SOURCE: “Sophisticated Teaching: The Double-Talk of Andreas Capellanus,” in Contrary Things: Exegesis, Dialectic, and the Poetics of Didacticism., Stanford University Press, 1998, pp.91–115.

In the following excerpt, Brown contends that the self-contradictory theme found in De Amore is deliberately used by Capellanus to facilitate the lessons he wishes to teach.

Safety in numbers!—Fight on, add up the sum of my precepts;           Pile up the numerous grains, mountains of counsel arise. But since the ways we react seem to differ as much as our features,           Do not trust me too far. 

—Ovid, Remedia amoris

Medieval writers learned much of what they knew about the literary doctrina of love from Ovid, a situation that the Roman poet's narrator does everything possible to encourage. The narrator of Ovid's Ars amatoria and Remedia amoris dubs himself quite literally the Master of his subject: “I am Cupid's preceptor” (Ego sum praeceptor Amoris), he...