rarely an easy feat. As Andreas’s third rule of love has it, “no one can be bound by two loves” (“nemo duplici potest amore ligari,” DA 2.8.44), and it is unclear that Drouart succeeds in proving him wrong by swearing fealty to both God and Eros. There remains something distinctly troubling about Drouart’s suggestion that the doctrine of pure and mixed love, a “contrast . . . not between heavenly and earthly love, but between two earthly loves,”46 satisfactorily resolves the antagonism between Christian morality and the amorous life. Pure lovers do not have sex, but they do trade erotically charged hugs and kisses, and nothing indicates that their love for each other is somehow sublimated into a form of divine love or universal caritas. Nor can amour pure easily be glossed as a form of “nonlibidinous desire”—in Paulinus of Nola’s expression, “chaste voluptuousness” (casta voluptas)—akin to those analyzed by Jaeger in his wide-ranging study of “ennobling love” in the Middle Ages.47 The nonsexual erotic paradigms reconstructed by Jaeger are modes of politicizing the passions, disciplining mores. Without excluding private emotional experience, they are essentially public and performative ways of loving with important roles in the formation of social identities and relationships, for example at court or in monastic communities. The most coherent models of “ennobling love” are also, not coincidentally, based on ideals of passionate friendship between men. Even after a kind of heterosexual love “asserted its ability to ennoble” in the late eleventh century, “virtue and sex formed a precarious union.” What Jaeger calls “the romantic dilemma” constantly threatened the compatibility of love with morality because sexuality, a natural component even of male-female erotic relationships that aspired or claimed to be chaste, was widely considered to be inherently debasing.48 At both the theoretical and the practical levels, this dilemma certainly haunts Drouart’s advocacy of an apparently private, apolitical, “chaste” heterosexuality whose main benefit to the lovers—aside from the vague suggestions that love increases proece and helps a man “bien 130 Medievalia et Humanistica faire” or “bien govrener son affaire” (“act well . . . properly manage his affairs,” vv. 4119–20)—seems to be the pleasure it provides. To be sure, it is conceivable that the point of chaste love in the Livres d’Amours, as in certain other vernacular treatments, is “to stoke . . . [and] maximize desire so that the victory over it will appear all the greater” in the context of a moral training aimed at acculturating and disciplining instinctual drives.49 If so, however, Drouart is strangely noncommittal about the concrete positive value of this erotic practice, which is constructed almost entirely by negation: it is not mellee, it allows kisses but does not go so far as sexual intercourse, it does not harm one’s neighbor or destroy ladies’ reputations, it hardly arouses God’s wrath. When Drouart insists that pure lovers “wellent sanz plus acoler / et baisier sanz outre couler” and that “dou delit de la char n’ont cure” (“want only to embrace and kiss without going any further . . . they care not for carnal pleasure,” vv. 4088–90), he fails to specify whether their abstinence is spontaneous and natural or, on the contrary, achieved through an effort of moral will. This leaves open the possibility of plotting acts of pure love on a continuum with sex and thus of celebrating for their own sake, under cover of the demonization of a “carnal sin” identified principally with coitus, the venereal pleasures that lie this side of the “final consolation.”50 The opposition of “loial delectacion” to mixed love affirmed in Drouart’s conclusion may thus be less categorical than it seems, especially given that all of the text’s other references to delectacion link it to “la char” and its iniquitous lust.51 A reader of the Livres d’Amours familiar with Andreas’s Latin or with Jean de Meun’s Rose—Nicole de Margival certainly knew all three52—or, for that matter, with real men and women might well recall that hugs and kisses often lead to or transparently metonymize less chaste activities. As Andreas’s noblewoman drily quips in direct response to her interlocutor’s exposition of pure and mixed love, “I am startled that in any person such abstinence of the flesh has been observed. . . . Everyone accounts it a prodigy if a man is placed on a fire and does not burn” (“miror enim si in quoquam tanta sit abstinentia carnis inventa. . . . Monstrosum namque iudicatur a cunctis, si quis in igne positus non uratur,” DA 1.6.476). Indeed, one of the few points on which all three books of De amore agree is that love is inherently immoderatus and the lover “cannot observe moderation” (“nescit habere modum,” DA 3.62).53 Nevertheless, with every opportunity to proclaim that pure love catapults the spirit past the flesh and up to God, or at least to insist on the moral value of inviting carnal temptation so as to overcome it,54 Drouart chooses instead to translate unadorned Andreas’s much more modest, even flimsy vindication of erotic love: “Diex gaires ne s’en courece” (“God is hardly angered by it,” v. 4094). The Art of Clerkly Love: Drouart la Vache Translates Andreas Capellanus 131 III. Clerkly Love Some of the ambiguities in Drouart’s text result, as the prologue suggests, from tensions between the translator’s agenda and that of his matiere, but the more overarching ones are created by Drouart himself. He goes some way toward Christianizing the cynical and worldly-wise Ovidian ideas expressed in De amore, but stops short of moving his account of pure love beyond earthly relations between men and women or expressing the value of such relations in strictly moral terms. At the same time, though, he develops a version of legitimate heterosexual desire not easily mapped onto the secular “courtly” models offered by late twelfthcentury aristocratic culture, troubadour lyric, or chivalric romance. As in earlier thirteenth-century vernacular arts of love, “l’utilisation d’une langue nouvelle, romane et non latine, permet, . . . dans le jeu qui s’instaure entre les modèles convoqués, d’énoncer un discours ni ovidien, ni courtois, ni scolastique.”55 Who, then, is the “pure lover” of Drouart’s Livres d’Amours—and the ideal audience for the delicately balanced doctrine of sustained ambiguity that allows it to keep both of its demanding inscribed readers, God and the poet’s lady, in view? Drouart’s epilogue provides one answer that critics have unanimously found at once entirely plausible and hollowly or even risibly formulaic. The poet declares que j’ai por les clers fait ce livre qui est par raison biaus et gens, et non pas por les laies gens qui sont .I. peu nices et foles, car ou livre a plusors paroles que lai ne porroient entendre, qui les devroit noier ou pendre. Mais li clerc qui i penseront, le livre bien entenderont, car assez i a de delit. (vv. 7548–57) [that I wrote this book, / which is naturally fair and noble, / for clerks and not for laymen, / who are a bit naïve and foolish, / for the book contains some things / that laymen could not understand, / which might get them drowned or hanged. / But clerks who meditate on it / will understand the book aright, / for there is in it much delight.] Given his command of Latin, the parameters of his evident but unexceptional erudition, his apparent personal acquaintance with Nicole de Margival (who gives him the title of “mestre”), and the overall tone of the Livres d’Amours, the historical Drouart was very probably a member of the secular clergy writing primarily for his peers.56 It is less obvious which difficult paroles the poet might have in mind as being dangerously unintelligible to foolish laymen. We have seen that there is indeed a 132 Medievalia et Humanistica doctrinally dubious current flowing through Drouart’s text, but it would seem to be hidden from the inattentive reader and revealed to the careful one—who might, for example, pay closer attention to Drouart’s manipulation of the multiple meanings of amour—rather than vice versa.57 Certainly the text contains no arcane allegory in need of a sophisticated gloss. Perhaps, then, the exclusion of a lay audience is merely a selfaggrandizing topos, albeit one that sits a bit strangely in the epilogue to a vernacular translation of a widely circulated treatise that educated clerks could presumably consult in the original Latin. If so, the enigma of Drouart’s dangerous paroles might be no mystery after all, just as the epilogue ends by conveying the translator’s name to the reader through a supposedly daunting “Latin” riddle—its solution involves nothing more than assembling, according to clear instructions, the first letter of “Deus,” the first letter of “reus,” the second letter of “dominus,” and so forth—that puzzles nobody who is not truly “plus rudes c’une vache” (“more ignorant than a cow,” v. 7629). But what if the text does need clerkly readers, perhaps less to interpret it than to enjoy its teaching (Drouart links understanding to delight) as its author would wish, to be interpellated by the text and to receive the gift of the delit it encloses? For unlike De amore, the Livres d’Amours does offer something to clerks more than to all others: the privileged persona of the pure lover. At the same time, Drouart develops a model of clerkly identity triangulated between his poem’s multiple ideological and literary poles. Drouart’s term “clerc,” which consistently renders Capellanus’s “clericus,” connotes not only secular bilingual Latin and French erudition, as in vernacular literature from Chrétien de Troyes to the Rose,58 but also an important religious commitment that brings with it definite duties and prerogatives, as in De amore. Nevertheless, like the clerc of courtly-chivalric romance, Drouart’s clerk is favorably disposed to erotic love and to women. His view contrasts in this respect with the theologically determined tradition of clerical misogyny—possibly connected to a fear of emasculation imposed by the “vocational impediment” of consecration to God59—that informs Andreas’s book III, among many other patristic and medieval antifeminist texts.60 These include vernacular and cynically secular works like Jean de Meun’s Rose, which rules out any simple formula for relating the opposed pairs Latin/vernacular, religious/secular, and anti-love/pro-love (or misogynistic/non-misogynistic, which often amounts to the same thing). Still, Drouart’s negotiation of clerkly identity is clearly entangled in the work of translating from Latin “en rommans” (“into the vernacular,” v. 54), and his advocacy of a polite, virtuous love both theorized and practiced by the clerkly class draws on a theme closely connected to the vernacular The Art of Clerkly Love: Drouart la Vache Translates Andreas Capellanus 133 treatments of the ars amatoria in which the clergy simultaneously lays claim to a courtly poetic voice. Drouart’s representation of clergie thus complements his play to reverse De amore’s ambiguous condemnation of love, but it also contributes to the threat of ideological incoherence with which the Livres d’Amours contends. According to Andreas’s social hierarchy, the cleric is nobilissimus (DA 1.6.20), above even the highest temporal lord. However, clerks’ status as lovers is tenuous at best. The questionable propriety of clerkly love is debated at some length in book I’s eighth dialogue, to which we shall return momentarily, and then taken up by Andreas in a special section entitled De amore clericorum. The magister concludes that since a clergyman’s nobility derives from his consecration to God, he “ought not to devote himself to labours of love, but rather is constrained utterly to forgo all delight in the flesh and to preserve himself pure of all bodily defilement for the Lord” (“non debet amoris operibus deservire, sed omnem carnis delectationem tenetur penitus declinare, et ab omni corporis inquinamento immaculatum se Domino custodire,” DA 1.7.2). However, given that clerks are men and “there is scarcely a man who ever lived without sinning in the flesh” (“vix . . . unquam aliquis sine carnis crimine vivit”), clerks may decide to participate in “the struggles of love” (“amoris . . . certamina,” DA 1.7.4), in which case they should behave in accordance with the social rank of their parents. While Andreas may be engaging in some indulgent “special pleading” to excuse the illicit pursuit of love by his own clerkly caste,61 his theoretical position here is orthodox and in line with the clerical misogyny and the “pastoral” critique of love that will erupt in book III. Drouart takes a much bolder stand on the contested issue of clerkly love.62 After translating Andreas’s thoughts on the different classes of men and women, Drouart elaborates on the superlative nobility of clerks: Clerc sont tres noble gent; clerc se maintiennent bel et gent, car bonne amour fust or perdue, se clerc ne l’eussent soustenue. (vv. 715–18) [Clerks are very noble folk; / clerks conduct themselves well and graciously, / for good love would be lost by now / if clerks had not sustained it.] For Drouart, the “vocational impediment” of clerkdom is no impediment at all. Not only are clerks allowed to love, they are noble precisely because they are the pillars of “good” (that is, we now understand, pure and chaste) love solely responsible for its survival in this immoral world.63 In his own later chapter De l’amour as clercs, Drouart nevertheless reproduces Andreas’s statement that “nus clers ne doit avoir regart / a fame amer” (“no clerk should concern himself with loving women,” 134 Medievalia et Humanistica vv. 3883–84). However, just as in his translation of book III, the poet denounces amour but focuses his criticism on carnal lust, stressing that clerks’ duty to “vivre a Dieu nestement” means avoiding “de char la delectacion / et toute fornicacion” (“living immaculately for God . . . carnal pleasure and all fornication,” vv. 3885–88). There follows a faithful rendering of Andreas’s chapter on—or rather against—loving nuns, wherein it is made clear that although nuns are certainly capable of loving and being loved, becoming amorously involved with a nun is a despicable act that merits “the death-sentence” (“damnatio mortis,” DA 1.8.3), presumably in this world and the next. This is a sentence that Andreas (or, in Drouart, the magisterial “je”) once almost called down upon himself by ill-advisedly frequenting and, inevitably, seducing a bride of Christ. It is at this point that Drouart abruptly inserts the student’s objection and his teacher’s response. The student expresses great surprise, itself unexpected given the persuasive theological underpinnings of the foregoing arguments against clerks’ and nuns’ participation in the games of love, que tele amour avez blamee, qui de tout le monde est loee; car vous volez que clerc ne soient tel que par amours amer doient. Vostre sentence trop me blece, car li clerc ont plus de noblece, plus de sens et de cortoisie, comme gent sage et envoisie, k’avoir ne pueent autre gent . . . Ce me samble qu’il sont plus digne de maintenir bonne amor fine que nus qui au siecle repaire. (vv. 4019–35) [that you have condemned a love / praised by everyone, / for you claim that clerks’ nature / is not fit for love. / Your assertion pains me greatly, / for clerks possess more nobility, / good sense and courtesy, / being both wise and joyous folk, / than any other group of people can have . . . / I think they are worthier / to uphold good, refined love / than anyone living in the world.] No doubt the student finds his teacher’s pronouncements especially hurtful because the young man himself is both a clerk and someone who obviously aspires to be a lover. In this respect, he and not the master seems to be Drouart’s avatar in the exchange. By identifying himself temporarily with the student rather than with the voice of authority, the poet retroactively displaces the unsavory personal anecdote about seducing nuns onto a fictional “maistre” character, which will not prevent him from immediately resuming the magister’s mantle when the teacher unfolds the doctrine of pure and mixed love. The student character is in The Art of Clerkly Love: Drouart la Vache Translates Andreas Capellanus 135 any case hardly intellectually submissive. He quotes verbatim Drouart’s earlier statement about the excellent conduct of clerks and adds that their wisdom, measured generosity, skill in ordering themselves and their affairs, and, most importantly, universal knowledge make them the world’s worthiest practitioners of refined love. The student then goes on to chastise his master for having argued “vilment” (“shamefully”) and far from “soutilment” (“shrewdly,” vv. 4041–42)—that is, in a manner befitting neither a courteous lover nor a clever clerk. And, taking no offense, the master agrees that excluding clerks from the lists of love would indeed be wrong; there is no contradiction, however, because he was talking about mixed love, whereas pure love “est bonne / et la doyvent clerc embracier” (“is good, and clerks should embrace it,” vv. 4114–15). Such is of course the position that Drouart will explicitly endorse later on. This already striking assertion of the erotic rights of clerks is especially interesting in light of its relationship to the Latin text of De amore. We have seen that the doctrine of double amour is adapted by Drouart from Andreas’s eighth dialogue. So too is the deciple’s case for the clerkly caste’s preeminence in love. His arguments (and others) are adduced by the male speaker immediately after the passage on pure and mixed love to refute the lady’s claim that while “both these kinds of love win approval, it does not befit [him] to seek service in either” (“licet uterque sit amor electus, vos tamen neutrius decet affectare militiam”); because he is a clerk, he ought to devote himself to God and “be a stranger to all pleasure” so as to “preserve his body spotless for the Lord” (“delectatione alienus exsistere et suum prae omnibus corpus immaculatum Domino custodire,” DA 1.6.478). Notwithstanding the difficulty of interpreting De amore, there are a number of strong indications that the lady is right, and not only because her reasoning accords with what Andreas will assert in the upcoming chapter on the love of clerks. It is clear in this dialogue that, as Andreas says when introducing it, what is being staged is an example of attempted seduction that also serves as a particularly self-conscious example of rhetorical language. The dialogues as a whole insist that rhetoric and casuistry are an inalienable part of seductive discourse, but rhetoric’s importance is especially pronounced when the lady being targeted is a high noblewoman because such women are figured as masterful debaters who delight in discomfiting suitors by deconstructing the fallacious grounds of male claims on female favors (DA 1.6.401–2). Accordingly, the nobilior suitor is presented as an immensely resourceful rhetorician who turns verbal somersaults in an ultimately inconclusive effort to coax his interlocutor into bed. This clerkly would-be lover is, in other words, a sophist of the most hypocritical stripe. His untrustworthiness is ironically signposted near 136 Medievalia et Humanistica the beginning of the dialogue, just before he uses a morally dubious piece of kettle logic to show that “God cannot be gravely angered by love” (“in amore Deum graviter offendi non posse,” DA 1.6.417) because it is natural, but even if he is offended, the lady cannot devote herself entirely to obeying God without giving up all secular concerns, so she might as well practice love rather than vainly pursuing a virtue she cannot perfect. A few lines earlier, while reproaching the lady for acting friendly and then rejecting his amorous advances, the man has compared her to a self-interested hypocrite, “a bad priest who [feigns] numerous good qualities, and reminds others of the works which win eternal life, but condemns himself out of his own mouth while showing others how to obtain their reward” (“est enim malo similis sacerdoti qui de ipso plurima bona simulando et alios aeternae vitae opera commonendo propria se ipsum damnat sententia et aliis modum remunerationis ostendit,” DA 1.6.415). The shrewd lady, however, suspects that her suitor himself is precisely such a priest, a false friend who sings the praises and whitewashes the sinful side of love for his own advantage (DA 1.6.466). Indeed, while defending the right of clerks to serve love, the man even identifies himself with the image of the hypocritical priest, recast as a sympathetic figure who manages to fulfill his pastoral duties despite the understandable human frailty that spurs him on to the labors of Venus: The Lord saw that His clerics, by reason of the weakness of human nature, would fall into various excesses, and so he says . . . “You must believe the words of clerics because they are God’s ambassadors, but because they are subject to the temptations of the flesh like other men, do not eye their deeds in case they happen to go astray in some respect.” So it is enough for me if I stand at the altar and can announce the word of God to my people. (DA 1.6.486–87) [Videns enim Dominus suos clericos iuxta humanae naturae infirmitatem in varios lapsuros excessus, ait . . . : “Credendum est dictis clericorum quasi legatorum Dei, sed quia carnis tentationi sicut homines ceteri supponuntur, eorum non inspiciatis opera, si eos contigerit in aliquo deviare.” Sufficit ergo mihi, si altari assistens meae plebe Dei studeam verbum annuntiare.] The woman is surely not alone in finding these words surprising, and her legitimate skepticism sheds an extremely negative light on the entire defense of clerkly love. It sounds like part of the discourse of a seductive sophist, and so too does the doctrine of pure and mixed love, which the lady likewise finds “scarcely . . . credible” (“vix . . . credibilia,” DA 1.6.476)—not because she takes issue with the valorization of mixed as well as pure love but because it seems implausible that pure love has ever been successfully maintained by lovers “chastely” kissing and hugging while nude in bed. In other words, in detailing the difference between pure and mixed love and then asking the lady to choose between them, The Art of Clerkly Love: Drouart la Vache Translates Andreas Capellanus 137 the suitor is again being selfishly manipulative. He hopes that the lady will fall first into the trap of choosing one of the two types of love rather than no love at all, and then down the slippery slope from chaste kisses to consensual sex.64 And when this fails, the disappointed “courtly” lover ultimately resorts to misogynistic abuse (DA 1.6.499–501). It should now be obvious what motives, beyond a literary concern for concision and generic uniformity, might have led Drouart la Vache to eliminate virtually all of Dialogue Eight in order to extract and recontextualize key ideas articulated therein. As a clerk arguing for the erotic supremacy of clerks on the basis of their aptitude for a “vertueuse” (“virtuous,” v. 4091) pure love opposed to—and not, as in De amore, continuous with—the mere luxure to which mixed love boils down, the poet needs to distance himself and his arguments as much as possible from Andreas’s lecherous sophist. Reconfigured in the exchange between Drouart’s master and student, the seduction strategies of Andreas’s tonsured hypocrite trace the apparently disinterested portrait of chaste Eros that forms the very core of Drouart’s ideology of clerkly love. Moreover, the amicable and intellectually honest, truthgenerating dialectic of the maistre and his deciple vindicates the figure of the clerk as both amorous subject and logician. The representation of these characters gainsays a suspicious view of clerkly lovers as unscrupulous seducers who misuse their mastery of rhetoric to lascivious ends. The currency of such a view is suggested not only by Andreas’s dialogue and Jean de Meun’s personified Faus Semblant, but also, for example, by the anonymous Response (mid- to late thirteenth century) to Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaires d’amours (before 1252). The female speaker of the Response accuses “chil clerc qui . . . s’afaitent en cointise et en leur beles paroles” of being “li plus soutil en malisse” (“those clerks who . . . dress themselves up in elegant appearances and fine words . . . the subtlest in malice”) to prey on naive women.65 A short verse Art d’amors by one Guiart, probably Drouart’s near-contemporary, attributes a similar insight to none other than Aristotle: Aristote en son livre nos aprent a savoir qu’un clerc puet par fallace son amie decevoir, En cel mëisme livre aprent a parcevoir de cele fausseté a conoistre le voir.66 [Aristotle teaches in his book that a clerk / can trick his girlfriend with fallacies; / in the same book he shows how to / discern the truth of these falsehoods.] In Drouart’s text, the amorous clerk himself parses truth from falsehood and clears up the confusion surrounding the real nature and value of pure love, whose champion he is. The figure of the clerkly reader as a discerning student of the ars amatoria, capable of understanding the whole 138 Medievalia et Humanistica art but selectively acting only on those precepts that are morally innocent, is thus not so much presupposed as produced by the Livres d’Amours. IV. Contradictory Pleasures There remains, however, the question of nuns and the rather astonishing role reserved for them in Drouart’s exposition of his doctrine. The student who questions the prohibition on the love of clerks stands up for the love of nuns as well, citing the anecdote of his master’s own near-escape from undertaking “l’uevre de luxure” (“lust’s labor,” v. 4009) with an amenable sister as proof that the teacher “erra malement” (“erred badly,” v. 4045) in forbidding men to court such attractive and worthy women: Vous moustrez par vostre sentence qu’il a en eles grant science, et qu’elles estre amees doient et en la sale d’Amours soient. (vv. 4071–74) [Your own statement demonstrates / that they possess great learning / and that they ought to be loved / and to sit in the hall of Love.] The idea that nuns’ science qualifies them for love accords well with the student’s claim that clerks are great lovers thanks to their universal knowledge, especially if science implies an understanding of how not to love as much as a command of permissible erotic practice. Still, this is a risqué conclusion to draw from the teacher’s description of how, during his dalliance with a bride of Christ, sa grant biauté tant regardai que je certes ne me gardai, devant que j’en fui si soupris que j’en fui ausi com touz pris. Et si m’esmut trop durement ce qu’elle parla doucement . . . Et, ja soit ce que je creüsse que toute l’art d’Amours seüsse, a paines eschivai ses las, sans faire d’Amours le solas. (vv. 3975–92) [I gazed so long upon her great beauty / that I was truly off my guard, / so that it caught me so unawares / that I was entirely captivated by it. / And I was greatly moved / by her sweet words . . . / And although I thought / that I knew the whole art of love, / I barely escaped her snares without / performing love’s consolation.] Andreas Capellanus never glorifies such liaisons, at least on the moralizing and religious surface of his comments about the heinous crime of loving nuns, although the jocular tone in which Andreas recounts his The Art of Clerkly Love: Drouart la Vache Translates Andreas Capellanus 139 own dangerously pleasant experience with a beautiful, eloquent, and willing monacha undeniably keeps the specter of irony close at hand. Drouart’s maistre, however, again qualifies his condemnation of romances with nuns at the urging of his indignant student. As usual with Drouart, the problem is lust, not love. Provided that the passion in question is pure, it is positively enjoined upon both nuns and clerks. “Deveëe / ne sera,” he says, “a nule personne . . . et la doyvent clerc embracier / et nonnains, et l’autre enchacier . . . et doyvent bonne amour suïr” (“It will not be forbidden . . . to anyone . . . and clerks and nuns ought to embrace it, and banish the other [kind of love] . . . and they should follow the path of good love,” vv. 4112–18).67 The doctrine of a universally sanctioned chaste love, the keystone of Drouart’s ars amatoria, thus immediately follows and to an important extent derives from a moment of near-capitulation to the most unacceptable kind of desire, the carnal passion that flouts the laws of both God and man, a desire that almost overwhelmed the magister despite all he knew (or thought he knew) about the art of love. This ars is born faltering, tenuously poised on a tightrope of virtuous purity over the lust with which amour pure always seems suspiciously contiguous, even continuous, no matter how cleverly Drouart contrasts these two forms of passionate connection between irreducibly embodied human beings. Even the maistre’s effort to reconcile amour pure with Christian morality goes no farther than the weak claim, borrowed from Andreas’s sophist, that “Diex gaires ne s’en courece” (“God is hardly angered by it,” v. 4094), perhaps because Drouart, for all his hostility to the delectacion de la char, is unwilling to commit the vilonie of prohibiting noncoital caresses within virtuous love relationships. Does Drouart’s gratuitous insistence on the erotic availability of nuns, which appears ultimately—and scandalously—to propose two lovers in religious orders as the ideal amorous couple, draw the reader’s attention to a consciously transgressive program flickering within the text’s good-humored attempt to satisfy everybody? Is the poet’s exposition of an irreproachable profane love, like the blandishments of women in book III of De amore and perhaps like Andreas’s entire text, spoken “with a false”—or double—“heart and ambivalent mind” (“in duplicitate cordis . . . et mentis plica,” DA 3.86–87)? Or does the ambiguous, even self-contradictory quality of Drouart’s doctrine, very different from the ironic slipperiness of his source, stem rather from a refusal to set limits on the circulation of pleasure, on the pursuit of a particularly clerkly joy distinct from the values of troubadour lyric and chivalric romance? In theory, the poet agrees with Andreas that a good clerk should “preserve his body spotless for the Lord,” but the corollary that he should “be a stranger to all 140 Medievalia et Humanistica pleasure” is antithetical to the whole spirit of Drouart’s project, a project that begins and ends with pleasure of all kinds: the pleasures of rhyming, of friendship, of love, of interpretive reading, of pleasing others in this life and then passing on to “cele joie / que Dex a ses amis otroie” (“the joy God grants his friends,” vv. 7595–96). The Livres d’Amours relishes its own equivocal, impossible dedication to both Eros and caritas, between which it creates a space for clerkly love to thrive in an atmosphere of blissful indeterminacy. It is perhaps appropriate that the resulting affirmation of the clerk’s role as lover doubles as a kind of self-emasculation after all. Licensed to love but forbidden to consummate his chaste passion, he—like the furiously writing lover-scribe exhorted by Jean de Meun’s Genius to ply his phallic stylus68—is at once empowered and condemned to conflate the sexual with the textual, the practice of love with the transmission of knowledge about it. With regard to Andreas Capellanus and his De amore, Drouart is evidently more than an exhausted epigone nostalgically self-inscribed into a dying tradition of didactic love literature whose reworking in the Livres d’Amours “en signale le déclin et la perte de sens.”69 Drouart is no more a codifier of “courtly love” than is Andreas, but in the history of De amore’s reception, Drouart’s art of clerkly love stands closer to a beginning than to an end. Although the influence of the Livres d’Amours itself can have been modest at best, “la traduction de Drouart ouvre une nouvelle phase dans l’histoire de la réception du De Amore.”70 If this interpretive movement is often dominated by the banalizing representation of Andreas’s text as a manual of “courtly love,” at the same time it innovatively “entérine de fait l’existence d’un discours théorique et didactique sur l’amour humain” free of the frame of fiction.71 It also moves past the prevailing thirteenthcentury view of De amore as a reflection on culpable cupiditas72 to seek, in and through Andreas’s arguments, an elusive synthesis of Christian morality and an idea of profane, yet righteous and even ennobling love between men and women, not limited in its ideological function to feudal aristocratic self-fashioning and self-glorification, that might resolve the “romantic dilemma” arising from the high medieval “attempt to reconcile virtue with sex.” Drouart la Vache’s Livres d’Amours undertakes such an uncertain, sometimes uneasy exploration of “the territory stretching between spiritual and carnal love”73—and enjoys it to the hilt, “car assez i a de delit” (“for there is in it much delight,” v. 7557). Notes 1. I follow convention in referring to the “De amore” of “Andreas Capellanus” as such, although neither the text’s original title nor its authorship can be The Art of Clerkly Love: Drouart la Vache Translates Andreas Capellanus 141 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. known with any certainty. Nor is its traditional attribution to the late twelfthcentury court of Marie de Champagne beyond dispute. See P. G. Walsh, introduction to Andreas Capellanus on Love, ed. and trans. Walsh (London: Duckworth, 1982), 1–3; John F. Benton, “The Court of Champagne as a Literary Center,“ Speculum 36, no. 4 (1961): 578–82; and Peter Dronke, “‘Andreas Capellanus,’” Journal of Medieval Latin 4 (1994): 51–63. Although Andreas is no doubt inspired by the Ovidian tradition of tripartite erotological poems, his book III goes much further than Ovid’s Remedia amoris in offering not “cures” to liberate unhappy lovers from unrequited passions by dispelling their amorous illusions, but rather blistering invective directed categorically against love and women. C. Stephen Jaeger, Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 114. Gregory M. Sadlek, Idleness Working: The Discourse of Love’s Labor from Ovid through Chaucer and Gower (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 57–58; Michael D. Cherniss, “The Literary Comedy of Andreas Capellanus,” Modern Philology 72, no. 3 (1975): 223–37. A thorough review of critical responses to Capellanus is to be found in Kathleen Andersen-Wyman, Andreas Capellanus on Love? Desire, Seduction, and Subversion in a Twelfth-Century Latin Text (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 18–25. See also Don A. Monson, “Andreas Capellanus and the Problem of Irony,” Speculum 63, no. 3 (1988): 539–72, and Toril Moi, “Desire in Language: Andreas Capellanus and the Controversy of Courtly Love,” in Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology and History, ed. David Aers (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986), 11–16. For Allen, the text’s choral voices “present both sides of a discussion and acknowledge—even emphasize—the gap between them” so as ultimately to “teach lessons not about life but about art,” not about how to love but about how to understand the rhetoric of love and love as rhetoric. The resulting ironization of love’s literary conventions potentially creates a space for amatory fiction without contesting Christian morality’s jurisdiction over sexual relations beyond the limits of literature (Peter Allen, The Art of Love: Amatory Fiction from Ovid to the Romance of the Rose [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992], 9–13, 72). Compare Classen’s contention that Andreas’s enterprise is an “analysis of human language, communication, and the multiple functions of discourse” (Albrecht Classen, “Epistemology at the Courts: The Discussion of Love by Andreas Capellanus and Juan Ruiz,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 103, no. 3 [2002]: 342), and Mackey’s view that “the medium has become the message,” the “reality of sex . . . sublated and sublimated in the discourse of love” (Louis Mackey, “Eros into Logos: The Rhetoric of Courtly Love,” in The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love, ed. Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins [Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991], 341). Andersen-Wyman, Andreas Capellanus on Love?, 3. Catherine Brown, Contrary Things: Exegesis, Dialectic, and the Poetics of Didacticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 96. According to Brown, this is precisely the kind of active reading deliberately solicited by De amore’s presentation of “opposing propositions . . . at once mutually exclusive and mutually coimplicated,” which imposes on the reader the hermeneutic and moral responsibility for constructing “something truthlike” from the text’s “contradictory shards” (Brown, Contrary Things, 91–115). Compare Allen, The Art of Love, 68–78. De amore’s manuscript tradition and reception history suggest that many medieval readers and translators were uncomfortable with the text’s self-contradictions and especially with book III. See Bruno Roy, 142 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. Medievalia et Humanistica “À la recherche des lecteurs médiévaux du De amore d’André le Chapelain,” Revue de l’Université d’Ottawa 55, no. 1 (1985): 45–73, and Alfred Karnein, “La Réception du De Amore d’André le Chapelain au XIIIe siècle,” Romania 102 (1981): 324–51, 501–42. This date of composition is given twice within Drouart’s translation; see Robert Bossuat, ed., Li Livres d’Amours de Drouart la Vache (Paris: Champion, 1926), vv. 25, 7575. Subsequent references to this edition are given parenthetically; all translations are my own. Whereas Capellanus’s De amore is divided into three books, of which the first two are subdivided into titled chapters, Drouart’s poem is rubricated only with chapter headings, which do not always correspond to those of the Latin text. Dembowski makes much—probably too much—of the link between the linguistic and generic senses of romans as a guiding principle of Drouart’s vernacular translation (Peter F. Dembowski, “Two Old French Recastings/ Translations of Andreas Capellanus’s De Amore,” in Medieval Translators and Their Craft, ed. Jeanette Beer [Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University, 1989], 185–212). Dembowski, “Two Old French Recastings,” 190. Gaston Paris, “Une traduction d’André le Chapelain au XIIIe siècle,” Romania 13 (1884): 404. The manuscript consulted by Paris (Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 3122), probably produced within a decade or two of 1290, remains the only witness to Li Livres d’Amours. Robert Bossuat, Drouart la Vache, traducteur d’André le Chapelain (1290) (Paris: Champion, 1926), 55–65, 74. According to Bossuat, Drouart deliberately tones down Andreas’s lofty ideas and austere language and reshapes De amore into a straightforward late thirteenth-century ars amatoria, emphasizing the text’s Ovidianism while effacing or minimizing the traces of refined curial mores, pagan references, and potentially heretical precepts tying it to a late twelfth-century courtly context. Karnein similarly emphasizes Drouart’s “Ovidianization” of Capellanus while distinguishing it from a genuine popularization (Karnein, “Réception,” 526–28). Don A. Monson, “Censorship and Self-Censorship? The Case of Drouart la Vache, Translator of Andreas Capellanus,” Mediaeval Studies 74 (2012): 259–61. After crediting Drouart with a “lecture lucide” of De amore as an ambiguous exposé of the aporias of erotic discourse that simultaneously begins to legitimate profane love as a subject of scientific and legalistic study, Gally reduces Drouart’s project to a well-intentioned effort to “l’assainir, le récrire . . . pour en corriger les ambiguïtés, effacer précisément les ‘bons mots’ et le ramener au sein d’une tradition ovidienne et érudite . . . plus conforme à l’ordonnance scolastique, moins équivoque, en un mot moins séductrice” (Michèle Gally, “Quand l’art d’aimer était mis à l’index . . . ,” Romania 113 [1992–1995]: 436–37). Anne Berthelot, “La ‘Vulgarisation’ de l’idéologie courtoise: Drouart la Vache traducteur d’André le Chapelain,” in Zum Traditionsverständnis in der mittelalterlichen Literatur: Funktion und Werkung. Actes du colloque, Greifswald, 30 et 31 mai 1989, ed. Danielle Buschinger and Wolfgang Spiewok (Amiens: Université de Picardie, 1991), 52. Andersen-Wyman, Andreas Capellanus on Love?, 2. Barbara Nelson Sargent, “A Medieval Commentary on Andreas Capellanus,” Romania 94 (1973): 530–34. On Capellanus and the condemnation of 1277, see A. J. Denomy, “The De Amore of Andreas Capellanus and the Condemnation of 1277,” Medi- The Art of Clerkly Love: Drouart la Vache Translates Andreas Capellanus 143 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. aeval Studies 8 (1946): 107–49; Roland Hissette, “Étienne Tempier et les menaces contre l’éthique chrétienne,” Bulletin de philosophie médiévale 21 (1979): 68–72; Gally, “Quand l’art d’aimer était mis à l’index . . . ,” 421–40; Brown, Contrary Things, 108–9; and Andersen-Wyman, Andreas Capellanus on Love?, 12–18. Bowden argues that the condemnation motivated Drouart la Vache’s modification of his Latin source (Betsy Bowden, “The Art of Courtly Copulation,” Medievalia et Humanistica n.s. 9 [1979]: 70), which Bowden believes to be a tissue of ribald puns. However, this account of Drouart’s objectives is thoughtfully rebutted by Monson, “Censorship and Self-Censorship?,” 243–61. Walsh, ed. and trans., Andreas Capellanus on Love, § 0.4. Subsequently cited parenthetically, as DA, by book, chapter, and section; only book and section numbers are given for book III, which has no chapters, and for Andreas’s prefatory letter to “Gualterius,” to which I assign the chapter number 0. The magister’s past as a lover lends his theoretical knowledge the support of unimpeachable eyewitness testimony, but theoretical mastery of the erotic ars—or any other intellectual discipline—is incompatible with the state of being in love because “the man subject to Venus’ slavery can give really earnest thought to nothing except the perpetual attempt to . . . [become] further enchained in her fetters” (“qui Veneris est servituti obnoxius nil valet perpensius cogitare nisi ut aliquid semper valeat suis actibus operari, quo magis possit ipsius illaqueari catenis,” DA 0.3). The text mentions the magister’s personal knowledge of love as a source of authority on a few other occasions, but these passing references to “the teaching of the lover Andreas” (“amatoris Andreae . . . doctrina,” DA 1.6.385; cf. DA 0.3, 1.2.7, 1.8.1–6, 2.6.22) do not seriously undermine Andreas’s status as a dispassionate pedagogue. Andreas is also the declared “lover”—although he refers to friendly dilectio and affectum, not amor (DA 0.1–4, 3.1)—and rhetorical “seducer” of his inscribed addressee, Gualterius, but again, this highlights his mastery of love’s language, not his subservience to its commands. On “Andreas” as lover, see Peter Allen, “Ars amandi, ars legendi: Love Poetry and Literary Theory in Ovid, Andreas Capellanus, and Jean de Meun,” Exemplaria 1, no. 1 (1989): 189; Dronke, “‘Andreas Capellanus,’” 53–55; and Brown, Contrary Things, 104–6, 113. Stephen G. Nichols, “The Rhetoric of Sincerity in the Roman de la Rose,” in Romance Studies in Memory of Edward Billings Ham, ed. Urban Tigner Holmes (Hayward: California State College, 1967), 118. Cf. Paul Strohm, “Guillaume as Narrator and Lover in the Roman de la Rose,” Romanic Review 59, no. 1 (1968): 3–9, and Evelyn Birge Vitz, “The I of the Roman de la Rose,” Genre 6 (1973): 49–75. On Drouart’s debts to Jean de Meun, see Bossuat, Drouart la Vache, 104–14. At the midpoint of the Rose, the God of Love names Jean de Meun and “prophesies” that he will take over the narration of Guillaume’s/Amant’s exploits after the original lover-author’s death, but reveals that the pen had already been passed some sixty-five hundred lines earlier (Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. and trans. Armand Strubel [Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1992], vv. 10551–658). On this muchglossed passage and on the relationship between the Rose’s two authorfigures, see among others David F. Hult, Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: Readership and Authority in the First Roman de la Rose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 10–24; Nichols, “Rhetoric of Sincerity,” 118–29; Kevin Brownlee, “Jean de Meun and the Limits of Romance: Genius as Rewriter 144 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. Medievalia et Humanistica of Guillaume de Lorris,” in Romance: Generic Transformation from Chrétien de Troyes to Cervantes, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Marina Scordilis Brownlee (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985), 114–34; Eva Martin, “Away from Self-Authorship: Multiplying the ‘Author’ in Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose,” Modern Philology 96, no. 1 (1998): 1–15; and Sylvia Huot, “‘Ci parle l’aucteur’: The Rubrication of Voice and Authorship in Roman de la Rose Manuscripts,” SubStance 17, no. 2 (1988): 42–48. This much-discussed issue is concisely treated in Alastair Minnis, Fallible Authors: Chaucer’s Pardoner and Wife of Bath (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 295–98. Drouart’s point is that “il ne s’agit pas d’une oeuvre de fiction, mais d’un écrit didactique. L’amant (amerres) se placerait sur le premier terrain, le pédagogue (enseignerres) se situe sur le second” (Karnein, “Réception,” 524). Sargent, “A Medieval Commentary on Andreas Capellanus,” 535. On Andreas’s duplex sententia, probably better translated as “double teaching” or “double meaning,” in the context of contemporary dialectical and exegetical practices, see Brown, Contrary Things, 94–101, 112–15. For Kelly, “Andreas’ double intention and his [negative] attitude towards courtly love in relation to the teachings of the Church are conspicuous and consistent throughout the treatise” (Douglas Kelly, “Courtly Love in Perspective: The Hierarchy of Love in Andreas Capellanus,” Traditio 24 [1968]: 121). This view is supported by Frappier, for whom book III is “moins une palinodie qu’une guerre déclarée après une contestation adroitement déguisée” (Jean Frappier, Amour courtois et Table Ronde [Geneva: Droz, 1973], 81; see 80–87), and by Gally. Monson takes seriously “Andreas’s commitment to moralizing love” throughout his text but suggests that the rejection of love in book III “constitutes the admission of . . . Andreas’s own failure to achieve the synthesis between the secular and Christian traditions that he had undertaken in the first two books” (Don A. Monson, Andreas Capellanus, Scholasticism, and the Courtly Tradition [Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2005], 340–43). Allen suggests that “Andreas’s narrator goes too far” in support of both courtly and Christian views “to be a trustworthy spokesman for either cause,” but he concludes that the “finite, fictive domain” of love is “contained within a moral parenthesis” that the careful reader is not allowed to forget (Allen, Art of Love, 59, 62). The idea of a “moral parenthesis” helps to explain why Andreas, usually suspicious of love for both pious and secular reasons, can occasionally wax lyrical about its (profane and performative) virtues: “What a remarkable thing is love, for it invests a man with such shining virtues”—the ones mentioned are comeliness, courtesy, humility, and complaisance—“and there is no-one whom it does not instruct to have these great and good habits in plenty” (“O, quam mira res est amor, qui tantis facit hominem fulgere virtutibus, tantisque docet quemlibet bonis moribus abundare!” DA 1.4.1). See Douglas Kelly, Internal Difference and Meanings in the Roman de la rose (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); Allen, “Ars amandi, ars legendi”; Brown, Contrary Things, 106–8. Cf. Brownlee’s reading of the fifteenthcentury Spanish Corbacho by Alfonso Martínez de Toledo, archpriest of Talavera, a text deeply influenced by De amore: first condemning the love of women and then recanting his didactic (and misogynistic) perspective, the archpriest reverses the structure of De amore while “employing Capellanus as a privileged [structural and hermeneutic] model to undermine his own ostensibly misogynistic discourse” (Marina Scordilis Brownlee, “Hermeneutics The Art of Clerkly Love: Drouart la Vache Translates Andreas Capellanus 145 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. of Reading in the Corbacho,” in Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers, ed. Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987], 221). Drouart’s frequent use of the seemingly banal adjective bonne to qualify the love he deems praiseworthy may be significant given Corbellari’s observation that in Old French love literature, “la bone amor”—as opposed to the elitist fine or the excessively sensual fole amor—“finit par s’assimiler à un type d’amour quasiment conjugal, d’une stabilité totalement opposée à l’inquiétude troubadouresque, et où la misogynie est, de surcroît, exprimée de plus en plus clairement, en particulier dans les poèmes liés à la mouvance cléricale” (Alain Corbellari, “Retour sur l’amour courtois,” Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes 17 [2009]: 379). Moi, “Desire in Language,” 29. Alfred Karnein, ed., De Amore deutsch: Der Tractatus des Andreas Capellanus in der Übersetzung Johann Hartliebs (Munich: Beck, 1970), 17–20; Karnein, “Réception,” 526. Drouart probably worked from a lost De amore manuscript in the family of the one used by Hartlieb (Bossuat, Drouart la Vache, 67–71). Karnein, De Amore deutsch, 258. My translation. Karnein, De Amore deutsch, 166–68. Karnein, “Réception,” 526. Compare the “cautionary” (“ad cautelam”) teaching of the ars amatoria recommended in a quaestio attributed to Peter the Chanter, described and published by John W. Baldwin, The Language of Sex: Five Voices from Northern France around 1200 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 24, 251. Sargent, “Medieval Commentary on Andreas Capellanus,” 538. Andersen-Wyman, Andreas Capellanus on Love?, 16. Compare Monson’s suggestion that Drouart “saw in [Andreas’s] treatise a secular summa on sexual love” (Monson, Andreas Capellanus, 142). On chaste heterosexual love as a concept or value occurring elsewhere in the medieval erotological tradition, see Jaeger, Ennobling Love, 117–22. The relationship between mixed and pure love is portrayed in the same way in the two other passages where these terms are mentioned by Andreas (DA 2.6.23–25, 2.6.38–39). Drouart’s faithful translations of these quaestiones (vv. 5311–54, 5531–60) shed no light on his own views. A considerably abbreviated version of the dialogue’s subsequent section, a casuistic appraisal of the relative desirability of the pleasures associated with the upper and lower parts of the body (DA 1.6.533–50), is likewise resituated by Drouart among the love-judgments he translates from Andreas’s book II (vv. 6271–414). The earlier passage occurs in a dialogue between a lowborn man and woman (vv. 1173–81; compare DA 1.6.60–61). See Monson, Andreas Capellanus, 308; Lionel J. Friedman, “Gradus Amoris,” Romance Philology 19, no. 2 (1965): 167–77; and Baldwin, Language of Sex, 164. Rose, vv. 4379–80; my translation. In a letter belonging to the Querelle de la Rose, Christine de Pizan reproves Jean de Meun’s defender Pierre Col for asserting “that all those who have been or who are truly in love find all their happiness in striving to go to bed with their ladies . . . for I believe that there are many men who have loved loyally and impeccably without ever going to bed with them . . . for their principal intention was that their morals be improved through this experience” (Christine de Pizan et al., Debate of the Romance of the Rose, ed. and trans. David F. Hult [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010], 172–73). On the medieval reception 146 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. Medievalia et Humanistica of Andreas’s definition of love, see Don A. Monson, “Andreas Capellanus and His Medieval Translators: The Definition of Love,” Mediaevalia 26, no. 2 (2005): 155–68, and Alfred Karnein, “Amor est passio—A Definition of Courtly Love?,” in Court and Poet: Selected Proceedings of the Third Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society (Liverpool 1980), ed. Glyn S. Burgess (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1981), 215–21. Drouart’s idea of double amour thus differs from the medieval distinction between “two Venuses”—legitimate, sacramental, reproductive sexuality as opposed to perverted, postlapsarian lust—analyzed by George D. Economou, “The Two Venuses and Courtly Love,” in In Pursuit of Perfection: Courtly Love in Medieval Literature, ed. Joan M. Ferrante and George D. Economou (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1975), 17–50. Mackey attempts to integrate the conflicting strands of Andreas’s text by arguing along similar lines that books I and II represent a love “spiritualized” (not necessarily in a Christian sense) “by its translation into language” and dedicated, despite appearances, to the deferral of sexual consummation in favor of interminable erotic language games; book III’s litany against “love” then confronts the rhetorical “ideal of love with the brutal actuality of sex” before both are trumped by the image of the heavenly kingdom where “the cravings of the flesh and the needs of the spirit are proleptically reconciled” (Mackey, 341–50). Andreas’s parallel passage (DA 3.4–5) refers euphemistically to Veneris opera and Veneris actus, which certainly signifies sex but perhaps less clearly excludes chaste erotic relations. Sargent, “Medieval Commentary on Andreas Capellanus,” 537. Jaeger, Ennobling Love, 14–15. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 121. Compare especially song 88 (“Amor habet superos”) of the Carmina Burana, in P. G. Walsh, ed. and trans., Love Lyrics from the Carmina Burana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 94–97. The text describes in provocative terms the poet’s chaste “play” with the young virgin Cecilia, loveplay that includes the first four stages of love (contemplari, loqui, tangere, osculari) but excludes the fifth, the sexual act itself (“quintum, quod est agere, / noli suspicari!”). Although the poet declares himself content to enjoy “love’s solaces” in paradoxically shared virginity (“amoris solamine / virgino cum virgine”) and appoints himself “custodian” of the “lily of [Cecilia’s] chastity,” he also flirts with the danger of his “crimeless sin” (“pecco,” he says, “sine crimine”) and hints that he may be postponing sexual gratification only until the girl is old enough for decency to allow the consummation anticipated by her suitor: “I let the grape swell until it becomes ripe . . .” (“Uvam sino crescere / donec sit matura . . .”). See vv. 3887, 3950, 5410, 6351, 6636, 6690, 7111, 7136, 7143. On delectatio as a physiological term for particularly carnal delight, see Baldwin, Language of Sex, 127–39. In his Dit de la Panthère, or Panthère d’amours, Nicole de Margival eulogizes Drouart, whom he identifies as the translator of the Gautier (a common name for De amore): “Et celui livre translata / cilz qui onques jor ne flata / ne blandist homme, que je sache: / ce fu mestre Drouars La Vache. / A chascun plaisoit son afaire, / tant estoit dous et debonaire / (je ne t’en ay dit que le voir); / si n’estoit mie a decevoir, / ne par promesse ne par don. The Art of Clerkly Love: Drouart la Vache Translates Andreas Capellanus 147 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. / Mors est, or ait s’ame pardon” (Nicole de Margival, Le Dit de la panthère, ed. Bernard Ribémont (Paris: Champion, 2000), vv. 1717–26). Since Drouart suppresses all references to Andreas and Gualterius/Gautier in his translation, Nicole obviously knew the Latin text, but he seems nevertheless to have made use of Drouart’s Livres d’Amours instead (Karnein, “Réception,” 528– 31). The stakes of Nicole’s turn to vernacular authorities are investigated by Eliza Zingesser, “The Vernacular Panther: Encyclopedism, Citation, and French Authority in Nicole de Margival’s Dit de la panthère,” Modern Philology 109, no. 3 (2012): 301–11. Cf. DA 1.1.1, 1.1.13, 1.6.376. On “immoderatus,” see Don A. Monson, “Immoderatus in Andreas Capellanus’ Definition of Love,” in Études de langue et de littérature médiévales offertes à Peter T. Ricketts à l’occasion de son 70ème anniversaire, ed. Dominique Billy and Ann Buckley (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 293–302. According to Matfre Ermengaud’s Breviari d’amor (ca. 1288–92), “es le carnels movemens / de mout gran merit a las gens / que·l sabo be tener reglat / e restrenher lur voluntat / e venser la temtacio / carnal ab sen et ab razo” (Peter T. Ricketts, ed. Le Breviari d’amor de Matfre Ermengaud. vol. 5 [Leiden: Brill, 1976], vv. 27323–28). See Michelle Bolduc, “A Theological Defense of Courtly Love: Matfre Ermengaud’s Breviari d’Amor,” Tenso 20, no. 2 (2005): 26–47. Michèle Gally, “Le Huitième Art: Les clercs du XIIIe siècle nouveaux maîtres du discours amoureux,” Poétique 75 (1988): 291. Bossuat, Drouart la Vache, 244–46. On the other hand, Drouart’s idea may be that a clerical audience would possess “the training and vocation necessary to avoid abusing the work’s more controversial teachings on love,” in which case his “disclaimer . . . appears to be aimed at countering any possible accusation that through his translation he runs the risk of corrupting the morals of the laity” presumably targeted by vernacular didactic literature (Monson, “Censorship and Self-Censorship?,” 249). “Clerks were above all men of education, who need not have identified strongly with the Church and its teachings. . . . [T]he very fact of having more than one allegiance would enable them to distance themselves ironically from any” (Sarah Kay, “Courts, Clerks, and Courtly Love,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. Roberta L. Krueger [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000], 87–94). Alastair J. Minnis, Magister Amoris: The Roman de la Rose and Vernacular Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 191; see 164–92. Also pervasive in clerkly culture is the inverse fear (with classical antecedents) of phallogocentric savoir’s intellectual “emasculation” by ensorcelling female wiles, as emblematized by Merlin entombed alive, Aristotle ridden by Phyllis, and—closer to home—Abelard castrated by Heloise’s angry uncle; whether the studious life is positioned as a threat to masculinity or as its threatened source, the clerk’s relationship to women and love is troubled by an underlying anxiety about becoming ridiculous. See Alain Corbellari, La Voix des clercs: Littérature et savoir universitaire autour des dits du XIIIe siècle (Geneva: Droz, 2005), 40–52, 59–60. See Corbellari, La Voix des clercs, 85–111, and R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Monson, Andreas Capellanus, 331, 342. Contrast the view of Baldwin, Language of Sex, 25. 148 Medievalia et Humanistica 62. On the conflicted medieval representation of clerical sexuality, see Jacques Voisenet, “Figure de la virginité ou image de la paillardise: La sexualité du clerc au Moyen Âge,” in Le Clerc au Moyen Âge, Senefiances 37 (Aix-enProvence: CUER MA, 1995), 571–78. 63. Comparable elevations of clerkly lovers occur in the earlier vernacular texts on love analyzed by Gally, “Le Huitième Art,” 279–95. See also Christopher Lucken, “Richard de Fournival, ou le clerc de l’amour,” and Marie-Geneviève Grossel, “‘Savoir aimer, savoir le dire,’ notes sur les Débats du clerc et du chevalier,” both in Le Clerc au Moyen Âge, 401–16 and 279–93. Might it be to aggrandize the figure of the amorous clerk at the expense of the knightly lover, and not only to avoid outdated literary motifs, that Drouart eliminates Andreas’s references to the “court” or “palace of Love” (amoris aula) and the story of the Breton knight that introduces the Rules of Love in De amore (Bossuat, Drouart la Vache, 44–47)? 64. Monson, Andreas Capellanus, 308–14; Moi, “Desire in Language,” 24; and Frappier, Amour courtois et Table Ronde, 83–84. Jaeger reads the same passage as an account of ennobling “chaste love” requiring “a self-mastery of which few are capable and creat[ing] a category of noble victors over the flesh” (Jaeger, Ennobling Love, 115), though not necessarily as Andreas’s final word on the subject. 65. Richard de Fournival, Le Bestiaire d’amour et la Response du Bestiaire, ed. and trans. Gabriel Bianciotto (Paris: Champion, 2009), 326–28; my translation. On the Response, see Jeanette M. A. Beer, Beasts of Love: Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amour and a Woman’s Response (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 111–48. 66. Louis Karl, ed., “L’Art d’Amors par Guiart,” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 44, no. 1 (1925): vv. 21–24 (full text 181–87); my translation. For accompanying commentary, see Louis Karl, “L’Art d’Amour de Guiart,” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 44, no. 1 (1925): 66–80. Here, Guiart seems to reimagine Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations as an Ovidian textbook of erotic rhetoric. 67. A few lines earlier, Drouart’s maistre claims that “pucele et fame mariee, / et nonnain a Dieu dediee” (vv. 4097–98) can all love purely without injury, directly translating Andreas’s assertion regarding “a previously undefiled maiden [or] a widow or married woman” (DA 1.6.472)—but not nuns, whom Andreas never mentions outside of the chapter specifically devoted to their case. 68. In his long speech—called the poem’s “diffinitive sentence”—to the army of Love, Genius praises “cil . . . qui de bien amer paine / sanz nulle pensee vilaine” and chastises “cil qui des greffes n’escrivent / par coi li mortel toz jors vivent, / es beles tables precieuses / —que nature . . . leur avoit pour ce prestees / que tuit i fussent escrivain” (Rose, vv. 19509, 19537–40, 19633–39). Although Genius unequivocally advocates sexual reproduction as a morally neutral or even virtuous human activity, he never abandons the rhetorical veil of redundantly proliferating metaphors (“Greffes, tables, martiaus, enclumes, / . . . et sos a pointes bien agues / . . . et jaschieres,” Rose, vv. 19549–53), just as the ultimate penetration of the vaginal Rose consummates Amant’s allegorical quest without moving beyond the poem’s allegorical system. From this perspective, the phallic “penmanship” that transparently encodes coitus seems to be definitively substituted for the literal act it signifies (rather than, as traditional allegorical interpretation would have it, vice versa)—at least for Jean de Meun, the inscribed poet-author and The Art of Clerkly Love: Drouart la Vache Translates Andreas Capellanus 149 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. magister amoris, who is after all not a lover but only a writer about love. On the Rose’s conclusions and (ir)resolution, see Kevin Brownlee, “Pygmalion, Mimesis, and the Multiple Endings of the Roman de la Rose,” Yale French Studies 95 (1999): 193–211, and Minnis, Magister Amoris, 164–208. Berthelot, “La ‘Vulgarisation’ de l’idéologie courtoise,” 61. Karnein, “Réception,” 527. Gally, “Quand l’art d’aimer était mis à l’index . . . ,” 438. Karnein, “Réception,” 326–38. Jaeger, Ennobling Love, 7. lucas.wood@durham.ac.uk