37. Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, with introduction, translation, and notes by John Jay Parry
Mr Parry quotes from M. Bossuat the opinion that the De Arte Honeste Amandi is ‘one of those capital works which reflect the thought of a great epoch, which explain the secret of a civilization’. This, I submit, is to put its claims too high. Courtly Love itself does not suffice to explain the secret of medieval civilization and the treatise of Andreas does not, in all senses, ‘explain’ Courtly Love. The formal, and perhaps whimsical, systematization of his book makes it an extremely useful text for the modern scholar who wishes to illustrate the sentiment in its most distinctive and paradoxical form; but when we want to understand this sentiment from within, to think ourselves back into the attitude of the medieval lover, we may find better guidance from the poets, and not always from those poets who carry the feeling to its furthest extremity.
An English version of Andreas is, none the less, a very desirable thing, and especially for the audience Mr Parry has in view. The existence of this audience marks a stage worth noting in the history of culture. There is now, apparently, a public sufficiently advanced in medieval studies to wish to read Latin ‘source-books’ about Courtly Love, and at the same time so innocent of Latin that when Mr Parry (p. 4) mentions Ovid he finds it advisable to slip in tactfully the information that Ovid was a poet and ‘lived in Rome in the time of the Emperor Augustus’. What, after all, could be more medieval than this?
Mr Parry's Introduction brings readably together a good deal of information about the circumstances in which medieval love poetry arose and the suggestions offered by scholars as to its origin. He himself is a moderate upholder of the Arabian theory which he supports by liberal quotation from Arabic sources, especially from the Dove's Neck-Ring of Ibn Hazm. The evidential value of these quotations varies. I do not myself think that Ibn Hazm's references to sighs and tears, pallor, jealousy, secrecy, and loss of appetite are very conclusive. On the other hand the Arabic convention whereby ‘for decency's sake’ the mistress is given masculine pronouns and adjectives, and the fact that she can be addressed as ‘lord’ and ‘master’ (sayyidi and mawlaya) are a very striking parallel to the Provençal use of midons and senhor.
But the most difficult bit of evidence to interpret is the Platonic element in Ibn Hazm. He seems to know the Myth of the Symposium and represents lovers as divided parts of a single pre-natal soul striving to recover its lost unity; and he says that the soul, being herself beautiful, desires Beauty, and therefore ‘inclines to perfect images’. Now this idea, unless I am mistaken, is not found in the poetry of Courtly Love. On the other hand, when Plato's erotic mysticism became known to Western Europe a few centuries later, the courtly tradition immediately embraced it, as we see in Ficino, Castiglione, and Spenser. Courtly Love and Platonism are, then, things eminently congenial to each other. One might say indeed that they had long been waiting for each other: that Platonism which found in Athens no better soil than Greek pederasty had to wait for the Renaissance to find its true embodiment, and that Courtly Love, which in the Middle Ages had to make shift with the mock theology of Cupid, had to wait for the same period to find its true metaphysic. It therefore becomes a nice question whether the Platonic element in the Moslem poets supports the theory that the Troubadours are indebted to them, or whether it is, in fact, the strongest argument against that theory. For it might well be argued, ‘This thing, as later history proves, is so congenial to Courtly Love, that if the Provençals had encountered it they must have reproduced it. If they did not, the most natural explanation is that they knew nothing of Arabic literature’. I leave the question to those now working on a subject with which I have somewhat lost touch.
One point which Mr Parry does not make quite clear is the extent to which such sentiment as Ibn Hazm expresses was a novelty in Arabic literature. Ibn Hazm himself, however, is quoted as saying that the ways of ‘the Bedouins and the ancients’ in love were ‘different from ours’ (p. 9). If this means that the Moslem love poetry of his own age is as great an innovation in the Moslem tradition as that of the Troubadours is in the Christian, then the question of Spanish or Provençal precedence sinks into secondary importance compared with the massive originality – and mystery – of the sentiment that arose about this time at the Western end of the Mediterranean. When a phenomenon AB is new as a whole, we must be careful not to whittle this fact away or to imagine that we have ‘explained’ it by tracing the relations of A to B and of B to A.
In his Preface Mr Parry says that he has tried to keep his translation close to the original even at the cost of ‘somewhat awkward English’. ‘Awkward’ is much too harsh a word for the lucid version he has actually made. There is, indeed, a sort of unleavened taste about nearly all translations from Latin prose, and Mr Parry has not avoided it. (The verb seem is one of the traps. It is seldom a good rendering of videri on stylistic grounds, and not always on lexical grounds either.) He has certainly not succeeded in reproducing the ‘colloquial’ character which he attributes (p. vii) to the original: but I am not quite clear wherein the colloquialism of Andreas’ Latin consists.
This is a useful book and ought to be in College libraries.