SOURCE: “The Literary Comedy of Andreas Capellanus,” in Modern Philology, Vol. 72, No. 3, February, 1975, pp.223-37.

In the following essay, Cherniss explains why De Amore can be interpreted as an ironic response to traditional literary treatments of love and women.

The earliest recorded information about Andreas Capellanus's De amore indicates that only a century after its composition it elicited widely divergent responses from its readers, and to this day, criticism has failed to produce a harmonious climate of opinion about the work.¹ In the thirteenth century, Bishop Stephan Tempier formally condemned it,² while Drouart la Vache was delighted and amused by it.³ In our century, it has been read as a serious attempt to codify the sociological phenomenon known as “courtly love,” as a philosophical treatise which may or may not be heretical, as a handbook of practical advice for amorous courtiers, as an ironic attack upon the sins...