Andreas Capellanus on Love?: Desire, Seduction, and Subversion in a Twelfth-Century Latin Text (Studies in Arthurian and Courtly Cultures)

ANDREAS CAPELLANUS ON LOVE?

STUDIES IN ARTHURIAN AND COURTLY CULTURES The dynamic field of Arthurian Studies is the subject for this book series, Studies in Arthurian and Courtly Cultures, which explores the great variety of literary and cultural expression inspired by the lore of King Arthur, the Round Table, and the Grail. In forms that range from medieval chronicles to popular films, from chivalric romances to contemporary comics, from magic realism to feminist fantasy—and from the sixth through the twenty-first centuries—few literary subjects provide such fertile ground for cultural elaboration. Including works in literary criticism, cultural studies, and history, Studies in Arthurian and Courtly Cultures highlights the most significant new Arthurian Studies.

Bonnie Wheeler, Southern Methodist University Series Editor Editorial Board: James Carley, York University Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, George Washington University Virginie Greene, Harvard University Siân Echard, University of British Columbia Sharon Kinoshita, University of California, Santa Cruz Alan Lupack, University of Rochester Andrew Lynch, University of Western Australia

ANDREAS CAPELLANUS ON LOVE? DESIRE, SEDUCTION, AND SUBVERSION IN A TWELFTH-CENTURY LATIN TEXT

Kathleen Andersen-Wyman

ANDREAS CAPELLANUS ON LOVE?

© Kathleen Andersen-Wyman, 2007. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–6770–1 ISBN-10: 1–4039–6770–9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Andersen-Wyman, Kathleen. Andreas Capellanus on love? : desire, seduction, and subversion in a twelfth-century Latin text / Kathleen Andersen-Wyman. p. cm.—(Studies in Arthurian & courtly cultures) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–6770–9 (alk. paper) 1. André, le chapelain. De amore libri tres. I. Title. PA8250.A236Z6 2007 809.933543—dc22

2007060045

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: July 2007 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

To Lawrence B. Andersen

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

ix

Preface

xi

Introduction The Difficulty of Reading Andreas’s Text Readership and Historical Context The Critics My Approach Outline Note on Translations and Manuscript Edition

1 4 7 18 25 29 33

I

35

Fish or Fowl (or, Is There a Genre in This Text?) Transgressing the Boundaries of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric Genre Trouble, Reading Instructions, and Other Formalities Deconstructing Gender and Culture: A Reading of the First Five Chapters

II Repetition in Andreas’s Text How Repetition in Andreas’s Text Subverts Social Hierarchies How Repetition in Andreas’s Text Subverts Religion III On Clerical Intertexts and the Subversion of Seduction Author/ity Positions of Mastery and the Rhetoric of Eros Seduction and Critical Distance On Confessio and the Charm of Free Choice

36 40 48 67 70 90 113 116 131 140 149

CONTENTS

VIII

IV Andreas and Walter Andreas’s Desire Uncovered Identities Readership Feminine Desire and the Transgendered Agents of Andreas’s Text

159 160 173 181

V

201 202 226

Andreas on Women On the Discourse of Misogyny Women’s Religion

188

Notes

237

Bibliography

253

Author Index

267

Subject Index

269

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

his book was made possible in part by an Idaho Humanities Council Fellowship from the NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities), which allowed the research and writing of the final chapter to be completed. I would also like to thank Christopher Jones for his careful reading and useful criticism, especially with respect to the Latin translations and transcriptions and for asking useful and challenging questions about theory. I would also like to thank Jennifer Attebery for the significant personal and professional support. Many thanks are due H. Marshall Leicester, whose creative approaches to literature have been formative, and Jane Chance, whose example, moral support, and practical suggestions are of inestimable value. Many thanks also go to Bonnie Wheeler, whose enthusiasm, intelligent comments, and humane interactions as an editor made the publication process pleasurable. This book would not have been possible at all without the hard work of Dana Andersen-Wyman, whose hours in the kitchen, the yard, the laundry room, and the nursery are worth more money than I care to tally; and thanks to Dana, too, for always finding a way to make hard things look easy. My gratitude also goes to Lawrence and Naomi Andersen for their continual encouragement and example.

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PREFACE

his book offers a completely new reading of the book by Andreas Capellanus (c. 1185), commonly called De amore, once upon a time referred to as the code book of courtly love. The reading shows how Andreas’s text can be seen as a highly sophisticated contentious subversion of the accepted discourses of desire, social hierarchy, and ecclesiastical authority in twelfth-century Europe. Its historical beginning and endpoint is the condemnation and burning of Andreas’s book by Bishop Tempier in 1277. The reading is intended to shed light upon our assumptions about alterity in the Middle Ages, and to help historians of philosophy and literary critics further understand the Condemnation of 1277. It is also hoped that literary critics and theoreticians will be further convinced that there exist excellent examples of literary sophistication from the twelfth century. Feminist scholars will find significant historical and theoretical material to further studies in women’s literacy, misogynist discourse and queer theory. General historians of the Middle Ages and of twelfth century Europe will find plenty of food for thought, both in term of details and general assumptions. This book is also very much for teachers of the Middle Ages. One of its goals is to rescue us from the continued misuse of Andreas’s text. It simply does not work as a handbook for loving or for reading about medieval courtly love, and using it as such confuses our already often befuddled but intellectually honest students. This book is, therefore, also for students. I do not think there is anything in it that is beyond the reach of an interested undergraduate. It will certainly be of use to graduate students. Finally, the book is also for curious readers who are not in any way professional academics. They may find the last two chapters especially interesting, but the book should be generally accessible. I have had so many readers belonging to this category express an interest in the book that I cannot help but address them here and hope they too will enjoy it.

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INTRODUCTION

he impetus for this book began many years ago when I was an undergraduate trying to understand why medieval devotional texts and mystical writings used the language of courtly love and sexual passion to describe religious ecstasies. I was naturally led to study courtly literature and instructed to pay particular attention to the so-called De amore, by Andreas Capellanus, since it was then considered to be something akin to a “codebook” of courtly love. I found Andreas’s text to be singularly confusing. Not only was it contradictory, but its supposed relationship to love did not seem to be even plausibly descriptive, let alone prescriptive, as most scholars then suggested, and as the book on one level pretends to be. It seemed instead as though Andreas used love talk as a way into other topics altogether, which were then still vague to me, and perhaps even as a smokescreen to camouflage sensitive material. Compelled by the mystery, I began in graduate school to read Andreas’s text in earnest, in order to understand it, rather than something else by it. Andreas’s text did not become less difficult and my readings over the years did not square with what critics generally concluded about it, no matter their point of view. I became convinced that the problem lay in their reading of the text in terms of its surface discourse, which is plausibly enough related to “love.” Meanwhile, I had begun to see in Andreas’s text material and sentiment of more import and breadth than rules for, jokes about, or even discussion of heterosexual behavior, the then broad categories of continuing critical response. In contrast, I saw the text’s use of stories to indicate how institutions are created and legitimized. I also began to see that its suggestions about the psychological and social ramifications of the conscription of human desire were complex and possibly subversive. I began to wonder whether this was the real reason it was condemned by Bishop Tempier in 1277. The critical suggestions that it was condemned because it conveyed a set of rules for courtly love, or even because it was

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ANDREAS CAPELLANUS ON LOVE?

lascivious, seemed weak: there were plenty of other such texts available to Tempier—and plenty more vile—that were not condemned. The same seemed true of suggestions that the text was condemned for its references to magic (which are, on the surface, so minor that only a reading like mine could make them significant) or for its nominalism (a philosophical stance with which it plays but does not offer as “truth”). I began to understand that if I was right, if Andreas’s text subverts the mechanisms that create human institutions, and if it teaches the reader how to free him or herself from their conscriptive forces, then Tempier and his minions had every reason to fear it. Its condemnation began to make sense. It could appear as though I am making a mighty claim for my understanding of Andreas’s text. Why have so few, including me and perhaps one of Tempier’s staff, seen what Andreas’s text is up to? In fact, based on the work of Alfred Karnein, though to very different conclusions than his, I argue briefly in this introduction, under “Readership and Historical Context,” that there is evidence to suggest that a few of the text’s early collectors may well have recognized its rhetorical and social power; however, it is not within the scope of this book to provide a complete analysis of the history of manuscript transmission. As for readers who came after the notorious essentialism of the nineteenth century, when Andreas’s text was dubbed the “code book of courtly love” by Gaston Paris, they/we are hardly to be blamed for reading within the confines (or blinders, if you will) of our discipline. Fortunately that has changed. Thanks to increasingly sophisticated literary theory and criticism (historically comparable, in my opinion, only to that of the high Middle Ages) we are now able to see complexities, and therefore clarities, that were formerly impossible to perceive by virtue of our various horizons of expectation. Given the opacity of Andreas’s text and the nineteenth-century context in which it was appropriated for academic use, it is not surprising that many scholars, educators, and enthusiasts have misused and misinterpreted it during the past one hundred years. It is a difficult text, even for a careful, sophisticated, literate reader regardless of era. Its difficulties will be enumerated below under “The Difficulty of Reading Andreas’s Text” and will be addressed throughout the remainder of this book. Bishop Tempier’s comments in 1277 indicate that he himself did not understand Andreas’s text, although at least one member of the condemnatory committee surely did. It is also unlikely that Drouart la Vache (cleric c. 1290), upon whom so many present-day scholars rely for evidence of early reception, and who enjoyed Andreas’s text primarily for the laughs it provides, understood it. I think it is a mistake, and for a long time in studies of the history of reception a common one, to assume that early or contemporary readings of a work show us how a work was meant to be understood. Any reader can

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misunderstand a work. The more difficult, the more likely it is to be misunderstood. Drouart’s is the first copy we have of Andreas’s text after its condemnation, but his “translation” of it into French is also a paraphrase that leaves out key passages and whole sections of the book. Clearly Drouart’s translation should not be used as a key to understanding Andreas’s text. Andreas’s text is, as Drouart felt, excellent entertainment, which is one of the few things upon which many of its readers agree. I argue, unlike others, however, that this contributes to its cleverness rather than to its baseness. Beyond this, and more importantly, I hope to show that Andreas’s text is a sophisticated tool for profound social critique, useful in any age. It exposes the manipulation and self-interest inherent in institutions that exist to socialize desire, but it goes further: it undermines the very foundations and genesis of human institutions. Since the text shows a particular interest in how desire is conscripted (by the empowered to keep them so) it makes sense that it occupies itself to some degree with heterosexual relations, which are, of necessity, one of the primary institutions responsible for the conscription of desire in any culture. But Andreas’s text is not so much interested in heterosexual relations as in what the rules are in any social situation, who makes them, how they are made, and whether and how they might be avoided. Andreas explores the same mechanisms with respect to class and gender that he does with respect to heterosexual relations. Although critical perspectives have become increasingly informed and sophisticated, Andreas’s text continues to be read and used as ancillary to other medieval literary works, particularly to courtly material. This approach not only limits what Andreas’s text can be about, but it also limits how his text can be applied to the understanding of other texts. Further discussion of current critical perspectives on Andreas’s text appears below in the sections entitled “The Critics” and “My Approach” and should make my points about the uses of Andreas’s text even clearer. One of the main purposes of this book is to show that once Andreas’s text is understood on its own terms, rather than as ancillary, it is likely to yield even more accurate and fruitful scholarship with regard to its literary context than it has yet done. Further, my reading demonstrates the necessity of reading a text well and carefully before assuming it is useful to explain its literary or historical context. Besides showing that Andreas’s text undermines sacred and secular institutions (the authorities that conscript desire, erotic or otherwise) and the mechanisms that create and maintain them, this book demonstrates how the supposedly misogynistic Book III of De amore is not. Another novel point of view this book provides comes from the possibility that Andreas’s text can be read as an attempted seduction of Walter, the young man to whom the supposed instruction on love is addressed. The historical probabilities will be explored.

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The remainder of this introduction is arranged so that readers with little exposure to Andreas studies might gain enough background to understand the rest of the book and so that specialists will be clear about my critical assumptions and contentions. The entire book is arranged so that readers can find which aspects of the material and argument interest them most and focus on those. There is, therefore, a little repetition for readers who need the entire text, and I beg their indulgence. The Difficulty of Reading Andreas’s Text Broadly speaking, Andreas’s text is difficult for reasons that go beyond its obvious contradictions. This section briefly touches upon its odd structure, multiple genres, intertextuality, voicing, and irony—some of the reasons readers assume it is something it is not. To try to avoid even more confusion than Andreas’s text presents on its own, I refer throughout to my own chapters in Roman numerals (e.g., Chapter I) to distinguish them from Andreas’s chapters (e.g., Chapter 1). I use Roman numerals for Andreas’s Books (I, II, and III) when they are mentioned separately, because it is standard practice to do so; but to cite a particular line, I use all Arabic numbers. For example, 1.6.47 would refer to line 47 of Chapter 6 in Book I. Book III, however, has no chapters, so citations will appear as 3.87. Structurally, Andreas’s text is odd to say the least.1 It begins with a preface (Praefatio) that is in fact a short letter to “Walter.” The Praefatio comprises four Latin sentences, the equivalent of three short paragraphs in English. I cite the quantities that follow in terms of English paragraphs, since this will be most easily imaginable to most readers. Liber primus (Book I) follows the preface, beginning with an unusually short and unhelpful accessus or explanation of what is to come. Chapters 1–5 of Book I follow, each the rough equivalent of five to thirteen short- to medium-length paragraphs in English. As their introduction by an accessus would lead readers to expect, these chapters briefly discuss, in more or less treatise form, various definitions related to love. Chapter 6, however, balloons unexpectedly into eight dialogues, a structure and genre for which the reader is entirely unprepared, and each dialogue is longer than any previous chapter. The dialogues are between men and women of varying social status, and they supposedly function as examples of how a man should approach a woman if he wants to “win her love” (which none ever manages to do). The dialogues increase in length, with the eighth dialogue being about twice as long as the next longest. They end up comprising more than half of the entire text, all three books included, with Dialogue 8 being especially disproportionate. After the eighth dialogue, Chapters 7–12, which are ostensibly about what to avoid doing, complete Book I in the same style and lengths as the first five chapters. Book II, called “How to Preserve Love,” contains six

INTRODUCTION

5

chapters of the treatise variety as in Book I, a fifty-one-paragraph Chapter 7 consisting of “various judgments on love,” and a fifty-paragraph Chapter 8, which is a chivalric narrative expounding “the rules for love.” Book III, “The Condemnation of Love,” completes Andreas’s text and is made up of the equivalent of 121 paragraphs, most of which appear to condemn women as a way of condemning love. Andreas’s text is obviously far from structurally balanced. Unlike critics who see Andreas as simply distracted or sloppy, it seems to me that Andreas uses the most space to develop what is most important to him. In the eighth dialogue, a cleric debates with a woman of the highest nobility about exactly what kind of love is the “source of life and all good”—sexual or religious, physical or theoretical. The lady and the notorious “lower half” take the day. What this suggests will be taken up at greater length further on. Let it suffice for now that De amore’s odd structure is more a help than a hindrance to its understanding if we assume there is purpose to its oddness rather than incompetence. Let us not be confused by critical expectations. What Andreas’s text does “wrong” with structure, it also does with genre. Andreas’s text reflects multiple genres: missive, treatise, dialogue, narrative, rulebook, and catalog of misogynist sayings. The different genres in Andreas’s text not only lend surprise and confusion but also begin to hint at the complexity of the text’s intertextuality. The treatise parts of the text, partly because of their structure and mostly because of their subject matter, have led critics to see works like eleventh-century Arabic, The Neckring of the Dove and especially Ovid’s Ars amatoria and Remedia Amoris as being possible prototypes of Andreas’s text.2 The dialogues are reminiscent of troubadour tensons and of Aelred of Rievaulx’s De amicitia spirituali, a set of dialogues on spiritual friendship between men founded upon a work of Cicero on male friendship, from a father to a son. The rules in Andreas’s text echo Abelard’s Sic et non, because they conflict, and rule “books” or advice literature, such as Aurigena’s Facetus, because of (apparent) intent.3 The narratives in Andreas’s text conflate Christian parables with chivalric romances, as do the Lais of Marie de France and the romances of Chrétien de Troyes; although for Andreas the conflation is more overt and exists to more subversive ends. Book III engages works like those of Tertullian, Jerome, and Walter Map against women and marriage. Finally, because Andreas’s text begins with a letter and continues with intimate vocatives to the reader/Walter throughout, the thoughtful reader (for so Andreas calls us and asks us to be) must consider the nature and circumstances of letter writing in the late twelfth century. The problem of intertextuality goes far beyond considerations of genre, however, to considerations of discourses engaged. Andreas’s text engages twelfth-century discourses of desire generally, including mysticism and misogyny, as well as the more basic ones of sexuality, wealth, and power.

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Although I argue that Andreas’s text is not about courtly love in the sense it generally has been taken to be, it is, like courtly love, clearly also about the relations between rhetoric and desire. So are mystical texts like those of Bernard of Clairvaux and Richard of St. Victor, who wrote only slightly earlier in the twelfth century than did Andreas and whose texts Andreas’s engages. It may be that Andreas learned about the uses of fiction from Richard, who explores them at length in his Benjamin Minor. Unlike the mystical texts, however, Andreas’s is not interested in sublimating the reader’s desire but in exposing the mechanisms that would sublimate it. Andreas’s subversive polyphony uses the mystical discourse of desire as a kind of counterpoint. This will be taken up at greater length in Chapter III. Besides the registers necessarily perceptible from its intertextuality, Andreas’s book creates further registers of meaning (confusion to some readers) by employing a complex system of voicing. First, there is the voice that I call “Andreas the Master.” This is the authorial persona who naively (but self-consciously so) claims to have all the answers, even though they do not work and do contradict each other. Andreas the Master also ventriloquates the obnoxious lines he claims to be appropriate for the men of the dialogues, whose voices echo the Master’s. There are also the voices of the women being courted in the dialogues, and of the ladies at court giving their advice. Their lines are as ventriloquated as those of the men, and they not only refute the Master’s teachings but also make his advice useless. Further, since Andreas’s text continually plays with its author’s femininity as a cleric, gives advice to a feminine readership, and blurs gender distinctions on the social level (as it pretends to be defining them), it is clear that the text is occupied with what could be called the position of the feminine.4 I call this textual voice the “feminine” voice, or the voice of disenfranchised desire. Finally, there is what might be called “the voice from the fissures.” It erupts from the contrapuntal junctures and disjunctures between the voices of Andreas the Master and the feminine voice. It is a “gap” because it rarely expresses itself in words, but it is also not a gap because it forms a locus of meaning. The complicated voicing in Andreas’s text also contributes to the text’s efforts to problematize authority, both textual and social, in three ways. First, it presents an untrustworthy if not scurrilous author (Andreas is not at all afraid to appear contradictory, foolish or immoral—in fact, he seems not only to intend to do so but also to get some sort of perverse satisfaction from doing so). Second, through its many voices, the text presents secular and ecclesiastical authorities on rhetoric, social structure and human relations in Sic et non fashion to show that “rules” and definitions are man-made and contradict one another. Third, and ironically, since the voices accomplish a text that is unusually full of gaps and contradictions, seeing the text as reliable/authoritative in any conventional sense is out of the question. No wonder the casual reader becomes confused.

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Irony, often a result of the voicing, is another complexity with which the reader of Andreas’s text has to contend. Many of the “ironic” loci could be accurately described as passages that force the reader to reread, rethink, and reinterpret because of the contradictions they present.5 For example, there is the problem of giving the reader useless instructions. The Master begins the dialogues by asserting that this is how men of varying social stations must talk if they expect to win love; however, the women in the dialogues, even those of lower station, always reject the men. The Master creates another problem generally considered to be ironic in Book III when he appears to tell the reader not to love after having gone to so much trouble to supposedly teach him how. That particular irony is a surface irony that disappears after close reading but complicates in order to obtain that close reading. So-called ironic problems arise at a different layer of the text as well. For instance, the narratives used by different speakers rarely work the way their narrators intend them to work. A narrative illustrating how reluctant ladies will be punished in hell, for example, ends up reflecting the cruelty and arbitrariness of such doctrinal manipulations by those who hold power (specifically men, the moneyed, and the church) rather than showing how well deserved such punishment is. Finally, and perhaps the most extreme ironic problem of Andreas’s text, one that has been the biggest obstacle for his readers, lies with Book III, which maligns women with the standard misogynistic quips and gripes after having portrayed women throughout the rest of the text as being completely unlike their representations in traditional misogynist discourse. This will be addressed in Chapter V. These “ironies,” while confusing at first, function as reading instructions and quizzes. So far we have only begun to touch upon the tortuous complexity of Andreas’s text. How does one approach such a densely woven—some would claim tangled—web? The next two sections suggest how early readers, other medievalists, and I have gone about it. Readership and Historical Context No original title for the book by Andreas Capellanus emerges from its manuscripts, although several later manuscripts agree to call it De amore. The lack of a title is not unusual or necessarily meaningful for a medieval work; but in the case of Andreas’s text, the lack may be one more indication of the difficulty readers have always had with deciding what the book is actually about. P.G. Walsh gives the options that do appear, probably all added by later copyists: C (thirteenth century) has “Incipit liber amoris et curtesie”; D (fourteenth century) “Incipit de arte honeste amandi et de reprobatione inhonesti amoris,” the words honeste and inhonesti having been added above the line by

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second hand; B (fifteenth century) “De arte amandi, de reprobatione amoris et eius remedio.” But the commonest formula in the manuscripts is “De amore,” with the variations “Tractatus de amore,” “Liber de amore,” “Galteri de amore,” “Liber amoris.”6

These titles indicate a number of interpretive possibilities. Taking the possibilities in the order that they appear above, Andreas’s book may have been thought by a thirteenth-century copyist to be about love and courtly behavior; by fourteenth-century copyist, about decent and indecent love, telling also how nasty indecent love is. A fifteenth-century copyist may have thought it was about the art of loving generally and about the condemnation of love and its remedy. The titles also suggest that the book has been seen as a treatise, a book, and a letter. The titles and suggested genres reflect some of the work’s thematic and structural difficulties: Is this book about love or society? What kind of love does it discuss? Is the love it discusses valuable? If so, to whom? Does the book recommend love? For whom is this book? Finally, Tempier’s prologue to the 219 condemned propositions calls Andreas’s text “ ‘De amore’ sive ‘De deo amoris.’ ” 7 This suggests that in 1277 “On the God of Love” was as likely a name for Andreas’s text as “On Love.” “On the God of Love” is not inept, given that Andreas personifies love and often conflates his personification with the God of Christianity. Most critics refer to Andreas’s text as De amore. Although perhaps adequate, I do not use this title for two reasons: first, it is not Andreas’s; second, it is now steeped in associations with Parisian8 notions of courtly love, and consequently tends to define Andreas’s text in those terms, which themselves have been called into question for a number of reasons.9 Since Andreas’s text comprises a prologue and three “books,” calling it Andreas’s “book” would be confusing, although he calls it such. He also calls it a letter and a treatise, but since it only partially conforms to twelfth-century (or any century) standards for letter writing or for treatises, I do not call it by either of those names. Because the text’s genre is elusive and its content covert, it seems possible that the author left the text without a title intentionally. I therefore simply call it “Andreas’s text.” My appellation has its own problems, however. Mainly, they relate to calling the text Andreas’s, as though his identity were a solid fact upon which to anchor the wayward text. Andreas is in fact an unknown quantity, as textually multiple as he is historically elusive. His historical identity has been established mainly by internal textual evidence, accompanied by a little existing external evidence, but both combined only add up to hints. Taking the internal evidence first, the author refers to himself as “Andreas” as he takes an oath at 2.6.18, and one of his fictional speakers refers to the teaching of “the lover Andreas, Chaplain to the Royal Court” at 1.6.385. Although this is spoken in

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the context of a discussion about the “Court of Love,” and could be a joke or a nom de plume,10 the most thorough scholars have taken this internal evidence as reference to Philip II’s royal court in Paris.11 As for further external evidence, the name of Andreas is found as a signature, twice identifying him as a priest, to nine charters of Champagne. One of these, dated 1182–1186, was granted by the Countess Marie, who appears as a living authority on love in Andreas’s text.12 These dates are relevant if we believe the internal evidence for the text’s dates, which consists of, for example, the date May 1, 1174, on the conspicuously fictional letter from Countess Marie de Champagne at the end of the seventh dialogue (1.6.400). This kind of evidence, combined with the fact that Andreas cites authorities that were favorites in the late twelfth century, leaves critics generally in agreement that the text was written around 1185.13 If Andreas was in fact a chaplain to the royal court at Paris, signing charters would have been one of his duties, besides saying mass for a fee, being in charge of the King’s records, and writing letters of diplomacy.14 Whether or not the signatures on the charters belong to the author of Andreas’s text, I am persuaded that the text’s author was a cleric. First, when writing in what is claimed to be his own voice at the beginning of 1.6 and 2.1–2, he indicates that he has intimate knowledge of clerical clothing and clerical needs—he speaks as an insider. Second, in the chapter on loving nuns (1.8), he claims the experience of nearly loving a nun: what man but a cleric would have been likely to have the “repeated and prolonged access” to a nun that he describes? Third, and most convincing, the issues with which the author seems to be most engaged are usually found to be embedded in several major religious or ecclesiastical discourses: that of mysticism, that of canon law, and that of misogyny. Finally, I find the text’s claim that the author is a clerk to be believable because of his erudite Latin. Because of this, the most commonly held critical view is that the text’s intended audience was other clerics (see, e.g., P.G. Walsh’s Introduction). The recent work of some renowned scholars, such as Catherine Brown, Don Monson, and Albrecht Classen, whom I discuss below, depend upon this view. There is, however, a problem with it: the text tends to offer advice to women more often than to men, or even than to Walter himself, for whom the text is supposedly written. We are therefore forced either to consider the possibility of twelfth-century women being learned enough to be an intended audience for Andreas’s text or to postulate a readership of clerics who see themselves to be in a position somehow feminine, a position I will explain in due course.15 Either hypothesis (or both) would fit with the understanding of Andreas’s text that I propose. To postulate that Andreas had a female readership would not be new. Some critics have thought that perhaps the work was written for the

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entertainment or wooing of noblewomen.16 Even P.G. Walsh, the most recent editor and translator of the text into English, who argues persuasively for a clerical audience, entertains the possibility of Andreas being in love with the Countess Marie, or some other noble woman.17 Andreas’s text may well appeal (in both senses) to women, for one reason or another. But the clerical audience has won the day, for now, primarily on the basis of what modern scholarship thinks it knows about Latin literacy at the supposed date of the text.18 Since facts about the historical context of the text are still as sparse as they are, and since our knowledge of late twelfth-century women’s literacy is growing but still scanty, I do not believe this issue can yet be resolved.19 Andreas himself makes the women in his text seem extraordinarily well read and astute, which could be seen as evidence for such a readership. I lean toward this interpretation. But Andreas also identifies clerics as being effeminate.20 Within the fiction of Andreas’s text, “feminine” is a position anyone can occupy— the position of disenfranchised human goods, the position of the one to be seduced. The dialogues construct such a position, and other places in the text allude to it. Throughout his text Andreas claims to occupy this position to some degree himself. I will return to these and other issues of identity in Chapter IV. Despite all of this, I generally refer to the text as “Andreas’s.” Further historical unknowns include Walter. The work is supposedly for him, and we know even less about a potentially historical Walter than about Andreas. Necessarily briefly, therefore, there is this historical possibility: after showing that Andreas was at least as likely to have been a chaplain at Paris as anything else, Pascale Bourgain makes a good argument for Walter being the son of a chamberlain (also Walter) at Paris. She writes, Et le traité est dédié à un Gautier qui pourrait bien être Gautier de Nemours le Jeune, né en 1163, fils et successeur de Gautier le Chambellan, très en faveur auprès de Philippe Auguste: cet homme “jeune” de 1180 à 1186 environ, débutant à la cour vers 1190, conviendrait d’autant mieux comme destinataire du traité écrit vers cette date qu’il fut gardien du Trésor des chartes où, dans l’inventaire de 1350, figure assez bizarrement, seul texte littéraire parmi les documents d’archives, un exemplaire du De amore.21 And the treatise is dedicated to a Walter who could well have been Walter the Young of Nemours, born in 1163, son and successor of Walter the Chamberlain, very much in favor amongst those near to Philip Augustus. This man, “young” around 1180–86, made his debut at court around 1190 and works especially well as the recipient of the treatise written around this date, since he was made guardian of the Treasury of Charters, where, during the inventory of 1350, strangely enough, the only literary text found amongst the documents of the archive was a copy of De amore.

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Clearly, Andreas’s Walter may have been the historical person, twenty-two years old at the writing of Andreas’s text, and possibly as beloved of Andreas as his text claims. Unfortunately, Bourgain does not tell us any more than that about the manuscript found in the Treasury of Charters; neither does she discuss its possible history. She only suggests that Walter might be responsible for the version found in 1350 in the archive. It is possible that someone—perhaps a later patron, family member or Walter’s successor—fearing to lose the text to Tempier’s flames, hid an illicit copy in the unlikely place. What became of this manuscript is not clear. Also unfortunate, for our knowledge of Walter, Bourgain is less interested in Andreas’s relation to him than in Andreas’s relation to the noble ladies cited as authorities in his text, so she follows the connections with Walter no further. Brackett makes a strong argument for Bourgain’s suggestion about a historical connection between Andreas and Walter, based on historical evidence and the work of John Baldwin.22 Brackett shows that this particular Walter was very well educated and close to the King. Even Brackett, however, calls the evidence of Walter’s connection to Andreas “circumstantial.”23 Although more research needs to be done, the connection with this historical Walter is plausible. Given the evidence we have about Walter, there is at least as good a chance that Walter was a historical character (a young man close to the king) as a convenient fiction, and I tend to see him as the primary recipient of Andreas’s text. That said, it is equally clear that whoever Walter was for Andreas, Andreas’s text invokes a multiple readership: it addresses women and men of all classes, and especially the “assiduous” reader. I do not see this fact to negate Walter as a primary reader but to convey Andreas’s knowledge or belief that his text would, sooner or later, be read by many people. The evidence of manuscript transmission also remains sketchy. Although scholars have agreed for some time that Andreas’s text was probably written in the late twelfth century, the earliest extant manuscripts date from the last quarter of the thirteenth, that is, from about the time the manuscript was burned.24 The earliest witness (c. 1235) is fifty years after the calculated writing of the text, and the earliest complete copy about a hundred years later (c. 1285). Most of the extant manuscripts are fifteenth century and German. Further, the evidence of more distant witnesses needs to be reevaluated since, as Karnein has pointed out, what was formerly believed to be the wide influence of the text is evidence that was compiled under the assumption that Andreas’s book was the code book of courtly love.25 We can therefore make only a few inferences from manuscript transmission about the text’s use or understanding by its contemporaries. Why there is no better contemporary reference to the work remains a mystery, perhaps to be solved only in Bishop Tempier’s fires.

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Since Bishop Ètienne Tempier condemned Andreas’s text in Paris in 1277, someone clearly found it more dangerous than courtly love literature could be in itself. What exactly were the “vanitates et insanias falsas and quosdam manifestos et execrabiles errores” for which is was condemned, however, is yet another topic of critical and historical disagreement. The condemnation of 1277 was Bishop Étienne Tempier’s over zealous response to the pope’s inquiry as to how long-standing contentions between members of the faculty at Paris might be resolved. The issues at hand revolved around the influx of Aristotelian rationalism, which Tempier deeply mistrusted. Over the course of only three weeks, with the help of sixteen anonymous scholars, Tempier compiled a repetitive and contradictory list of 219 execrable teachings. Anyone who taught or listened to them would be excommunicated. The undertaking was sloppy: no more than twenty of the propositions can actually be attributed to Tempier’s enemies, who were primarily members of the faculty of arts at Paris. The doctrine of “double truth,” which some modern scholars have used to explain the condemnation of Andreas’s text, was a notion of Tempier’s, based on Tempier’s misunderstanding of the scholastic notion that something could be true in religion but not in Aristotle and vice versa. Tempier also condemned any teachings treating of occult sciences or prejudicial to faith and good morals. But he in fact condemned only two books: a book on geomancy and Andreas’s text.26 Hissette argues for the text’s scurrilous connection in the bishop’s mind with Romance of the Rose, which had been the wrong kind of popular reading for young scholars for years. Hissette even suggests that since Andreas’s text was particularly condemned, it was probably also particularly popular with students, perhaps even more so than the Romance. Hissette argues, however, that the Romance was the more obvious of the two to exhibit unwanted ideas. He therefore concludes that Andreas’s text was condemned for its conflation of “pure” love with “mixed” and therefore for the kind of flippancy and immorality for which the Goliards had been reproached for some time.27 This is plausible enough, but it does not explain why Andreas’s text was condemned rather than texts that were “worse” for the same reasons that Andreas’s was “bad.” Betsy Bowden claims, without reference, that Andreas’s text contains verbatim some of the 219 propositions. Arguing that Drouart la Vache left out statements that Tempier had condemned in Andreas’s original text, she writes, “The two omitted allegorical passages list precepts of love, many identical to the 219 condemned propositions.”28 This is simply not the case: neither passage uses any of the propositions. Most of the writers on the condemnation, who are historians of philosophy, also claim there are no propositions in Andreas’s text; they therefore agree that it was condemned for its sexual immorality. Surely it was. But this does not account for why other and more immoral texts were not condemned. My reading shows that

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there were plenty of reasons to condemn Andreas’s text. Some of the reasons follow, according to the number of the condemned proposition. Proposition 8 says that our intellect by its own nature can attain to knowledge of the Prime Cause.29 Andreas never says this, but the dialogue between the cleric and the woman of the higher nobility (Dialogue 8) assumes it. Proposition 9 asserts that we can know God’s divine essence in this life. Andreas, again in Dialogue 8, through the lady, argues that amor (Eros) is the source of life and all good, and this can be known. He does not equate the Prime Cause with God’s divine essence, at least in the requisite way. Any knowledge of the God’s divine essence as understood by the orthodox of his day is conspicuously missing from his text. Proposition 16 says that the First Cause is the Cause of all remote causes. Again, Andreas never says this, but many of his arguments assume it—especially those that attribute goodness to sex and sex to a good god. His First Cause is not the Unmoved Mover of Aristotle, but the very moved and moving God of Love, Eros, the “fount of life and all good.” Hissette categorizes these propositions as philosophical errors on the knowablity of God. The following propositions have to do with philosophical errors about the human will. Propositions 158–161 are on the appetites and are condemned because they limit free will. Andreas would agree with Tempier that the will is radically free but would give more credence to the appetites since, he would argue, they are good. Proposition 163, that one cannot abstain from that which reason dictates, is a common argument put forward by the men of the dialogues, Dialogue 5 in particular, in order to seduce the women. Perhaps one of Tempier’s men saw this to indicate Andreas’s position rather than a position that is shown by the women to be false. Desire is privileged over reason every time, and their desire is not to have sex. Proposition 168 says that a man acting from passion acts by constraint. Andreas’s letter to Walter assumes this from the very beginning, and I discuss it in Chapter IV. But Andreas agrees with the proposition by virtue of his experience, not for philosophical reasons. Philosophically, he is in accord with Tempier on free will. Clearly, it would be easy to miss the subtleties of Andreas’s point of view and simply credit him with heresy. There are only four philosophical errors related to ethics that might be close to Andreas’s point of view. Proposition 172 says that happiness is had in this life and not in another. Andreas never says this, but after reading his text one is left feeling that if any is ever to be had it had better be had now. Similarly, Proposition 173 says that God cannot be the immediate cause of happiness in man. The Christian God is clearly the source of great unhappiness for Andreas, as I will show at greater length. Only if one sees God as the Fount of Life (the maker of sex as the source of all good, an idea offered by the woman of Dialogue 8) can God be an immediate cause of

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happiness. Perhaps the depth of Andreas’s heresy is becoming clear. Proposition 174 says that man after death gives up all good. Andreas never says this either, but the approach of death is always portrayed as horrible in his text. Proposition 178 suggests that divinatory practices work. Andreas mockingly condemns them as women’s religion in Book III. But since I do not read Book III as misogynous, it is possible that Andreas supports “women’s religion”—practical “magic.” Whether his inquisitors saw it my way is not clear, but his book was condemned with a book on geomancy, the only other book condemned. Andreas could therefore be condemned for 12 of the 179 philosophical errors. Now begin the theological errors, and the proportion here is only a little higher: 12 of 139. There are three propositions about Christian law that Andreas can be said to have held. Proposition 180 states that Christian law impedes the addition of new thoughts. Nothing could be clearer by the end of Andreas’s book than that Andreas not only believes this but also abhors the fact. Number 181 says that there are fables and falsehoods in Christian religion just as there are in others. Andreas shows the absurdity of many Christian doctrines and that they are made up like stories. Proposition 183 says that theological teachings are founded in fables. Again, Andreas’s use of stories, particularly of hell stories, makes it clear that he would agree with 183. As Hissette points out, these propositions are the expression of a sort of naturalism and rationalism—both are rampant in Andreas’s text, and Tempier and his minions feared both. Propositions 185–199 are errors of dogma. Curiously, I can find no parallels for them in Andreas’s text. But Andreas could be condemned for half of the dozen errors about the Christian virtues (200–212). Proposition 200 says that virtues are not possible unless they are acquired or innate. Andreas might even go as far as to say virtue is impossible. This might be closer to the church’s point of view, but his text certainly gives no evidence of any credence in “infused” virtue, virtue given by God supernaturally. His text is singularly devoid of any belief in grace, or rescue from sin or desire, and it complains loudly about this. Proposition 205 says that simple fornication is not a sin. Andreas never says that fornication is not a sin, although his smarter characters imply it. Maimonides said that fornication was not a sin against natural law but a rational prohibition. Aquinas said it was contrary to the good of man therefore proscribed by divine law. Tempier wouldn’t have drawn such careful distinctions. But Andreas argues that fornication can be very useful—more useful than marriage for fulfilling God’s injunction to multiply— and that desire (to fornicate or not to fornicate) ought to be the “rule” for enjoying this natural “good.” Hissette reads Proposition 206 to mean that sins against nature, with respect to abuses in coitus, are contrary to the nature of the

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species but not to the nature of the individual. Andreas undermines the notion of “nature” in this sense completely and argues for beasts as paradigms of true nature, the nature that is the Fount of Life. This includes homosexual behavior but not rape. These were certainly not the accepted prescriptions of the time. It should not be a surprise at this point to see that Andreas supports Proposition 207, that delight in the acts of Venus do not impede the acts or use of the intellect. In fact, his characters find them wonderful grist for the philosophical mill. Andreas is also, obviously, condemnable for 208, that continence is not essentially a virtue. He does not see it as any kind of virtue but as a way of maintaining one’s social acceptability in a society that is simply wrong about what constitutes goodness. Most of the execrable propositions about Christian virtue with which Andreas agrees relate to sex. Proposition 212 is the only remaining one related to virtue that Andreas supports, and it is about poverty. It says that lack of good fortune is not a good catalyst to morality. Andreas would strongly agree. In Andreas’s text, poverty and other forms of ill luck are opportunities for despair, infidelity between people, and lack of faith in God. The last two propositions that fit Andreas at all relate to theology of the end times, and these are only partial. Proposition 214 says that God is not able to give eternal life and to transmute corruptible things. Andreas does not say this, but neither does he affirm its opposite. Again, the Christian God seems only to offer a terrifying and desolate future of judgment and punishment. Proposition 217 claims that to say that God gives felicity to one and not to all is without reason and a figment. This clearly contradicts the doctrines of judgment and hell used so consistently by the church at that time. Andreas undermines hell, exposing it as a fable used to manipulate people. Although Andreas does not suggest heaven is for everyone, or that it even exists, his vision for earthly life certainly includes the good and desire of everyone, regardless of rank, gender, or any other socially inscribed difference. Andreas is condemnable for roughly 24 of the 219 propositions. That is more than can be pinned on any of the faculty of theology or arts at whom the condemnations were aimed. It is no wonder, therefore, that Andreas’s book was singled out. But there is more, as I shall argue through the remainder of this book. Certainly, a book that undermined the foundations of the controlling institutions and set readers free to think for themselves would not only be condemnable as a threat, but the nature of the threat would itself have to be kept quiet. Some have suggested that the two books Tempier condemned were simply chosen as examples. Although this is possible, it is the sort of simplistic explanation that obscures history more often than elucidating it. Luca Bianchi provides a bit more information in noting that the treatise on geomancy was of Arabic origin.30 So were the texts that Christian scholars

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then had of Aristotle. So was the Neckring of the Dove, upon which Andreas’s text could well be based, at least as much as it is on Ovid’s Ars amatoria. Tempier was as suspicious of Averroes and his Islamic culture as he was of Aristotle and his paganism. It could be that the combination of the perceived immorality of Andreas’s text, its possible popularity with students, its questionable doctrines, and its cultural heritage were enough to condemn it. But I think there is more, even beyond its unusual ability to challenge the standard expectations for reading and authority. I think at least one of Tempier’s readers understood the potential threat the text presented to the socialization of desire and, therefore, to existing power structures.31 Even a brief look at the history of later collectors suggests there were more than lascivious or even philosophical reasons for acquiring Andreas’s text.32 And, as Bruno Roy has pointed out, because medieval book production was a laborious and expensive undertaking, “La présence de De amore dans une bibliothèque médiévale correspond donc à un choix fortement motivé.”33 (The presence of the De amore in a medieval library corresponds therefore to a strongly motivated choice.) It therefore seems to me that a book thus collected, and with the companions I am about to name, is unlikely to be copied primarily because it was considered to be cupidinous. The two earliest owners of the work of whom we know are Albertano of Brescia, a lawyer (c. 1238), and Geremia da Montagnone, a judge at Padua (c. 1300). Both wrote on theological issues, and both had troubled relations with the church.34 Karnein cites evidence that supports these two owners as reading Andreas’s work as cupidinous.35 Nevertheless, the evidence suggests to me at least as strongly that a lawyer and a judge would have had vested interests in books on the arts of persuasion and interpretation, as well as on critiques of church teachings about morality—especially those that might relate to social justice. They would, it also seems to me, be most likely among the erudite to be interested in how one might undermine any of the institutions then in power. To suggest that these men of law saw Andreas’s text as being primarily a “dirty book” seems to me to oversimplify to the same degree as to suggest that the text is about courtly love. Roy’s similar oversimplification—that Andreas’s text served as a reference for pastoral work because of its primarily ecclesiastical provenance—is undermined by some of his own evidence. For instance, Roy shows that Drouart la Vache found the work funny and paraphrased much of it into French for the enjoyment of his friends. Drouart called the work cupidinous, and his paraphrase is so. This hardly sounds like pastoral care. Further, although Drouart mollified the condemnation of women in the final book by suggesting that the sentiments therein were meant to apply only to bad women; even mitigated misogyny sounds unlike any of the medieval works on pastoral care that I have read.36 Because Drouart la Vache and others have

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taken it to be funny and cupidinous, others yet have seen it primarily as a series of dirty jokes, as Betsy Bowden has suggested.37 The mistake, in my view, that both Roy and Bowden make is to see the work as being univocally about sex. Reading Andreas’s text as being as serious as it is funny, acknowledging its theoretical and sociopolitical interests, as well as its sexual ones is not only a textual and contextual way to read it but also corresponds to its history. The reading that I propose makes more sense of the history of the work’s manuscript transmission, or of what we know of it at this point, than other readings have yet done. Most copies of Andreas’s text are bound in collections of moral, judicial, or scholarly works, as well as with some religious ones, and they are, not surprisingly, almost always found in ecclesiastical libraries. Of the 174 texts copied with and/or included in volumes with the 35 copies or versions of Andreas’s text, 89 are categorized as religious or moral, 57 are “scholarly,” and 28 are about women or love.38 Of these 28, most are about women (how they ought to behave, etc.). There are a few love poems, though no troubadour poems, as would be likely if collectors saw Andreas’s text as “courtly.” Nor are any courtly romances copied or collected with Andreas’s text.39 Although the kind of manuscripts with which a manuscript is copied and collected is not a guarantee of how the collectors read and therefore categorized a text, collection companions are nevertheless suggestive. From the evidence Bruno Roy supplies, Andreas’s text was primarily categorized with religious, moral, and scholarly works, a few with works on women, fewer with works on love. The collection evidence suggests that Andreas’s text was not necessarily read by collectors before the sixteenth century as being solely, or even mainly, about heterosexual love. Reading Andreas’s text this way seems to be a nineteenth- and twentiethcentury interpretation. Returning to the fact that lawyers collected Andreas’s text40 I would like to quote Roy in further support of my position: “Les hommes de loi médiévaux font le lien entre les problemes ‘vulgaires,’ vernaculaires, et la loi latine. Ils sont au corpus iuris ce que les theologiens sont a la sacra pagina.”41 (Medieval men at law create the connection between popular, vernacular problems and Latin law. They are to the legal corpus what theologians are to the sacred page.) If lawyers were the mediators of language and meaning in the social and secular world, and priests were the mediators of language and meaning in the ecclesiastic and sacred world, and if Andreas’s text occupies itself with those worlds and with the powers and permutations of language in and on them, it is no wonder that lawyers and churchmen collected the text. Andreas’s text is, in fact, useful toward interpreting any “page,” including any aspect of life as it might be perceived by a given reading subject.

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Whoever recommended the condemnation of Andreas’s book to Bishop Tempier probably understood it. The Critics The aim of this book is to offer a new understanding of Andreas’s text, not a careful refutation, explanation, or expansion of all earlier ones. But a quick view of the critical landscape will help to contextualize the point of view for which I argue. Despite the obvious difficulties inherent in reading Andreas’s text, despite its varied readership, and although courtly love has been challenged by scholars as more likely an invention of nineteenth-century French medievalists than a sociological phenomenon of the Middle Ages,42 Andreas’s text is still commonly used in the classroom as a companion or reference work for the study of courtly love literature. Besides being misleading, this approach to Andreas’s text has sociological ramifications in the present. For instance, psychologists have used Andreas’s text to test modern expectations of romantic love.43 Because Andreas’s text was assumed to describe love relations of the past it was also assumed to prescribe those of the future, meaning not only those contemporary to the study but also those of a more distant future. This means that at least some psychological research on love relations has been based on a huge misunderstanding. Among medievalists, however, Andreas’s text has begun to appear too complex to categorize as such a code book and perhaps too complex for readers to reach much of a consensus. Some of the critical uses of Andreas’s text follow. Paolo Cherchi’s Andreas and the Ambiguity of Courtly Love begins with Cherchi’s experience, similar to mine, gleaned when he taught a course on courtly love: Among the required readings was a selection of troubadour poems and Andreas Capellenus’s De Amore, which are traditionally considered complementary because they shed light on each other. Andreas’s treatise was supposed to help interpret the poems we were reading but it didn’t happen quite that way; in fact, the Latin treatise proved to be a cause of great confusion. Using the poems to interpret the treatise was no less confusing. Both texts present a high degree of ambiguity on their own, and adding one ambiguity to another is not the best way to shed light on a problem.

Cherchi’s response to this problem is first to wonder whether courtly love (which his book goes on to define) and Andreas’s text were in fact connected in any way. He finally decides that, because of shared material,

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they are related and that “Andreas was not a codifier of courtly love but an adverse interpreter who, in order to carry out his polemic, chose to mimic courtly lovers in the hope of unmasking their supposed deceitfulness.”44 (Would not the bishop, had his minions read it this way, have approved rather than condemned the text?) Although Cherchi agrees with me that Andreas’s text is in no way a code book of courtly love, he continues to define and understand Andreas’s work only in relation to a more important or primary set of texts about love—for his work, the troubadour lyrics. In order to understand Andreas’s text in an ancillary capacity, not only does Cherchi seem to overlook too much textual data, but he also ends up with no real understanding of the text itself. In fact, he is left with one of the older standard interpretations: that Andreas, the chaplain, believed love was wicked and wrote in order to undermine it. R. Howard Bloch and C. Stephen Jaeger have built theories about medieval culture based on similar commonly held assumptions about Andreas’s text. Like Cherchi, Bloch shares the critical assumption that Andreas’s text exists/existed to enlighten readers about how to behave in heterosexual games of love. Bloch uses Andreas’s text to support his thesis about the relations between romantic love and misogyny—that the former is an outgrowth of the latter.45 This is a perfectly supportable thesis but not supportable, in my opinion, by citing Andreas’s text as being about love and as being misogynous. Jaeger sees Andreas’s text as “a jumble of sentiments explaining, defining, arguing about the refined love of the nobles.”46 In other words, he sees the text as being about courtly love, despite the problems with the concept. And although Jaeger sees Andreas not only as befuddled but also as “a faint-hearted voyager” who “turns tail” and heads for the “safety” of antifeminism (158), he nevertheless uses Andreas’s text to support his view that male protestations of love to males (the “real” courtly love) was more a reflection of homosocial patriotic adulation than evidence of homoerotic feelings or behavior. The continuing misunderstanding of and misappropriation of Andreas’s text clearly has far-reaching ramifications. Let us now turn to standard interpretations of the text itself. In 1986, Toril Moi conveniently summarized the main critical stances from Gaston Paris to the time of Moi’s writing.47 The categories that follow are Moi’s, but I have added more recent critics, as well as my own critical conclusions, to her very convenient categories. The first stance is that Andreas defines, supports, and defends courtly love. Books I and II seriously promote courtly love, and Book III must be seen as a conventional piece of retraction only meant to save the author, a priest, from getting into trouble with the Church. Readers of this opinion include well-known medievalists and writers on love such as C.S. Lewis (The Allegory of Love) and Denis de

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Rougemont (Love in the Western World). This type of reading makes Andreas, in effect, the authority on courtly love. This kind of reading has been the most prevalent until relatively recently. To hold such a point of view, however, one must gloss over the ruptures and incongruities of which Andreas’s text is full and to which it self-consciously points.48 A second group of critics, which includes A.J. Denomy, has not avoided or tried to explain away the difficulties of this text, yet they agree with Lewis and de Rougemont that Andreas’s purpose is essentially serious and that the work is about courtly love. Denomy suggests that Andreas is a proponent of double truth, that all three books are serious, that Andreas holds both the Church and the adherents of courtly love to be right.49 I agree that all three books are serious, but I do not agree that they are about courtly love. The main problem with Denomy’s view, besides that of courtly love, is that there were in fact no medieval proponents of double truth. Double truth was a misunderstanding of Tempier’s: once again, he oversimplified the philosophical notion of his enemies that something could be true in Aristotelian philosophy and false in theology, accusing them of the nonexistent position of double truth.50 Another category of readers and critics suggests that Andreas was necessarily mad or stupid, or simply an ungifted writer. Charles Muscatine calls Andreas “either an ironist or a nasty fool.”51 He seems to choose the latter, since making any sense of an ironic interpretation is very difficult. Don Monson, who has argued strongly for the irony of Andreas’s text, believes Andreas changed his project midstream, failing, as a result, to systematize sayings on love.52 Although Monson has changed his views on irony and has credited Andreas with a more sophisticated (scholastic) approach, and although in his most recent book Monson gives Andreas high praise for his definitions, Monson still concludes that the text is a less than well-organized and less than successful treatment of love.53 Even P.G. Walsh says, “The reader of the De amore is left with the strong impression not of original and deep reflexions by an author of passionate intellectual integrity, but rather of a derivative attempt to codify notions of love which have impinged on him in reading and in discussion.”54 This is a singularly disappointing conclusion to come to, especially after Walsh’s high praise for Andreas’s Latin— disappointing as much for Walsh as for his reader. I prefer to credit an author with at least as much intelligence as his or her reader. Approaching a work from this presupposition is not only prudent and courteous, but it makes for more interesting reading and writing than does any assumption that the author was in some way defective. A group of critics whose conclusions I find to be no more satisfying than those of the above group include medievalists such as D.W. Robertson who see at least part of Andreas’s work as ironic. For Robertson, Books I and II,

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which seem to praise courtly love, are ironic, and Book III, which berates women, is serious, containing Andreas’s “real opinion.”55 Robertson supposes Book III to be evidence that Andreas was a “good” conservative supporter of church doctrines, who “defends the Church and condemns courtly love.” This stance seems likely to be founded on suppositions that Andreas, being a medieval cleric, must have been a “good” Christian and that the diatribes against women that the third book echoes were unanimously taken as appropriate by the Church, at least for certain purposes. I do not believe either of these can be taken as historical givens. Again, Tempier’s group certainly did not see the text this way. The final alternative, which Moi presents as being the opinion of the group into which she fits, is to see all three books as ironic, perhaps even outrageously funny. Michael D. Cherniss’s point of view could be placed among these, but he sees the irony and humor as referencing literary models, not love (of any kind) itself. As early as 1975 Cherniss argued that Andreas’s text cannot be about courtly love, itself a questionable construct; instead, Cherniss argued that De amore is a “comic mock treatise” on amor, based on and parodying literary models current in Andreas’s time. It is certain that Andreas’s text participates in that level of literary awareness. But like the proponents of complete seriousness, Cherniss accounts for inconsistencies in the text by attributing them to sloppiness. He writes, for instance, “Amor is all but forgotten in the eruption of antifeminist invective.”56 And, as is my contention with many excellent readers of Andreas’s text, this sort of explanation does not account for the seriousness with which the text was condemned. I agree that the textual evidence is more conducive to Cherniss’s conclusion than to many others, but, for me, this is only the sort of conclusion one builds from, not at which one finishes. Unlike most proponents of complete irony, such as E.T. Donaldson, I find serious undertows in the work that prevent me from believing that Andreas simply wanted to be outrageous, a position (Donaldson’s) that would make Andreas a sort of boorish practical joker.57 There is no doubt outrage in the work, but it is the very traces of human outrage and frustration in the text that cause me to see Andreas’s work as both ironic and deadly serious. All of these readings share the assumption that Andreas’s text is primarily about courtly love or sex. Even though his theory of courtly love has been officially abandoned by most medievalists, Gaston Paris still influences many readers more recent than those just named, who even see their own work as standing against his.58 Bruno Roy, for example, claims that his ascription of most of the manuscripts of Andreas’s work to ecclesiastical provenance frees it from the realms of courtly love by freeing it from a courtly readership. Yet he infers from these facts, not that the work might not be about love in a

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conventional sense at all but that the work served as a manual of instruction on secular behavior between the sexes for clerics interested in pastoral care.59 Even Betsy Bowden’s most novel and pleasantly scandalous position on the work pushes past the dirty jokes and double meanings apparent in the Latin (based on Old French) to strain every semiotic connection possible in the attempt to reduce the whole work to a linguistic exercise employing dirty jokes as its vehicle—apparently out of the need to keep the work primarily a work on sex.60 Peter Allen’s admirable scholarship, on the other hand, strays, in my opinion, too far from the relations and issues between men, women, classes, and institutions presented by some of the main currents of Andreas’s text. Although Allen argues, in my opinion rightly, that Andreas’s work is about reading and writing, he does not entertain any possibility that reading and writing relate to bodies. The works Allen discusses (he compares Andreas’s text with Ovid’s Ars amatoria and the Romance of the Rose) become, almost univocally, texts on literary criticism that might have been written by a twentieth-century professor of literature.61 Allen’s readings detach the work from any relation to human emotions or affairs and relegate its relevance to the reified upper air only to be found between the ears of intellectually elite readers of the late twentieth century. Perhaps some of the same criticisms could be leveled at my reading. But my hope, and perhaps one of my basic presuppositions, is that intellectually elite readers of any era are not necessarily so detached from their human core/coeur/corps that they are unable to connect the intellectual with the emotional and the physical. I see sociopolitical, religious, and sensual implications in Andreas’s text that would connect its theoretical purport to a historical situation. Even the best and most recent critics miss this, however, mostly in the attempt to continue to see Andreas’s text as about love. Catherine Brown, in her truly brilliant Contrary Things, writes, reductively to my mind and a priori, “One of the most provocative of the medieval reworkings of Ovid has long been Andreas Capellanus’s De amore.”62 But she does not compare Andreas to Ovid; she compares him with Abelard, and she argues that the De amore resembles the Sic et non not only in its assemblage of divergent teachings but also in its endlessly provocative structure, which juxtaposes one teaching (that erotic love is the source of all good) with its opposite (erotic love is the source of all evil). Both the Sic et non and the De amore aim not only to teach us but also to teach us to read—starting with their own contrary, contradictory selves. However, where the Sic et non’s perceptive frame teaches us to resolve quaestiones by mediating their yes and their no, the De amore’s reading instructions seem to leave little room for such mediation, demanding instead that readers embrace one proposition and reject the other. (93–94)

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I agree that Andreas’s text not only teaches us to read, but intends to do so. But love is not the only issue, nor is erotic love the only love at stake. Nor do I agree with Brown’s conclusions. She asks, “How is one to make sense of a text that poses the quaestio ‘the love of women is the source of all happiness, et contra, the source of all damnation,’ and in response delivers a double verdict at once for and against each opposing side?” It is the goal of this book to answer that question, and it does not do so as Brown does. She concludes, The contemplative practices of lectio divina set up conditions wherein the response to contradictory teaching is a hermeneutic not so much either/or as both-and. Andreas’s narrator, however, is no exegete. His precepts allow no both-and. . . . The preceptor teaches either/or. Andreas makes him teach that way. . . . Where Abelard’s oppositional structure is designed to provoke an assidua interrogatio with a guaranteed epistemological and spiritual payoff, Andreas’s assiduous reading process, like the reasoning of John of Salisbury’s logicians, is sealed with the text’s own processes and bounds. . . . We are instructed with Walter to wait for the Bridegroom, but until that apocalyptic Last Moment, we keep reading, commanded that we must choose either earthly or heavenly love, but unable, the more assiduously we read, to distinguish one from the other. (113–115)

Andreas the Master may be no exegete, but Andreas the author certainly is. Brown even says, “Andreas makes him [the master] teach,” showing the difference between the two that she proceeds to try to erase. I shall go on to argue that although Andreas’s text does push the reader to choose, the choices do not lie between heavenly and earthly love but whether or not to continue to believe institutional fables and whether or not to live as though we believe them. Whether or not one believes the Church, one lives in the body, therefore one must accept that Eros is in fact both the source of happiness and of damnation, whether in this life or in the next. Brown’s focus on the choice between loves not only prevents her from seeing d’hors de texte but it also prevents her from seeing Andreas’s consistent subversion of institutions. Albrecht Classen is another recent critic who approaches Andreas’s text through its engagement with dialectics, but he, fortunately, does not privilege its status as “love literature.” In his article “Epistemology at the Courts,” Classen writes, The powerful dialectics at operation in both works force us . . . to refrain from most of the traditional but highly naïve perspectives and to gain a new foundation by seeing The Art of Courtly Love and El libro de buen amor in light

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of medieval epistemology as literary instruments in exploring man’s basic abilities to comprehend his own world by assuming a surprisingly deconstructionist, though nevertheless still thoroughly medieval point of view. Instead of addressing courtly love . . . Andreas and Ruiz utilize the framework of courtly love and the specific courtly language in order to embark on a much more ambitious enterprise, that is, the analysis of human language, communication, and the multiple functions of discourse. (341–342)

I agree. Classen goes on to outline, much as I have done, why seeing the text as being about courtly love has failed. I also agree that Andreas’s “ambitious enterprise” includes “the analysis of language, communication, and the functions of discourse.” But, once again, I do not think Andreas’s enterprise stops there. Although in this article Classen does thus limit Andreas’s purpose, elsewhere Classen explores the possibility that Andreas’s text calls readers to investigate the purpose and significance of communication for human society.63 This is a wonderful study and does not conflict with my own, nor does it go as far. In the above-quoted article, Classen acknowledges the necessity of accepting the “multiplicity of voices” in Andreas’s text if we are to understand it at all, but he relies too heavily on Peter Allen and reads Book III as misogynous.64 Classen concludes, Ultimately the discussion of love does not pursue erotic, physical ends; instead it creates an intellectual framework for the exploration of human nature and our existential conditions. . . . Both Andreas and Ruiz have presented us with literary challenges of the highest order, but the challenges are sweetened, on the surface, with a discourse on love providing the textual springboard for the true philosophical, that is, epistemological, investigations of human existence. (361–362)

I agree that much of Andreas’s purpose is epistemological. Although Classen does not fall into the pit of intellectual detachment from the world, for which I have already criticized Peter Allen, Classen does not discuss the social (and therefore physical) ramifications of Andreas’s text in the terms I do. Nor do I find Andreas’s discussion of “love” to “sweeten” a philosophical enterprise. The torment and ugliness associated with Andreas’s discussion of love is part of that very enterprise, one that we would call as political as philosophical. Again, all of this will be born out over the course of this book. Finally I return to Don Monson’s very recent and interesting booklength study of the relationship of Andreas’s text to scholasticism.65 Although I have profound respect for Monson’s work, I cannot agree with his interpretive approach. He claims to be without an interpretive agenda from the outset, but he assumes that Andreas’s text is about love, and he

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foregrounds his discussion of it with a mild debunking of interpretive enterprise, reducing all attempts to understand the work to circular reasoning (2). He also continues to see Book III as a rejection of love (340) and believes that the chaplain “attempts his customary reconciliation between traditions” (342). Little could be further my point of view or from those of Brown and Classen. Further, Monson concludes, Underlying the entire operation is a fundamental pessimism about the prospects for reciprocity in love relationships, a typically clerical attitude that remains constant throughout the treatise. This pessimism undermines the very elements of troubadour idealism that served as the point of departure for Andreas’s abortive synthesis. Consequently, the final outcome was to a certain extent foreseeable from the beginning (343). . . . The elaborate “disputed question” thus established is not susceptible of a solution at the level of human reasoning, however, hence to the Chaplain’s recourse to the sacred rhetoric of Christian exhortation to provide a kind of resolution at the end. (346)

Andreas once again appears to be somewhat dough-headed in the end, which is not, for me, a very satisfying way to see the text. Further, although Monson sees Andreas’s text rightly enough as a “discourse on discourses” (346), he does not acknowledge its threat to institutions. In fact, from Monson’s conclusions about the text, it is hard to see why Tempier would have bothered to condemn it. Monson cites Andreas’s “moral commitment” (342) but does not see that moral commitment as being in any way antiestablishment. I do. However out of favor or truly questionable, either for philological or theoretical reasons, a “reading” of Andreas’s work may be at this point in the history of literary criticism and theory, the text compels readers to engage in that very human enterprise: the making of meaning. In accord with Richard of St. Victor, I find “exegesis” to be not only one of the great pleasures of the text, but of life as well. Andreas’s text may not be about love, but it is about desire. My Approach Like any reader, how I read is influenced by what I have read. Perhaps I have been even more influenced by medieval books than by modern ones. Arguably, a medieval way of reading has been lost, but lectio divina, however altered, still exists as a practice, and medieval texts describe it. It could be called “monastic reading,” and it is not the essentialist type of reading that some twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars tend to ascribe to medieval reading generally. It is careful, ponderous, and ruminating, or repetitive. It necessarily includes multiple interpretive levels that are each based upon the assumption that everything is or can be a sign in a system of signification and

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that everything can be simultaneously itself and a presentation or representation of something else. Medieval reading, because of its monastic provenance, generally also incorporated four levels of interpretation: tropological/ metaphorical, literal/historical, anagogical/spiritual, and moral. The practice of lectio divina ensured that texts would be read and mentally “chewed upon” at least four times, according to the four levels, to complete one thorough reading. Besides being aware of and having employed this practice, I also see it as informing Andreas’s instructions to his reader: read carefully and reread. Although Andreas may not have been expecting the specifically religious practice of lectio divina, he was doubtless expecting a kind of attention to reading and interpretation rarely given to texts since the Middle Ages, until, perhaps, very recently. From among medieval texts, my approach to reading has been most influenced by Andreas’s text and by the works of the Victorines, an order of monastics both highly intellectual and deeply mystic, whose main house and most famous writers were centered in Paris, the height of whose influence peaked around the time of Andreas’s supposed writing. I have been particularly influenced by the writings of Richard of St. Victor (d. 1173), known for his creative and thorough exegesis. Richard’s minutely detailed and perfectly connected allegories evince not only exegetical and inventive genius but also a striking sensitivity to the workings of human psychology. Andreas’s text also displays a keen awareness of psychology, but that awareness is made known to the reader through the author’s constructions of his own inclinations and his self-presentations exposed through sundry confessional modes. The works of both Andreas and Richard are foremost among medieval texts that convince me that twelfth-century literary sophistication may well have been beyond anything critics have yet been able to imagine. Finally, the texts of both authors not only instruct the reader to read carefully but also force him or her to do so. Andreas’s text teaches suspicion of socializing practices and the narratives that promote them, whereas Richard’s supports the use of personalized fictions to socialize desire even as it exposes those fictions for what they are. I also base my approach to Andreas’s text upon the ideas of relevant critical theorists of the twentieth century. Among them, my way of reading has been most influenced by Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of “registers,” analogous to symphonic music, voiced in a given discourse. This seems to be a more complete rendition, or at least another version, of the kind of approach to texts begun by medieval theories about the four levels of interpretation. There are also some curiously exciting resonances to be heard with respect to Andreas’s text when one considers not only the particularly complicated voicing of it but also that its method of resolution, like that of contrapuntal polyphony, is based upon multifold contradiction. Many of the discourses in Andreas’s text are

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contrapuntal in that they are opposing and often dissonant, just as voices singing counterpoint sing opposed melodies at the same time and inevitably render dissonance as well as harmony. Whether this is pain or pleasure is left to the discerning subjectivity of the reader/listener. Not surprisingly, Andreas’s text is contemporaneous with the development of contrapuntal polyphony in music. Another of Bakhtin’s theories that I have found particularly useful for reading Andreas’s text, is that of carnival, because Andreas’s text burlesques the powers that be. Its version of carnival, however, seems to me to be potentially more useful toward actually subverting existing systems than as the ritualistic social “steam valve” most instances of carnival seem to be.66 Andreas’s text does not provide the reader a way of blowing off steam but of building it up. Andreas’s text seems to suggest that no hierarchy would be best; meanwhile, like carnival, the world upside down would be an improvement, particularly in the elevation of the lower half of woman. Feminist theory, combined with Foucault on institutions, is also useful with Andreas’s text, because those ideas allow us to become aware of feminine positions as they are constructed by Andreas’s text: not only does it show that the institutions of his time render women marginal but his text performs and reflects the depth of that marginalization. Like the works of Luce Irigaray, for instance, Andreas’s text not only challenges the phallocentrism of institutions of power (psychoanalysis for Irigaray, for Andreas the patriarchal ecclesiastic and social order), but it also splits the subjectivity of the author and reader. Both Irigaray and Andreas present the author’s subjectivity and the reader’s identity as multiple. The works of Teresa de Lauretis and Judith Butler take divided subjects as a premise, but both predicate whatever is identifiable— especially about feminine subjectivity—on the aspects of culture from which the divided subject arises.67 Andreas’s text does the same and does so for masculine subjectivity and class identity as well. Feminine subjectivity currently constitutes a particularly embroiled set of issues and definitions, and since the problems of identification, categorization, and definition are themselves at the root of current disagreement among feminist thinkers, I am not likely to find language that will be completely adequate to the task or satisfactory to all readers. Ironically, my dilemma would not be a problem for any assiduous reader of Andreas’s text, which works from the premise that identification, categorization, and definition are ultimately nothing more than provisional fictions. It is not surprising to me, therefore, that he makes no attempt to overtly name what the real levels of his discourse are about. What I call “feminine desire” in his text is an excellent example. It is my term, not his, although his text is clearly about it. What I mean by feminine desire is both the desire of historical (or real) women and the desire of the disenfranchised (or those in a “feminine” position).

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Since Andreas’s text undermines the processes of categorization and definition at every turn, I am tempted at times to see his text as a medieval Derridian performance. To me there is no doubt that part of what Andreas learned from careful work with texts, language, and scholasticism is a deconstructive as well as a suspicious approach to everything readable. This is perhaps the most important tool that the author seems to want to furnish his reader, and like Derrida (perhaps necessarily) he teaches it by performing it. Like the feminists and unlike Derrida, however, Andreas’s text is more interested in deconstructing culture and the existing systems that perpetuate it than in deconstructing texts per se, although deconstructing texts is clearly, for him, a good place to begin. He begins with his own. Like Derridian texts, Andreas’s text seems in places to aim at nothing less than complete alienation of the reader, but in other places, especially on the subtextual level, it seems to court the reader, to desire acceptance or complicity. Like Roland Barthes, Andreas points to and luxuriates in the gaps inherent in language at all levels, rather than trying to avoid or connect them. He uses them like Derridian pockets or “invagination” to multiply meanings. The author’s pleasure in his own text seems often, also, to be fraught with Barthian anxiety about cruising the reader: he “cruises” with the anxiety of someone already in love, not with the panache of someone looking for love. Indeed Andreas claims he is quite desperately in love and reiterates his devotion to Walter. Since among the multiple types of reader Andreas addresses, only Walter is named, Walter can begin to look a great deal like Barthes’s beloved, absent, reading “other.” Because Andreas portrays himself as multiple, elusive, and ultimately unidentifiable, his textual self-portrait could qualify as postmodern; it is too insistent an entity to be premodern as the term has been defined (one of those historical givens that I challenge). Although both the “other” and the “self ” are constructed as equally unknowable in any essentialist way in Andreas’s text, there is a cruising of the reader by the author. The only identifiable “other” must therefore be simply bodily—d’hors de texte (pace Derrida)—the physical reader/Walter—known or not. Ironically, if the attempted seduction succeeds, it does so only because of the freedom from coercion that the text makes possible. Although much useful and impressive work has been done in the areas of subjectivity and Otherness by medievalists, there still seems generally to be an underlying presupposition that the Middle Ages is somehow essentially “other” than “modernity” (or postmodernity, for that matter) simply because it is past. Surely there is some accuracy in this. Yet does the length of time elapsed necessarily increase the Otherness of a text, even given all the historical and physical gaps that often accompany the passage of time? Along with Lee Patterson, it seems to me that we must assume some very basic similarities

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(“sympathies”) if we are to make anything at all of a text written by another human being at any time period.68 The necessity of relying upon the presupposition of human sympathies, as well as historical context, in order to understand human works applies as much to a relatively contemporary writer such as James Joyce as it does to a medieval writer. I do not perceive time to be any more fundamentally distancing than any other semiotic gap. Some modern and postmodern texts seem to present greater interpretive problems than do some medieval texts. It seems inaccurate, as well as fruitless, to relegate medieval texts to the position of inscrutable Other. In fact, as I read it, Andreas’s text has an investment in subverting the self/other opposition in order to effect at least a reassessment of existing social arrangements if not social change. Through Andreas’s role-play as being among the enfranchised and his simultaneous self-identification with the disenfranchised, his text controverts polarizing systems and causes the reader to question socially attributed difference among people. In Andreas’s text the “Other” is not constituted by “the woman,” “the infidel,” or “the peasant” but is rather presented as an attribute of the so-called self. Given much of the thinking standard in medieval studies, some may want to accuse my suggestions here of being occasionally anachronistic. I would like to suggest that much of what the shapers of our discipline have come to see as anachronistic is of their own invention. I do not argue against the surety that there are differences in human perception and intellection, nor do I suggest that contexts of any kind should be ignored; I do argue against the notion that those differences and contexts must be enclosed monolithically in a particular era. To postulate a historical reality such as “the medieval mind,” once a given for many medievalists, has been considered bad history for some time now. Yet, what is possible for a twelfth-century individual to write or read is still often determined by the preconceptions held by twentieth-century scholars (mostly) about a given era. This is the sort of postulation become premise that is behind much of what has become possible to suggest or not about any medieval artifact. My book is offered, in part, as another effort toward reforming or revising the practices of the interrelated academic disciplines of medieval and contemporary studies. Outline What follows is a chapter by chapter outline of this book, which may be useful to readers who want to focus on only one or two aspects of my argument. It will also give any reader a “map.” “Chapter I: Fish or Fowl (or Is There a Genre in This Text?)” delineates the problems that Andreas’s text presents for readers of any century, and it

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does so in a depth of textual detail that explicates the problems most scholars assume. It is therefore especially useful to readers not deeply familiar with Andreas’s text and for scholars looking for textual references and connections. The chapter consists of three parts. The first, “Transgressing the Boundaries of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric,” discusses the structure of Andreas’s text and shows how it flouts grammatical, logical, and rhetorical convention as well as categories in general. The second part, “Genre Trouble, Reading Instructions, and Other Formalities,” discusses the text’s multiple identity in terms of genre (in more detail than does this introduction) and shows how Andreas undermines his authority as author and Master. It also exposes the reading method Andreas’s text fosters by looking at its charges to the careful reader and its self-referentiality. The third part, “Deconstructing Gender and Culture: A Reading of the First Five Chapters,” should be useful for any reader, as it begins to show textual support for the understanding of Andreas’s text that I have put forward in this introduction. The first five chapters of Andreas’s text, plus the beginning of the sixth, introduce Andreas’s most important issues—the questionable underpinnings of religion and conventional morality, the problems inherent in language and interpretation, the false distinctions between nature and art, homo- and heterosexuality, money, gender, class, and authority, religious prescription, and the (mis)uses of rhetoric. Andreas’s first six chapters contain densely packed layers of signification that are gradually unpacked over the course of the dialogues and Books II and III. I do this reading at the end of Chapter I to textually foreground the rest of this book and to offer a detailed example of the kind of reading towards which Andreas’s text pushes. The reading also allows me to conclude discussion of rhetorical forms and genre by illustrating how Andreas’s text undercuts categorization and definition. “Chapter II: Repetition in Andreas’s Text” begins with a theoretical discussion of repetition that concludes that repetition is always meaningful and that there is no such thing as nonmeaningful variance, perhaps especially in medieval literature. Andreas himself says that “things most often repeated are most likely to be believed,” (1.6.408) a comment that both shows how people tend to get their ideas and that what he repeats ought to be especially noted. This chapter is important as support to my argument that there is method to Andreas’s madness—his use of repetition is seen as intentional and meaningful as opposed to sloppy and random. The chapter divides into two parts: “How Repetition in Andreas’s Text Subverts Social Hierarchies” and “How Repetition in Andreas’s Text Subverts Religion.” These amplify and further support my reading of his first six chapters and are based mostly on the dialogues (1.6) with some reference to Book II. Close readings show how Andreas’s use of repetition subverts seduction

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attempted by institutions. The dialogues pay particular attention to the use of hell stories and religious and social prescription on sex and marriage. “Chapter III: On Clerical Intertexts and the Subversion of Seduction” naturally follows from the discussion of the dialogues in Chapter II, since it goes into detail about the religious discourses of desire—the key institutions—that Andreas’s text would undermine. This chapter covers several authors of intertexts but focuses primarily on three twelfth-century authors, without rehashing other critical discussion of their relations to Andreas and his text: Peter Abelard, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Richard of St. Victor. All three were known for their theories and practice of exegesis, as well as for how they handled their desire. The first section, “Author/ity,” begins by discussing Abelard’s relationship with Bernard, so that readers not deeply familiar with the twelfth century can get a glimpse of the debates related to desire, the conscription of which is the institution Andreas’s text is most keen to subvert. Although it has clear resonances with Andreas’s text, Abelard’s Sic et non is only briefly mentioned, because among the other intertexts it is the more commonly known and addressed. However, Abelard’s Historia calamitatum and the ensuing letters between the lovers receive a bit more attention in this section because those texts embody and voice the conflict between desire as it is experienced and desire as it is circumscribed by the Church. The next part, “Positions of Mastery and the Rhetoric of Eros,” shows, primarily by looking at some of his sermons on the Song of Songs, how Bernard uses erotic images and allusions to seduce men to monastic life. It also shows how Andreas deconstructs and repudiates Bernard’s method. The section, “Seduction and Critical Distance,” introduces Richard of St. Victor at some length, since many readers are not familiar with him or his work. Some careful readings of pertinent passages from his Benjamin Minor are then offered to show that twelfth-century monastics were not all as coercive and Machiavellian, if I may be so anachronistic, as was Bernard, and that there were some who left crucial choices up to intelligent readers, as does Andreas. By comparing Richard and Andreas, this section also shows that the discourse of desire in the twelfth century could be exquisitely rich and sophisticated and that Richard, a famous and holy exegete, agreed with Andreas about the uses of fiction: fictions are very useful toward socializing desire. In the end, however, Richard conforms to church prescriptions, and Andreas does not. “On Confession and the Charm of Free Choice” is the final section in Chapter III. In it I suggest that confession is a rhetorical engine of seduction, citing Augustine, Bernard, and Aelred of Rievaulx. Augustine and Aelred (like St. Paul, discussions of whom interlace the chapter) are better known as

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intertextual with Andreas’s work, so I do not spend as much time with them as with Bernard or Richard. I show that Andreas’s text also uses confession as a rhetorical mode but in a much less attractive and less coercive manner. I suggest that Andreas’s confessions arise out of the gaps and do not make him look good but that he seems to prefer this kind of self-representation. Whether the reader finds this approach appealing is purely subjective. It is therefore hard to say whether Andreas’s confession is an attempt at seduction. “Chapter IV: Andreas and Walter” argues that seducing Walter may be one of Andreas’s ends. In the section “Andreas’s Desire Uncovered,” I show through word studies and close readings that Andreas’s interest in Walter may be carnal and that Andreas’s text exculpates homosexuality. The next section, “Identities,” is a study of the gaps and various identifications throughout the text to show how Andreas represents himself—a pining lover, abject and undesirable, who cannot help his passion and who cruises his reader. The third section, “Readership,” discusses Walter’s textual identities, his possible relationship to Andreas, and Andreas’s feelings for him. I show how Andreas aligns himself, and perhaps Walter, with a disenfranchised “feminine” readership. I also present evidence for a female readership and finish the chapter with a call for Andreas’s text to be used as evidence for research on women’s literacy in the twelfth century. The final part, “Feminine Desire and the Transgendered Agents of Andreas’s Text,” looks mostly at Book II to demonstrate how institutional rules negate their reason for being while attempting to marginalize desire in general and women’s desire in particular. By looking at Andreas’s use of gendered language, we see how a reader of any sex or sexual orientation is disempowered by the institution but empowered by Andreas’s text. As readers, we are placed in the positions of all those possible readers. “Chapter V: Andreas on Women” shows that Book III is not misogynous but quite the opposite. The first part, “On the Discourse of Misogyny,” demonstrates through a fairly obvious reading of Andreas’s representation of the discourse of misogyny that if one attends to his absurd hyperbole, his repeated suggestions that “all women always” do x evil, it becomes clear that he parodies misogynous discourse. A closer look suggests that in doing so, and by using the examples that he chooses, he challenges religious patriarchy. The final part, “Women’s Religion,” looks closely at discussions of women’s religion as represented in Book III to show that Andreas compares women’s religion (practical, earthy, and magical) to that of Christian men (Neoplatonic and antiflesh). Andreas’s text shows women’s religion to be the more desirable way to live and, surprisingly, the more supported by Jesus himself.

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Note on Translations and Manuscript Edition I rely on P.G. Walsh’s edition, cited throughout, for my understanding of the arrangement of Andreas’s text. The translations of Andreas’s text are my own, unless otherwise noted, and they, too, are based upon P.G. Walsh’s edition. Because I want to offer the most open as well as reliable readings, my translations tend to be very literal. I hope the reader will forgive any awkwardness and enjoy what might not otherwise come to light. I use Walsh’s translations when I want to make a point about his translation. For Latin authors other than Andreas I generally quote the translations of others. All Latin quotations from Migne’s Patrologia Latina (the Latin portion of his Opera Omnia: Patrologiae Cursus Completus) are cited as being from the PL, as is standard practice. Most of the quotations of the Latin of Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermones super Cantica Canticorum (Sermons on the Song of Songs) come from the eight-volume edition, Sancti Bernardi Opera, by Leclercq, Talbot, and Rochais. I refer to this work as S.B. Opera, as is common practice. The numbers in an S.B. Opera citation refer to volume and page. The following abbreviations appear with respect to Latin quotations and translation, primarily in Chapter III and are also standard: SS for Song of Songs (a book from the Old Testament); Cant. for Cantica Canticorum (the Latin title of Songs of Songs); and Sap. for Sapientia (the apocryphal book, The Wisdom of Solomon, found in Vulgate versions of the Old Testament. English references to this work are simply “Wisdom”). I use the New English Bible for Bible quotations in English, unless otherwise noted, as it is the closest in modern English to the Latin Vulgate. All italics appear in the original unless otherwise noted.

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CHAPTER I FISH OR FOWL (OR, IS THERE A GENRE IN THIS TEXT?)

The actors are come hither, my lord . . . The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited. The Fishmonger, Ham. II.ii Dès qu’on entend le mot “genre,” dès qu’il paraît, dès qu’on tente de le penser, une limite se dessine. Et quand une limite vient à s’assigner, la nome et l’interdit ne se font pas attendre. . . . As soon as the word “genre” is sounded, as soon as it is heard, as soon as one attempts to conceive it, a limit is drawn. And when a limit is established, norms and interdictions are not far behind. . . . Derrida, 177, 203

y briefly regarding Andreas’s text with respect to the problem of its genre, this chapter begins to show the centrality of social issues in Andreas’s text. The first section, “Transgressing the Boundaries of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric,” shows how Andreas’s text flouts grammatical, logical, and rhetorical convention and the notion of categories in general and thus provides clues as to how to read Andreas’s text. Because the text does not follow medieval rhetorical rules of any genre systematically enough to be categorized, naming Andreas’s text becomes more problematic than naming the rose.1 This is not to suggest that rhetorical “rules,” being generally descriptive rather than prescriptive, were always followed, nor is it to suggest that genre is ever a wholly successful way to categorize literature. Nevertheless, the attempt to classify Andreas’s text is enlightening. The second section, “Genre Trouble, Reading Instructions, and Other Formalities,” explores the text’s multiple identity and shows how Andreas undermines his

B

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authority as author and Master, thereby undermining authority generally and showing a “split” in his textual identity. This section also explores the text’s charges to the careful reader and its self-referentiality, another set of clues for reading. The third part, “Deconstructing Gender and Culture: A Reading of the First Five Chapters,” provides a reading of the first five chapters of Andreas’s text, plus the beginning of the sixth, all of which introduce the most important issues in Andreas’s text—the questionable underpinnings of religion and conventional morality, language and interpretation, nature versus art, homo- and heterosexuality, money, gender, class, and authority, all of which are gradually unpacked over the course of the dialogues and Books II and III. This reading exists to textually foreground the rest of the book and to offer a detailed example of the kind of reading Andreas’s text insists upon. Transgressing the Boundaries of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric While the boundaries of the trivium were somewhat fluid in the late twelfth century, especially given divergence of times and places, it is clear that Andreas’s text transgresses whatever boundaries may have existed. The definition of grammar changed considerably during the hundred years between Hugh of St. Victor (d. 1154), who called it “the correct use of words in speech” and John of Garland, who defined it as “the art of coherent composition.”2 In contrast, Andreas’s text seems almost obsessed with the twisted use of language, the lie, the double meaning, which often result in what appears to be the art of incoherent composition. The grammar of his text, in the medieval sense, is transgressive in every way. “Bent” language was a part of grammatical or rhetorical study in the Middle Ages, but Andreas employs it to an extraordinary degree.3 If Andreas was chaplain to Philip II and wrote letters of diplomacy for the king, then his facility and preoccupation with tricky language might have been an occupational necessity. Before we discuss Andreas’s use of bent language any further, however, let us see how the playful twisting behind it works with what Andreas does with genre. Andreas’s text begins as a letter addressed to Walter in terms of an intimate missive salutation. It could be formally classified as belonging to the rhetorical genre of letter writing (ars dictandi) rather than to an explicitly grammatical genre.4 Yet it resists this category through what some critics have assumed to be a misprision of the standard formulae. Julius Victorinus (fourth century), whose work became the foundation of medieval rhetorical standards of letter writing, wrote that epistolae negotiales (letters of negotiation) should contain serious argumentative matter and figurative language, which Andreas’s does,

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and that epistolae familiares (familiar letters) should be clear and brief; Andreas’s text is neither clear nor brief, but it uses an intimate tone and style when addressing Walter. Victorinus contended that it is worse to be obscure in a letter than in an oration or conversation, because the writer’s absence makes it impossible to answer the reader’s questions. However, Victorinus also said, “Letters that are intended to be secret may be couched in language that is unclear to all but the recipient.”5 Since Andreas’s text does contain serious argumentative matter and figurative language, it could qualify as a negotiative letter. What he might be trying to negotiate only comes in hints at a first reading and mostly only with respect to his feelings for Walter. Since the text is so obscure, it may also be secret. What secret does this negotiative and familiar letter simultaneously cover and convey? If any one of my theses about Andreas’s text is correct—the interest in Walter, the suggestions about women and gender, and the instructions for avoiding the machinations of the institutions that conscript desire—the need to cloak as well as to convey is obvious. Victorinus’s prescriptions about letter writing were based upon rhetorical rules for the sermo (informal discourse), which is what Andreas calls the material that follows the Prologue: sermones. The sermo is subdivided into even smaller rhetorical categories. Andreas’s material could qualify as the narratio portion of sermones; yet they do not entirely conform to the expectations of this genre either. For example, even Alberic of Monte Cassino (c. 1087), who was a rhetorician especially attuned to thetext-as-pander, as his point of view would be theorized today,6 wrote that the narratio should be honesta and will be only “if it is brief and clear.”7 However, the parts of Andreas’s text that might qualify as the narratio (Books I and II) are not only protracted and confusing, but they also repeatedly present dishonest arguments, self-presentations, and representations. Whether Alberic’s fourfold outline for epistles in his Dictaminum radii (exordium, narratio, argumentatio, and conclusio), or the fivefold structure, more contemporary to Andreas, of the anonymous Rationes dictandi (c. 1135),8 (salutatio, benevolentiae captatio, narratio, petitio, and conclusio), or any other medieval model is taken as a rhetorical standard, Andreas’s text conforms only enough to show how it is not conforming to an accepted model. Andreas’s Praefatio or Prologue, seems to function as both salutatio and benevolentiae captatio, as they are described by the Rationes dictandi, since it speaks of Andreas’s love and concern for Walter, and of Andreas’s desire to content Walter. There is nothing formally unusual about this. Yet the accessus, which comes next and which tended at the time to function as a directory for ensuing treatise material, poorly describes what actually follows. Further, the accessus was generally supposed to attempt either to relate the

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part to the whole or it functioned as a perambulatory gloss to the translated or transcribed work of an author already dead, not of one’s own work.9 Not only does Andreas’s accessus appear to be the author’s own, but it does not relate parts to the whole, nor does it really represent the work that follows.10 Andreas’s accessus is unusually small. Here it is in its entirety: Accessus ad amoris tractatum Est igitur primo videre quid sit amor, et unde dicatur amor, et quis sit effectus amoris, et inter quos possit esse amor, qualiter acquiratur amor, retineatur, augmentetur, minuatur, finiatur; et de notitia amoris mutui, et quid unus amantium agere debeat altero fidem fallente. (P.G. Walsh, 32) Accessus to a treatise on love First we must see what love is, why it is so called, and its effect; between what persons it can exist, how it can be obtained, kept, increased, diminished, and ended; how reciprocated love is recognized, and what one lover should do if the other is untrue.

Although this accessus could function as a sort of table of contents, it does not do so in an orderly, logical, or complete fashion. The headings of the chapters that follow the accessus also inadequately describe their contents, and they do not follow the outline given in the accessus. For instance, the accessus says nothing about the discussion of “shameful loves,” which is ostensibly the subject matter of the last six chapters of Book I, nor is any mention made of the infamous Book III. Perhaps this approach expects too much of an accessus. Jean Leclercq, for example, writes that the accessus should simply “provide access” to the text that follows it.11 Even so, in the case of Andreas’s text, the accessus actually misleads the reader, not only in terms of content and organization but also in terms of purpose. The only way it can be argued that the accessus does provide a sort of index for the reader is to argue that if Andreas’s accessus does not function in the manner generally expected, then neither does the rest of the text. Andreas’s text leads the reader to suppose it will accomplish one thing when it in fact accomplishes another. According to the accessus, that which follows it is a tractatus. By the end of the twelfth century, tractatus had solidified from a missive form into what would be understood today as a treatise. As the etymology implies, tractatus was a drawn-out handling or treatment of the subject matter and was then, as now, generally associated with a systematic set of analyses, definitions, and logical arguments.12 Andreas’s text, however, does not go on to delineate its “rules” and definitions in a linear, orderly, logical fashion. Andreas’s text only partially fits the formal requirements of a treatise, and, as its equivocal definitions show, it only partially fits the requirements of a treatise’s purpose.

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It is and is not a treatise just as it is and is not a letter. Andreas’s text distends and contracts the proper rhetorical forms and contents of a treatise to make a “shape” much different from what would be expected, and it establishes its own peculiar, nonlinear logic. The first five chapters of Andreas’s Book I, and the first part of the sixth chapter, if they are read with relatively little attention, might pass for the contents of a treatise. But Chapter 6 (“How Love Is Won and in How Many Ways”) balloons, with no apology or explanation, into eight dialogues that consist of more lines than the rest of the text combined: the dialogues make up roughly two-thirds of the entire work.13 If Andreas had been interested in adhering to existing models for treating a topic in dialogic fashion, as has often been assumed, then he had plenty of models to choose from. The two most likely were Cicero’s treatise on friendship (which one of Andreas’s speakers quotes) and Aelred of Rievaulx’s treatise on spiritual friendship, which was based on Cicero’s.14 Unlike these models, whose speakers were historical men intimately known to one another, Andreas’s speakers are anonymous, identified only by social class and gender. They are hypothetical people, exemplifying (supposedly) how to behave and what to expect when a man wants to pursue a woman sexually. Also unlike his models, Andreas does not employ believable settings for conversation, nor do his speakers cooperate to try to solve a problem, answer a question, or draw an argument to a logical conclusion. Rather, they argue defensively and uncooperatively to no mutually agreeable end, and the discourse between them is attributed to the author’s invention by his own voice—there is no suspension of disbelief. For instance, Andreas’s first dialogue begins, “The commoner should approach the common woman and address her as follows,” then come sundry instructions about what to do in response to the range of hypothetical situations that could ensue. Andreas then continues, “After such casual comments you can continue like this: ‘When the Divine Being fashioned you. . . .’ ” and so on. There is absolutely no doubt, at the beginning of each dialogue, that the author wants the reader to see that the dialogues are fictions created by the author. There is no attempt in Andreas’s text to gain the suspension of disbelief that comes so easily through the representationalism employed by Cicero and Aelred. Aelred’s setting is a monastery, and he is one of the speakers—he is never “outside” the dialogues once they have begun. Andreas is very self-consciously not only outside of his dialogues but also their ventriloquist, puppeteer, and script writer. Aelred’s brothers come to him for advice and comfort, and they all have moods, names, and distinguishable personalities; they work together toward the resolutions of the problems presented. Andreas’s characters are clearly that— fictions—identified only by class and gender, and none of his dialogues ends

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with even an agreement to disagree, let alone the promised seduction; rather than any kind of resolution, there is only irresolution. Aelred’s dialogues are connected by the passage of time—the conversation between him and his brothers is subject to monastic rule and daily offices; Aelred is called away for an extended period and meanwhile a best friend of his dies, and when he returns he grieves, and so on. There is little sense of real time or place in Andreas’s dialogues. Cicero’s dialogue remains in the context of one faceto-face dialogue with the son of the friend and, like Aelred’s, refers to their setting in a representational way. Although Andreas’s text is clearly in their tradition, the differences in its mimesis expose and reject the processes that make readers credulous rather than wary. The troubadour tensons constitute another dialogic form to which Andreas’s text is often compared. They are supposedly similar to Andreas’s text in that they are dialogues between lovers, rather than between monastic friends or between father and son. Yet unlike the tensons, Andreas’s dialogues are prose, not poetry, and we discover other divergences: in Andreas’s text, the man consistently and rudely belabors the woman for her love (there is no longing from afar as in the tensons), and the woman consistently finds ingenious means of escape; tensons, on the other hand, often record the woman’s love for the man,15 and they usually show the finesse or anger of the lover, not (as in Andreas’s dialogues) the clumsiness. Also unlike the tensons, none of Andreas’s men actually succeed in winning a woman’s love. For a chapter entitled “How Love Is Won and in How Many Ways,” this seems a singularly odd, even selfsubverting, outcome.16 By the time a reader has discovered this, however, he/she will also have noticed that Andreas subverts all of his authorities, not just possible genre models that might be found to explain what he is doing. Although Andreas’s text clearly subverts its surface attempt to be a formal treatise on love, its agenda does emerge, and, as I hope to show, it is ultimately at least as instructive about its real subjects as is any treatise. Genre Trouble, Reading Instructions, and Other Formalities To suggest that a piece of writing is of a particular genre is problematic because categorization is itself problematic. Categorization always comes after the fact, as a way of facilitating analytical discourse about the writing and therefore must ignore textual differences in favor of similarities, making exceptions to whatever rules it has instituted. When examined closely, it is a rare text that perfectly fits its genre. To discuss genre, perhaps especially in relation to a medieval text, therefore, may seem useless. Yet, Andreas’s text occupies itself with genre, with the institution of conscriptive categories, and not just rhetorical categories, since thematically our attention

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is called to social categories related to sex, gender, and class. Further, Andreas’s text is particularly difficult to label because it enacts or dramatizes the difficulties inherent in the project of categorization, naming, and definition. As a preliminary example, the definitions Andreas’s text offers as such do not work; rather, they muddy the very distinctions and descriptions they claim to draw and seem to undermine the definitional enterprise altogether. The very first chapter, for example, claims to define love: Amor est passio quaedam innata procedens ex visione et immoderata cogitatione formae alterius sexus, ob quam aliquis super omnia cupit alterius potiri amplexibus et omnia de utriusque voluntate in ipsius amplexu amoris praecepta compleri. (1.1.1) (Italics mine.) Love is a certain inborn suffering derived from the sight of and excessive thinking upon the beauty of the other sex, from which someone desires above all things to possess the other with embraces and to complete all of love’s commands in the embrace of the other, according to the will of both parties.

By this account, love is both inborn and contrived from sight and thinking. However, something innate cannot logically be the product of thinking, particularly thinking that one must consciously make “excessive.” Andreas nevertheless continues to claim the authority of right reason, recommending that his reader examine the argument carefully and consider its truth: Quod autem illa passio sit innata, manifesta tibi ratione ostendo, quia passio illa ex nulla oritur actione subtiliter veritate inspecta; sed ex sola cogitatione quam concipit animus ex eo quod vidit passio illa procedit. (1.1.8) Moreover, that this suffering is inborn I show you with clear reason, since this suffering (if truly and carefully examined) does not arise out of any action but only out of meditation that the rational soul conceives from that which it sees does this suffering come.

Although Andreas claims that mental action (cogitatione or meditation) is not an action, it had long been considered an action in both in philosophical and monastic circles.17 Given this context, and a necessarily literate readership, taking pains to point out that mental action is not action in fact undermines the credibility of the authorial voice, at least to a reader who is “truly and carefully” examining this argument. What should be an argument that falling in love is natural (something that just happens and for which one is not initially responsible) instead becomes an argument for the opposite: that love is an invention, and the lover is its author/inventor.

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Further, the text goes on to undermine its claim that the suffering in question is innate (put there by God or nature) and therefore innocent. The text proceeds to describe exactly how the process develops: The man clearly engages in a volitional process of mental action, beginning with meditation on a pleasing shape and moving on to imagine mastery in sexual intercourse. In case the lover’s mental duties and actions are not clear enough to the reader, Andreas ends the chapter with the following: Nam quum aliquis videt aliquam aptam amori et suo formatam arbitrio, statim eam incipit concupiscere corde; postea vero quotiens de ipsa cogitat, totiens eius magis ardescit amore, quousque ad cogitationem devenerit pleniorem. Postmodum mulieris incipit cogitare facturas, et eius distinguere membra suosque actus imaginare eiusque corporis secreta rimari ac cuiusque membri officio desiderat perpotiri. (1.1.9–10) For when a man sees a woman suitable for love and shaped to his pleasure, immediately he begins to desire her in his heart; after this, however much he thinks about her, that much more does his love burn until he comes to a fuller meditation. After awhile he begins to imagine the way a woman is made, to separate her members and to imagine them set in motion, and to lay open the secrets of her body, and the service of whose members he desires to have become master of. Est igitur illa passio innata ex visione et cogitatione. Non quaelibet cogitatio sufficit ad amoris originem, sed immoderata exigitur; nam cogitatio moderata non solet ad mentem redire, et ideo ex ea non potest amor oriri. (1.1.13) Therefore this inborn suffering is from sight and meditation. Not meditation in just any way will suffice to begin love, but that which is proven [measured] excessive; for moderate meditation does not usually return to the mind, and from such love is not able to arise.

“Falling in love” is therefore a conscious and arduous undertaking. It is not just the result of an unguarded mental action but of a volitional process of abstraction and invention—the desire to desire, the desire to inflame desire, and the use of the imagination in the entire process. A woman is abstracted by a male imagination that goes on to invent what it will probably never see—the woman’s naked body and the man’s sexual interaction with it. This abstraction is the object of a cultivatedly excessive meditation, what the twentieth century would call obsession. This is not just lust at work; it is a work of artistry or fiction in which lust and desire are mere ingredients. Like creating a written work, making love in this sense requires an immoderate use of desire, abstraction, imagination, and, according to the dialogues, as we shall see, words.

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The kind of meticulous reading I have given so far is at least as much the product of the kind of reading Andreas’s text demands of a reader as it is of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century literary criticism. There are two types of instruction about reading in Andreas’s text. One is the obvious kind, in what the author claims to be his own authoritative voice, which tells the reader about the text and what to do with it, such as the appeal to the careful reader cited above. The other, although more ambiguous on a number of levels, is a practicum, a method of reading, which the text suggests both by undermining and by referencing itself, and which is forced upon any reader who would really try to understand the text. For clarity’s sake, I will begin with examples of the more obvious type of instruction: to read carefully. The passages in which this suggestion is repeatedly embedded are important and complicated and will be even more closely examined in Chapters IV and V because of their content. However, the densest cluster of them appears near the very end of the text (3.117–119), where the reader is addressed as “you” and named Walter. The reader/Walter is told, “haec igitur nostra subtiliter et fideliter examinata doctrina, quam tibi praesenti libello mandamus insertam, tibi duplicem sententiam propinabit” (3.117; “This subtlety and faithfully examined teaching of ours, which we hand to you in person, inserted in a little book, will pledge a double [duplicitous] meaning to you”). We are then told, “Quam si iuxta volueris praesentem exercere doctrinam, et sicut huius libelli assidua tibi lectio demonstrabit omnes corporis voluptates pleno consequeris effectu” (3.118; “If you wish to justly exercise the teaching presented, as an assiduous reading of this little book will demonstrate, you will obtain all pleasures of the body in full effect”). Finally, “Quem tractatum nostrum si attenta volueris investigatione disquirere ac mentis intellectu percipere et eiusdem doctrinam operis executione complere, ratione manifesta cognosces neminem in amoris voluptatibus debere male suos expendere dies” (3.119; “If you desire to diligently investigate our treatise in an attentive search and to comprehend it with the intellectual faculty of your mind, and to complete/fulfill its teaching by the accomplishment of works, you will understand by manifest reason that no one ought to waste his days in the evil pleasures of love”). As obvious as are the reasons to read carefully, there seems to be no promise that a clear teaching is to be found. What a reader finally makes of this text seems to be the real problem posed. The “diligent reader” is addressed in other places in the text, which are also at junctures key to interpretation. At 3.6 Andreas writes, “Cernas ergo, Gualteri, et acuto mentis disquiras ingenio, quanto sit praeferendus honore, qui coelesti rege contempto eiusque neglecto mandato pro mulierculae cuiusdam affectu antique hostis non veretur se vinculis alligare” (“Discern, Walter, and with your sharp and ingenious mind inquire how much

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preferential honor there is for the man who, in contempt of the king of heaven and in neglect of his command, and on account of whose feelings for some insignificant woman is unafraid to bind himself in the chains of the ancient enemy”). There does seem to be a question as to how admirable this kind of man is. He is not simply condemned. It is up to the intelligent reader, using the advice that has come earlier in Andreas’s text, to judge the honor of this man. It could well be, given the argument in Dialogue 8, that sexual love is the source of all good, that the man in question is a kind of hero. At the end of Chapter 5 of Book II (2.5.10), the assiduus lector is called upon to do his own thinking, only this time he is encouraged to add his own ideas to Andreas’s list of signs of reciprocated love. Unfortunately, but typically, most of the signs Andreas lists also signify their opposites, that love is not returned. To set the reader the task of establishing his or her own list not only makes it impossible to miss the duplicity of Andreas’s list, but it also implicates the reader as a maker of meaning (that may or may not be reliable). The injunction also invites the reader to encounter and make conscious the vagaries and possible duplicity inherent in any system of signification, be it social and face-to-face or verbal and textual. Andreas’s text repeatedly calls the reader by name, the intimate “you” or “Walter,” asking for special attention to those loci where no right interpretation seems possible. A final pair of examples may prove even more instructive (or confusing). Andreas calls upon the careful reader only twice in the dialogues: at the beginning of the first dialogue (1.6.21–22) and in the introduction to the eighth or final dialogue (1.6.402). The first passage warns that moving too quickly into love talk and too much flattery is suitable for courting whores but not for ladies; yet the exemplary man of each of the dialogues does exactly these things and thereby enacts the treatment of each woman as a whore. The reader is left not only wondering what the term “whore” means and how it relates to women but also whether the reader is to follow precept or example. The second passage in question, the one in the introduction to the eighth dialogue, calls upon the careful reader to note that the advice for wooing women of the higher nobility is “much the same as what has gone before, in the previous dialogue.” This would make the eighth (and longest) dialogue an optional appendage, as far as wooing goes. The “previous dialogue,” the seventh, in turn references the sixth and the fourth dialogues, both between noble men and common women, rendering the methods prescribed to seduce a countess the same as those to seduce a common woman. The class differences between women become inconsequential. Further, the women are all not only approached as whores, but at some point in each dialogue the woman is usually, by

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reason of manipulation or retribution, accused by the wooing man of actually being a whore. What advice, then, is for the careful reader? At very least that the term “whore” is an empty signifier more often used to manipulate women than to represent something real, and, at least as importantly, that careful interpreters of language can escape seduction. The advice itself may be equivocal on the surface, but there is a definite reading method promoted by the text, which is the second type of reading I named above, and which is more or less forced upon the careful reader by the text’s self-referentiality and self-subversion. The text demands that the reader engage in multiple readings, at least if he/she intends to even try to understand. This would explain why the passage from the end of the work places in the future whatever understanding the careful reader may gain (3.117, the text propinabit [will pledge]; 118, experience demonstrabit [will demonstrate]; 119, cognosces [you will understand]). Further, as initial examples of the text’s self-referentiality, the woman in Dialogue 4 (1.6.190) references the story of love’s palace as if she has already read this story in Dialogue 5 (1.6.225). In the eighth dialogue, the woman who was a widow at 1.6.445 claims to be a maiden at 1.6.452. Like the examples below, these draw the reader back and forth in the text, and in and out of the text, while calling attention to the speakers as textual fictions, products of the author’s invention. The man in Dialogue 6 (1.6.294) cites Love’s command of secrecy, indicating his familiarity with the list of rules both in the previous dialogue (1.6.268, Rule 6) and at the end of the next book, Book II (2.8.46, Rule 13). There are at least seven examples like these, some of them misquotations, which send the reader back and forth between the two lists of rules. Both lists are forged by characters in chivalric romances that are narrated by the wooing man in Dialogue 6 and Andreas the Master in Book II. Further, at the end of the first set of rules (1.6.269) the God of Love (ventriloquated by the wooing man who is ventriloquated by Andreas) cites Andreas’s text to Walter as bearing in Book II some less important rules than he himself has just cited. Such self-referential passages force the reader to search for the “real” advice, which is never found. Meanwhile, the reader is learning to be suspicious of the power and authority of authorial voices and to discern interpretations for him- or herself. Such passages also smack of what a modern reader might call mise en abyme,18 although the reflexivity in Andreas’s text connects on too many levels to qualify simply as an enclosed, miniature model of the whole. Its reflexivity does not create the kind of semantic clarity described in Dällenbach’s theory of mise en abyme but it does lend clarity and support to my notion that one of the work’s sententiae is that meaning must be actively constructed by the reader. Perhaps Derrida’s theory of invagination, which he calls the “law of the law of genre,” is even more to the point here. This law, he writes, is a

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“principle of contamination.” Apparently, once the clarifying line of division is drawn, it also becomes clear that categories inevitably overlap. “A text cannot belong to no genre,” he writes, “it cannot be without or less a genre. Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text; there is always a genre and genres; yet such participation never amounts to belonging.”19 Just as Andreas’s text participates in genres but belongs to none, so also its reflexivity transgresses levels of fiction to create that “pocket of meaning which is greater than the whole,” to mix or confuse categories, and to play with the author/ity that might establish them.20 Genre, as Derrida suggests, is not so much a name for a nature inhering in a thing as it is a way of reading (making sense of ) that thing. To prove his point, he uses the example of using examples: he claims it is the citation of examples that changes the “law of genre” (the injunction of purity) into the “law of the law of genre” (which he describes as “contamination”). Andreas’s text performs a version of this transformation. How the examples in Andreas’s text actually change the rules or precepts also given in it, I find impossible to describe with a general “law,” although it can be said that the examples tend to undermine the precept rather than to support it. Since each example cited in support of a given precept changes it differently, and since the use of examples differs from precept to precept, it seems that each precept and its accompanying examples must be considered on their own terms. Here are a few more of many possible examples: one of the problems with “Andreas’s teaching on love,” the problem of Marie de Champagne, and the problem of subjectivity. We will start with a very typical kind of problem with the Master’s teaching. The man of the seventh dialogue cites “Andreas the lover, Chaplain to the Royal Court” as authorizing the exclusion of the mad and the blind from the court of love: “Quos ab amoris curia penitus esse remotos amatoris Andreae aulae regiae capellani evidenter nobis doctrina demonstrat” (1.6.385; “The teaching of the lover Andreas, chaplain to the royal court, shows us beyond doubt that they are utterly debarred from the court of love”). But if we check the passages where Andreas discusses the suitability of the blind for love, we find, as usual, no simple instruction. In contradistinction to his fiction’s citation of him, he says that blindness only impedes love and that certain kinds of blind men can in fact love (1.5.6). Yet, according to Andreas in the first chapter, beginning love should be impossible for a blind man by definition since sight is a necessary part of love’s construction. The reader is left to decide whether to go back to the Master’s initial definition to judge its worth in this particular context. As for the mad, search as we may, Andreas does not discuss their suitability for love. He only describes the behavior of lovers, usually from a woman’s point of view, as one kind of madness or another. This would render all lovers mad.

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Countess Marie de Champagne is the final authority to whom the speakers appeal by letter in Dialogue 7, and she is an authority in some ways “outside” the text: she is neither its author nor a speaker invented by the author, but she is a historical person. Even so, her response to the supposed letter is narrated by Andreas’s fictional male speaker, rendering it hearsay at best. Further, in her letter, Marie cites rules from Andreas’s Book II (2.8.44 ff.). This textual ploy does not allow Andreas’s text to inscribe into the reading subject any faith in the authority of the text. The reader must choose between faith in him/herself or in untrustworthy authority. The example of Marie transgresses the categories of history/reality and fiction. How distinct these categories were in the Middles Ages is a debated issue,21 but the possibility of their overlap does not change the inversions of perception or frame of reference Andreas’s text creates in the reader. These inversions may bear upon our notions of what history (or reality) may have meant to a particular medieval scholar. Since Andreas shows that history or reality depends upon subjective experience and construction, he was surely at least as aware of this perspective as he makes his reader. Subjectivity is as complex as is everything else in Andreas’s text and is also shown to be constructed partly because the writing/speaking subject in Andreas’s text is fraught with the complications of definition. At 1.6.438, in commenting upon “the point so excellently entered previously” by Andreas the Master (1.6.64), the cleric of the eighth dialogue speaks as though he is writing the text and as though he is a fiction who has “come to life” while fully aware that he is a fiction. At 1.5.6, just preceding the discussion of blindness, Andreas the Master claims that he “shall perhaps explain on another occasion why love burns in a woman at an earlier stage than among men.” But when the topic reemerges, it is on the tongue of the cleric in Dialogue 8 (1.6.453–454). On the difference between pure and mixed love, the cleric of the eighth dialogue is the authority at 1.6.471; however, Andreas is the authority on the subject at 2.6.24. At 1.7.4 and again at 2.1.11 and 2.2.6, Andreas the Master recites the cleric’s sayings on clerics in the eighth dialogue (1.6.490–499) as though the fictional cleric was Andreas’s authority or as though Andreas was the fictional cleric. At 2.2.2 Andreas cites the cleric’s discourse in the eighth dialogue as being clear on jealousy (which it is not) and as though it were either something he had formerly discussed or as though the fictional cleric were the authority. And so it continues. The confusion between fictional authority and historical author permeates the text and has ultimately significant consequences. Further, the reading subject, as Andreas’s text constructs it, is no less complicated than is the writing subject. To the issues of subjectivity and Andreas’s textual identity, I shall return in Chapter IV. For now, these passages exemplify how the text forces the reader to read with suspicion

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and to read reflexively. These examples also suggest that the text is best read several times, keeping other readings and the text’s diverse parts in mind. Deconstructing Gender and Culture: A Reading of the First Five Chapters The final section of this chapter contains a fairly detailed reading of the first five chapters of Andreas’s text as well as of the introduction to the sixth. I place the reading here, where at moments in the explanation it may seem premature, for several reasons. First of all, doing so foregrounds in a textual and succinct way the most important issues in Andreas’s text as a whole: the first five chapters contain densely packed layers of signification that are gradually unpacked over the course of the dialogues and Books II and III. Second, a close reading of these early chapters functions as a more detailed example of the kind of reading Andreas’s text pushes toward. Finally, this section helps conclude the discussion of rhetorical forms and genre because it further illustrates how Andreas’s text undercuts categorization and definition. If in places the reading seems to push the boundaries of the evidence I give, much of “missing” evidence will be presented in Chapter II, on repetition. Although some of what I suggest in this section may not be completely apparent on a first reading, it is unmistakable after the first. I therefore ask my reader not to suspend judgment but to read (this part at least) reflexively. After multiple readings of Andreas’s text, it has become clear to me that Andreas’s text is profoundly occupied with a particular set of ideas, all interrelated. His text repeatedly, obsessively returns to religious prescription or rules, issues such as nature versus art, homo- and heterosexuality, money, gender, class, the rhetorics of love used by church and court, the fictions that found institutions, and authority—in short, the relationship between individual desire and socializing institutions. The first chapter of Andreas’s text, which purports to define love, suggests that what is called “natural” may in fact be artificial, as my reading of it above has already shown; this argument need not be revisited except to note again that it raises a question as to whether the natural and the artificial are entirely distinguishable categories. What I want turn to from Chapter 1 at this point is some evidence of just what kind of active force is behind the artificial: Amor est passio quaedam innata procedens ex visione et immoderata cogitatione formae alterius sexus, ob quam aliquis super omnia cupit alterius potiri amplexibus et omnia de utriusque voluntate in ipsius amplexu amoris praecepta compleri. (1.1.1) (Italics mine.) Love is a certain inborn suffering derived from the sight of and excessive thinking upon the beauty of the other sex, from which someone desires

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above all things to possess the other with embraces and to complete all of love’s commands in the embrace of the other, according to the will of either of the two parties.

Potiri is from potior, which means to have power over or “to be master of.” This suggests that the kind of possessing described in this passage is not just an embrace of the other; it is a power play. Nor does the possession have to be “according to the will of both” parties, as utrius is often construed by translators of the text. If one were to translate Andreas’s text assuming it was a “codebook” for courtly love, “both” would be the teaching it would be assumed to convey. However, utrius indicates one or the other of two, not necessarily both at once. The act of possessing the other, therefore, can clearly be a one-sided enterprise. Given that the inciting gaze is presented as male and the object of the gaze is gendered female, the reader is left with very little option but to envision a man enjoying the embraces of a woman whether she is completely in accord with his desires or not. Artifice comes from the desire to possess or control and is generally perpetuated upon the disempowered by those in power. From the readings I have given of the text’s initial definition of love so far, it is possible to see the beginning of three lines of inquiry that continue throughout the text: (1) whether definitions work at all; (2) whether nature and art are trustworthy distinctions; and (3) whether freedom of choice is ever really possible in hierarchical relations. The tension between nature and contrivance, which Andreas’s text constructs in its own way, continues in Chapter 2, called “Between What Persons Love Can Exist,” specifically in relation to homosexuality. The chapter begins with what looks, at first, like a declamation against homosexual attraction, and it is usually translated as such. But if translated literally, the declamation must be supplied by the reader, if it is to exist at all: Hoc autem est praecipue in amore notandum, quod amor nisi inter diversorum sexuum personas esse non potest. Nam inter duos mares vel inter duas feminas amor sibi locum vindicare non valet; duae namque sexus eiusdem personae nullatenus aptae videntur ad mutuas sibi vices reddendas amoris vel eius naturales actus exercendos. Nam quidquid natura negat, amor erubescit amplecti. (1.2.1) This moreover is a precept to be noted in love: that love cannot exist unless it is between persons of opposite sexes. For between two males or between two females love is not able to claim a place for itself; for two persons of the same sex do not appear to be fitting for the exchange of reciprocal love or for the exercising of its natural acts. For whatever nature denies, love blushes to embrace.

Andreas appears to begin arguing that homosexuals are unfit for love because their love is unnatural. This was an argument presented by the church, via

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citation of revered authority and privileged passages of scripture.22 Even Ovid, considered in the twelfth century to be the most sexually knowledgeable and irrepressible of revered pagans, could be quoted as maintaining that homosexuality was wasteful and womanish, although, not unnatural per se.23 However, Andreas’s passage quoted above does not preclude the possibility of homosexual love—quite the opposite—it brings up the possibility of homosexual love, even detailing that it occurs between women as well as between men. Nor does the passage assert that homosexuality is wrong and cite an ultimate authority such as God or scripture or Augustine or even Ovid: it simply says that homosexual relations “do not appear” to be “fitting” for the exercise of “natural” acts. “Appearance” in Andreas’s text, as I shall show in Chapter II, tends to depend upon public opinion, and it is a word that suggests doubt or possible error of perception. Appearance, that is, public opinion, is the reason homosexual love cannot “claim a place” as “love” between people. The passage therefore asserts that love is, by the art of definition, not by nature, heterosexual. What is natural is defined by some kind of authority, then it becomes a verbal then a social contrivance. I will discuss this in more detail in Chapter IV. The final sentence of the passage says love does in fact blushingly embrace the unnatural. Blushes are most commonly used to denote the first signs of love between lovers and are usually more or less innocent.24 Yet blushes, like pallor, their opposite, can and did constitute standard physical significations both for innocent glorified love and for shameful desire or guilty acts. That Andreas employs this particular signifier, the blush, to describe the homosexual embrace proves just how equivocal that embrace may be. Nature may well enjoy it. Chapter 2 ends with this equally equivocal sentence: “Nota etiam quod amans nihil sapidum ab amante consequitur nisi ex illius voluntate procedat” (“Even so, mark that nothing tasty accompanies a beloved unless it proceeds from her [or his] will”). The forms of the genitive singular of illius and the ablative singular of amans are not distinguished according to gender. Technically, the beloved could be either male or female. Sandwiched between passages on homosexuality in 1.2 is the first of many discussions of money. If this were a treatise in the usual sense, then the connection between the middle part of a chapter and its beginning and end would be more apparent. In this case there is an important connection, although it is not immediately visible. The middle part states that a true lover (verus amans; 1.2.3) would give everything away to enjoy the act of love with his beloved, but a wise lover (sapiens amator; 1.2.5) would not, for without his money he could not afford to continue as a lover. Wisdom and truth are presented as being at odds with each other, at least when it comes to love and money.

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So why does a lover need money? According to Andreas’s second chapter, the requisite meditation upon the beauty of the beloved is so excessive, that one must have ample leisure and be amply free of cares (especially financial) to have the time and frame of mind necessary to obsess properly. So what does money have to do with the distinction between homo- and heterosexuality? Later in Andreas’s text, the man not only must buy his leisure to create the requisite fantasies, but he must, to one degree or another, buy the woman as well. Poor lovers are therefore out of the game, at least according to Ovid, says Andreas.25 Heterosexuality in the twelfth century brought with it problems associated with an economic system of exchange whose bottom-line value was a woman’s body, whatever it produced, and whatever property accompanied it. So, although a lover might not be interested in marriage, women would remain a commodity to protect or for which to compete with money or gifts. The dialogues repeatedly raise this issue, as do Books II and III, and it is one to which I shall return. Male homosexuality is free of these rules of exchange. Chapter 2, which is supposed to exclude the poor and the queer, instead begins to indicate that the freedom supposedly indispensable to the lover’s pleasure is logically impossible in heterosexual relationships, since heterosexual relations are fraught with rules—especially about gift giving and marriage. Heterosexual relations, as socially construed and mirrored in Andreas’s text, begin to appear increasingly unlike love. As for the possibility of free will in love, the tiny Chapter 3 conflates the love rhetoric of church and court in terms that are far from free. Called “The origin of love” and quoted in its entirety below, Chapter 3 offers this false etymology and analysis: Dicitur autem amor ab amo verbo, quod significat capere vel capi. Nam qui amat captus est cupidinis vinculis aliumque desiderat suo capere hamo. Sicut enim piscator astutus suis conatur cibiculis attrahere pisces et ipsos sui hami capere unco, ita vero captus amore suis nititur alium attrahere blandimentis, totisque nisibus instat duo diversa quodam incorporali vinculo corda unire, vel unita semper coniuncta servare. (1.3.1–2) It is said, moreover, that “love” is from the word “hook” [amus], which means to capture or to be caught. For he who loves is captured in the chains of desire and wishes to capture another with his own hook [hamo]. Just as a skilled fisherman tries with his little tidbit to attract fishes and to capture them on his crooked hook, so truly does one captured by love strive to attract another person with his blandishments and insists with all his efforts to unite two separate hearts into one body with a chain, or if united to preserve the union forever.

Although the passage puts forward the ideal of freedom of choice in love, these are images of capture and bondage, not of freedom or free will, the

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supposed underpinnings of real love. In this passage, underneath the pleasantry associated with a superficially casual exchange of dirty jokes (e.g., the “hook” as penis) lies a metaphor that, especially in the dialogues, Andreas associates with the game of love: the hunter versus the hunted. In the dialogues, the metaphor is avian and the quarry female. Here, the gender of the “fish” is unspecified. For the quarry, the only difference between hunting and fishing is the bait. The end result is the same: consumption by the empowered. The difference between the hunter and the fisher is that of active aggression versus passive aggression. Although there is no overt violence in this passage, it is implied in every metaphor. The image of making two hearts one, from the troubadour tradition, is conflated with that of making two bodies one, from the tradition of the church. Heterosexual union appears as defined and valorized through the rhetorical terms of both the church and the court. But taken literally, as Andreas’s passage quoted above presents it, the union sounds painful and ultimately impossible: the hearts are somehow removed from two bodies and put, with great effort and the help of a chain, into one body. As Teresa de Lauretis perceptively argues, “Violence is the sign of a power struggle for the maintenance of a certain kind of social order.”26 The heterosexual contract of Andreas’s era was economic, social, and ideological, requiring profound investment to maintain the arrangements based on the difference it claimed. The difference between men and women was constructed to be as deep as the difference between species and therefore potentially violent. Man was pitted against or lived in relation to woman as against or toward beasts, or nature, or his own wicked nature. But she was necessary to the promotion of his worldly achievements, an indispensable helpmate for the man of the world. This subject is elaborated upon in the dialogues, most of which employ the metaphor of hawking to acknowledge the interlocutors’ understanding of the heterosexual contract. When using the hawking metaphor, women and men both acknowledge that women are victims and men predators. The metaphor of entrapment in Chapter 3, fishing, bears yet more nuances in its relation to hunting in the Prologue and hawking in the dialogues. As the Arthurian image of the Fisher King indicates, particularly in Chrétien’s contemporary Conte du Graal, fishing is the sport of the “gelded” religious man, even if he is a king, whereas hunting and hawking belong to the virile worldly man of the court. Fishing may also be categorized as a religious metaphor for entrapment since Jesus called his disciples to be “fishers of men” (Matt. 4.18–20). Monastics of the twelfth century, Bernard of Clairvaux in particular, often considered themselves to be fishers of men, trying to convert men to monastic life through their preaching, their words

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being the hook.27 In Andreas’s time, a convert was not simply one who was baptized into the fold after having been a heretic or of another religion. A convert was a Christian moved to live a “perfect” life, to join a religious order of some kind. It is in the metaphor of fishing that Andreas’s text locates the origin of the word amor, connecting seduction with proselytizing, and his dialogues are clear about the necessity of language to seduction. Andreas’s text indicates that words are seductive, whether toward religious or erotic ends. Although the lover’s phallic “tidbit” is called bait in Chapter 3’s definition of the origin of love, the chapter also refers to the bait as blandimentis, “blandishments” or “flattery.” Flattery is one of the main ingredients necessary for a successful benevolentiae captatio,28 which is the beginning, not just of Andreas’s text but also of a convincing argument, and it is used by all the Fathers. The church, with respect to its quest for converts, is like the male wooer of Andreas’s text, besmirched by a disingenuous and self-interested enterprise—that of capturing its quarry through arguments and tales. Comparing God (or his representative) to a pursuing lover is not innovative on Andreas’s part or on mine. The parable of God as the Bridegroom is older than Christianity and had by Andreas’s time made itself exceedingly visible in Bernard of Clairvaux’s famous sermons on the Song of Songs. Further, Chapter 4, “The Effect of Love,” brings religion under scrutiny even more overtly, since it criticizes the “God of Love” who throughout the text is compared to the God of Christianity.29 Love in Andreas’s text moves between being an emotion, a biological urge, a game, a cosmic force, and a quasi-pagan personification. In its acts as a personification, however, it is a bit too easily confused with the God of Christianity to be labeled simply pagan or Ovidian.30 Further, Love (amor) in Andreas’s text is called the source of all good and the Fount of Life, as is the Christian God, the summum bonum of medieval theology. However, the summum bonum of Andreas’s text turns out to be sexual activity, not the Christian God, and it is directly identified as the source of all good and the Fount of Life (1.6.538–543).31 In some places it is not easy to tell which god, the Christian or the pagan, the text is describing. Andreas’s God of Love becomes personified where it acts as a judge or king and where Andreas claims it to be an unjust master whom he refuses to serve. Yet Andreas’s reasons for refusing to serve this god could just as easily apply to the God of Christianity, and the parallel begins at least as early as Chapter 4. Chapter 4 begins by stating that love creates virtues, that love can make any man generous, handsome, noble, humble, and even chaste (1.4.1–2). A similar ability to transform was attributed to the Christian God, although He did not often, if ever, make one of His servants handsome or noble. Instead, He was said to be able to bestow qualities or virtues that made

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serving Him possible. Chastity, for instance, was a gift especially sought by monks and, if received, usually came after long stormy bouts with temptation.32 Andreas protests that he will not serve the God of Love because that god is “unjust.” That is, the balance between a couple is not necessarily equal, reciprocity is not guaranteed, the woman does not have to love him back or say yes, although he may be compelled to love her. At least, this is what a cursory reading seems to indicate: Hoc ergo tuo pectori volo semper esse affixum, Gualteri amice, quod si tali amor libramine uteretur ut nautas suos post multarum procellarum inundationum in quietis semper portum deduceret, me suae servitutis perpetuo vinculis obligarem. Sed quia inadequale pensum sua solet manu gestare, de ipsius tanquam iudicis suspecti non ad plenum confido iustitia. Ideoque ad praesens eius recuso iudicium, quia “Saepe suos nautas valida relinquit in unda.” Sed quare amor quandoque ponderibus non utatur aequalibus, albi tractatu latiori te plenius edocebo. (1.4.3–4) This therefore I wish always to be affixed in your breast, o friend Walter, that if love could serve himself with a scales in a balanced way so that he might always lead his sailors into a port of quiet after the inundation of many storms, I would bind myself forever with the chains of his slavery. But because he is accustomed to carry a weighted scales in his inconstant hand, I do not place much confidence in the justice of that suspect judge. And for this reason at present I reject the judgment: because “Often he leaves his sailors in powerful waves.”

Surely the passage is to be read as meaning that the God of Love weighs the scales of justice to suit himself, which in the dialogues proves to be to the benefit, small as it is, of the women/the wooed. These images in themselves could also be classified as simply pagan. Yet the metaphor of sailing is at least as suggestive as the metaphor of fishing. Although Ovid used sailing to represent the trials of the lover, it had also been used since the Church’s inception to represent the journey of the Christian soul. The metaphor was so widely spread that churches were even the metaphorical boats in which a sojourner could find safety, hence the churches’ naves. The passage above could just as easily be speaking of the God of the Christian Church as of the secular God of Love. Andreas never once claims, at least not for long, that the Christian God is trustworthy or that He will rescue the believer from his tumultuous desires, the desires that could send him to hell. In fact, Andreas goes on to show quite the opposite and even throws the justice of God into question. No matter what rhetoric Andreas manages to ply, the lover (Andreas/Walter/the reader) is confessedly still in love, against his Christian judgment, helped neither by the secular god to attain his desire nor by the Christian God to reroute or to squelch it.

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Although the nautical metaphors in the above-quoted passage may be as attributable to pagan sources as to Christian, the judicial metaphors are probably mostly Christian. God as judge dominated the iconography of most of the cathedrals existing in Andreas’s day, and the Last Judgment had long been the subject of anxious religious discourse. The God of Love in Andreas’s text seems most like the God of Christianity in those passages where he acts as judge. At the end of Book III, the Christian God “returns” to issue in the apocalypse, death, and the Last Judgment. However, this advent is not presented as help, or even relief, but as a doomsday for which the reader ought to be prepared, even if the author is not. The Christian God of Andreas’s text is to be feared rather than loved, desired, or trusted. God’s grace is as absent in Andreas’s text as is God’s love. To accuse the Christian God of being unjust or of “leaving his sailors in the waves,” is obviously not the kind of statement one in Andreas’s day and position would want to be too clear. Yet, his text does make it clear enough by making the two gods almost interchangeable at crucial junctures throughout the text. Further, the women also fearlessly pose the questions of the disenfranchised not only to the men but also to their God. In contradiction to the claims of Chapter 4, that the God of Love can make any man into a lover, Chapter 5, “The Persons Suited for Love,” asserts that there are some basic qualifications for the part of lover: a person must be sane, capable of sexual intercourse, not too old or too young, not blind, and not excessively lustful. Andreas the Master not only contradicts himself in this way, but in his discussion of why young men are unfit for love, he contradicts canon law based on his own experience. In speaking of age limits appropriate for lovers, Andreas says first, in agreement with canon law on marriage, that the earliest age for boys to “love” (or to be sexually active) is fourteen.33 Andreas then goes on to argue that in fact, from his own experience, eighteen is a better age: Dico tamen et firmiter assero quod mascullus ante decimum octavum annum verus esse non potest amans, quia usque ad id tempus pro re satis modica verecundo rubore perfunditur, qui non solum perficiendum impedit amorem sed bene perfectum exstinguit. Sed et alia ratio efficacior invenitur, quia ante praefatum tempus nulla in homine constantia viget, sed in omnibus variabilis reperitur. Nec enim aetatis de amoris imperii arcanis posset tanta infirmitas cogitare. Cur vero citius in muliere amor quam in masculis exardescit, alibi forte docebo. (1.5.4–5) I say, nevertheless, and firmly assert, that a man is unable to be a true lover before eighteen years, because until that time on account of a modest enough situation he is drenched with shamefaced redness, which impedes love about to be carried out but thoroughly extinguishes [the possibility of ] completed love. But another and more convincing reason is found: that

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before the previously mentioned time nothing constant thrives in a man, but he is found variable in everything. Nor is it possible in such an infirm state to understand the commands of a secret love. Why truly love blazes out more quickly in a woman than in a man, I will perhaps teach elsewhere.

Andreas overrules canon law on the basis of his own experience: boys under the age of eighteen, according to his experience, are (1) hampered by embarrassment (and/or premature ejaculation?) and (2) are inconstant— emotionally and physically unreliable and therefore occasionally flaccid when they ought to be able to firmly assert themselves, false when they should be true, and vocal when they should be silent. Analysis of this passage renders several interesting situations. First, Andreas asserts the “higher” authority of his own experience over canon law, forcing the reader to choose between authorities. Second, since the authority privileged in this passage is experience, and the authority of the author of the passage has already been undermined by his own hand, the reader is invited to consider the potential authority of his (or her) own experience. Third, the author’s experience here seems limited: it includes familiarity with the workings of young men but relies on untrustworthy authorities for those of young women, which he will discuss “somewhere else, perhaps.” Even if P.G. Walsh’s suggestion is correct, that this “elsewhere” is in the final dialogue, between a man and woman of the higher nobility (Walsh cites 1.6.454) the would-be enlightenment comes from a cleric explaining to a woman why she can be constant (therefore bedded) at the tender age of twelve. This is in response to her argument from experience, that her own youthful inconstancy was based on her humanity rather than her gender. The man’s responding argument is from a book he has read, not from his experience with girls, and is therefore more likely to be founded on culturally and textually constructed ideas about gender and sex than on human phenomenon. The man’s book uses the hot and cold theories of the ancient pagan doctors, citing chapter and verse, most of which were ignored by women “physicians” contemporary to Andreas.34 This “elsewhere” is not where Andreas undertakes to explain female sexuality, but is one of many places where the text represents the inadequacy of male, textual, learned authority in the face of subjective experience. Authority is represented as being based upon limited human experience and ideas that, as they are “handed on,” are further limited by being predominantly male and theoretical. That women can “perform” however they are inclined or whatever their age is the “truism” that the cleric of Dialogue 8 offers, but by offering it in contrast to the more intimate or sensitive “knowledge” of the boy, male construction of female sexuality (in disregard of feminine desire) becomes one of the issues highlighted.

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Further on in Chapter 5, Andreas’s assertion that the blind cannot love is qualified by his claim that one who goes blind after he has begun to love can continue to love. But if one takes experience into account, as Andreas models, as well as Andreas’s “exception to the rule” for the blind, one is forced to acknowledge that the blind can love and therefore to question the Master’s “rule” that love must start with sight of the beloved. In his discussion of why the lustful are unsuitable for love, the Master compares them to dogs and donkeys, which are not only symbols of shamelessness and lust but also representatives of the animal nature that humans share with them—something that Andreas points out in this chapter. He also claims he will speak of this later, and when he does, it is to point out that humans are living within their nature (in a positive way) when they respond to their animal instincts.35 Consequently, he challenges not only medieval Christian tradition but also Aristotle. As we can see, Chapter 5 introduces the complexities incumbent upon any doctrinal project, be it philosophical, religious, or social. It also begins the project of placing the incongruities asserted by authorities old and new, sacred and secular, side by side, much in the fashion of Abelard’s Sic et non,36 a project which Andreas continues throughout the remainder of his text. Andreas’s Chapter 5 not only undermines authority, it also begins to push the reader back and forth in the text, to force the reader to read reflexively in order to get the “correct” pronouncements of the authority, another project perpetuated throughout the text. If Chapter 5 begins reflexive reading and the undermining of authority, Chapter 6 puts at issue what kinds of things become challenged when authority is no longer trustworthy: gender, class, founding stories, clergy, the impossibility of language as an honest medium, proper behavior, to name some of the key issues. Chapter 6 also shows what kind of reader “wins”— one who is able to avoid the seductive rhetoric of the empowered. Chapter 6, “How Love Is Won and In How Many Ways,” begins in treatise form, like previous chapters, and provides introductory remarks to the ensuing dialogues that constitute two-thirds of Andreas’s entire work. Chapter 6 begins by rewriting authoritative maxims on how love is most easily gained. But as the text rewrites its authorities, it rewrites itself. It recalls its earlier assertion that there are five means of winning love: good looks ( formae venustate), excellence of character (morum probitate), much eloquent speech (copiosa sermonis facundia), wealth (divitiarum abundantia), and generosity ( facili rei petitae concessione). Andreas, however, overrules previous authority with his own opinion once again: “Sed nostra quidem credit opinio tantum tribus prioribus modis amorem acquiri, duos autem ultimos modos omnino credimus ab aula propulsando amoris, sicut mea tibi suo loco doctrina monstrabit” (1.6.2; “But our greater opinion holds that the first three ways

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ought to acquire love, moreover we believe the other two ways [wealth and generosity] ought to be completely thrown out of the court of love, as my teaching will, in its place, demonstrate to you”). It does, in Book III, as I will explain in Chapter V, but it does so by appearing to do the opposite. Andreas’s Chapter 3 asserts that the appearance of the wooer should be less important to one being wooed than his “character,” that only the “simple” go for appearances, and that the appearance of good character (or nice manners) can make an ugly lover seem handsome. This advice becomes problematic for two reasons. First, the advice is supposed to be from Andreas to Walter, between two male wooers, but here it instructs the wooed, who is supposedly female. Second, since, according to Andreas’s definition of love, beauty is one of the main ingredients necessary for love to begin in a wooer, the wooer is either by definition “simple” (simplex, stupid) or the wooed and the wooer are of such different categories that the same rules do not apply to both. But, since Chapter 6 goes on to recommend character over beauty in the wooed as well, this latter option must be excluded. The wooer and the wooed are therefore both necessarily simplex. Further, “good character” is not described by Andreas as being deeply moral behavior; rather, it amounts to maintaining a good reputation, preservable only by silence. Even love that follows all the rules (pretending for the moment that it could), when the story gets out (which it always does), is said to give the lover a bad reputation, causing angry relatives, separation of the lovers, and their consequent suffering. Attaining one’s desire while remaining socially acceptable is shown to be an impossible enterprise. Any lover—which must also include the reader, since he/she is in Walter’s position—will gain a bad reputation by pursuing love, by reading Andreas’s book. According to his text, to continue reading it is to transgress social expectations in the pursuit of desire. The genuine good character that society claims to require is, therefore, not possessed by the would-be lover, and, even if he can manage to appear to have it, the appearance cannot be kept up forever. A closer look at the introduction to Chapter 6 supports these assertions. Chapter 6 continues its discussion of morality by returning to physical appearances and suggesting that the significations of gender are socially constructed: Sapiens igitur mulier talem sibi comparare perquirat amandum qui morum sit probitate laudandus, non autem qui mulierum se more perungit vel corporis se cultu perlustrat. Non enim potest virili congruere formae mulierum se more ornare vel corporis ornatui deservire. Tales etiam mirificus Ovidius redargendo notavit: “Sint procul a nobis iuvenes ut femina compti, / Fine coli modico forma virilis amat.”

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Sed et si mulierem videris nimia colorum varietate fucatam, eius non eligas formam nisi alia vice primo ipsam extra festiva diligenter aspicias, quia mulier in solo corporis fuco confidens non multum solet morum muneribus ornari. Sicut igitur in masculo diximus, ita credimus in muliere non formam tantum quantum morum honestatem sectandam. (1.6.8–9) (Italics mine.) Wise therefore is such a woman to seek to provide for herself a lover who is praised for his worth with respect to his habits, not however one who anoints himself in the manner of women or examines himself all over for elegance of body. Nor is it possible for manliness to be like the beauty of women, to adorn itself in their custom, or to be subject to decoration of the body. Such ones even marvelous Ovid noted with disapproval: “Away from us young men adorned as women, manly beauty loves to be adorned according to moderate bounds.” But also if you see a woman painted too excessively with a variety of colors, do not pick the beauty of that one unless you first closely inspect her on another day outside festival, because a woman trusting solely in the paint of her body is not much accustomed to be adorned with the gifts of propriety/manners. So as we have said with respect to the male, also we believe in a woman not so much beauty as respectability of manners should be sought.

Mos, moris, which I translate as habit or manners or behavior, can connote character in a moral sense, as Walsh translates it, although it more often carries the sense of social propriety, adherence to expected patterns of behavior or norms. Manners, or self-presentation, seem to best fit the use of the word in this passage and elsewhere in the text. A lover’s worth or value as such is gauged according to his ability to present himself well, and that worth, like the worth of money, is determined by society rather than by the desire of the beloved or by anything that inheres in the lover. Like legal tender, the lover’s worth is ascribed. Lovers, if they are to play the game correctly, must become commodities in an economic system constructed by others—despite the Master’s protestations that love must be free of such encumbrances if it is to be love. Andreas does not, in the end, privilege one kind of ornament over another. He supplants the initially less praiseworthy ornament of makeup and finery with the ornament of good manners (morum probitas), the cultivation of a socially acceptable self-presentation. By making good manners an ornament at all, this passage places the socially acceptable and unacceptable on a par, relativizing any possible moral (or immoral) value inherent in either appearance. Both are contrived facades employed toward the seduction of another. Those who are taken in by or rely upon physical beauty or external artifice are billed as fools. Wit, or the ability to construct and deconstruct appearances, is privileged for both genders. By supplanting

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its first definition of how love begins (excessive meditation on beauty), the text replaces female beauty (the desired object) with interpretive intelligence. Anyone possessing the latter, therefore, becomes (for Andreas) the desired object. Andreas seems to warn Walter about the beauty of women but, in fact, warns him about the dangers of eloquence and seductive rhetoric: Cave igitur, Gualteri, ne inanis te decipiat mulierum forma, quia tanta solet esse mulieris astutia et eius multa facundia quod, postquam coeperis eius acquistis gaudere muneribus, non videbitur tibi facilis ab ipsius amore regressus. Morum probitas acquirit amorem in morum probitate fulgentem. Doctus enim amans vel docta deformem non reiicit amantem, si moribus intus abundet. (1.6.10–11) Beware, therefore, Walter, lest the empty beauty of women deceive you, because the cleverness and considerable eloquence of a woman is usually so great that, after you have begun to take joy in the favors you have acquired from her, it will not seem easy for you to escape from her love. Proper behavior gains a love shining with proper behavior. A learned lover of either sex does not reject an ugly [deformed] lover if he/she abounds inside with good behavior [conformity].

In this passage the empty beauty of which the reader is to beware lies in a woman’s speech more than in her body or physical appearance. It is her eloquence that is dangerously attractive. Ironically, however, rhetorical eloquence, effective flattery, convincing argument, engaging conversation, and psychological manipulation were in the Middle Ages, skills that bore both the power of the serpent over Eve and the privilege of learned men in “upright” positions. The men in the dialogues ply these skills on the women. The women, however, possessing the desired interpretive intelligence, adroitly dismantle the men’s artifice. The text therefore suggests that what ought to be found attractive in and by both sexes arises out of the position of the seducee: interpretive intelligence or language skills that prevent false seduction and promote personal desire. Both the men and the women of the dialogues are eloquent, but the women deceive in order to escape the men, not in order to manipulate them. Andreas, therefore, is telling the reader to be careful of seductive rhetoric, not of women. Andreas’s above quoted passage also begins to suggest that the term “women” is a social one defined by conflicting authorities and poor logic, both of which have little to do with the living, breathing human entities. It also indicates, because of its attribution of men’s manipulative language to women, that women are used as a repository for men of their own evils. These strands continue to be magnified and elaborated upon in Andreas’s text, as later discussion will show.

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Chapter 6 continues in a similar vein with regard to class, showing it to be as much a social construction as gender and as potentially deconstructable as any other hierarchical theory: Mulier similiter non formam vel cultum vel generis quaerat originem, quia “nulli forma placet, si bonitate vacet”; morum atque probitas sola est quae vera facit hominem nobilitate beari et rutilanti forma polere. Nam quum omnes homines uno sumus ab initio stipite derivati unamque secundum naturam originem traximus omnes, non forma, non corporis cultus, non etiam opulentia rerum, sed sola fuit morum probitas quae primitu nobilitate distinxit homines ac generis induxit differentiam. Sed plures quidem sunt qui ab ipsis primis nobilibus sementivam trahentes originem in aliam partem degenerando declinant: “et si convertas, non est propositio falsa.” Sola ergo probitas amoris est digna corona. (1.6.13–15) (Italics mine.) Similarly a woman should not seek beauty or adornment or descent of family, because “no beauty pleases, if it lacks goodness”; and propriety of manners alone truly makes a man to be blessed with nobility, and makes him thrive with the beauty of glowing gold. Since all people are derived from one beginning stock [or entering post] and accordingly we are all drawn out of one natural origin, not beauty, nor bodily adornment, nor even opulence of things, but only honesty of character [ proper behavior] has been used to distinguish the first nobility and introduce difference of family. But there are indeed many whose seed is sprung from those first nobles who have declined, degenerating into the opposite condition; “and if you reverse this, it is not a false proposition.” So only propriety is deserving of love’s crown.

The text is here offering advice to women. They are to look for “true” nobility in a lover, not just the nobility of his social status. That true nobility, unfortunately, lies in morum probitas. While the passage is supposedly promoting goodness, it likens that goodness to the “beauty of gold” then states that opulence of things is no sign of nobility. The text then goes on to point out that, at bottom, all people are alike: all were begotten by a man and drawn from the womb of a woman. What has come to distinguish some people as above others is their ability to project morum probitas—this was, supposedly, how the first members of the nobility came to be. That the text plays the significations of morum probitas—proper behavior, good manners, and honesty of character—against one another is clear not only because the Latin can mean these things but also because the first set of words in quotation marks in the above quoted passage shows that Andreas is aware that there are more precise words for genuine human goodness (such as bonitate) than morum probitas. The latter is an authorial choice for his own purposes. Further, no matter how hard a reader might

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try to cling to the notion that the passage is recommending true goodness as the qualification for true nobility, the last two sentences of it make the attempt futile. The final ergo, that only probitas deserves the crown of love (whatever that crown might mean), supposedly results from and depends upon the previous sentence, which is almost inscrutable. “Sed plures quidem sunt qui ab ipsis primis nobilibus sementivam trahentes originem in aliam partem degenerando declinant: ‘Et si convertas, non est propositio falsa’ ” (1.6.15; “But there are indeed many whose seed is sprung from those first nobles who have declined, degenerating into the opposite condition; ‘and if you reverse this, it is not a false proposition’ ”). The passage seems to suggest that there are many who are noble in social standing who have not retained the nobility of character that won their ancestors their social standing, but it is not clear which part of the statement is reversible, or what it would convey if reversed. Let us experiment with a few of the possibilities. If one takes the proposition to mean that the origin of nobility was with people who behaved well but that since then many noble people have ceased to behave well, reversing the proposition could render the following options: nobility did not begin with people who behaved well, and since then they have begun to behave better; or nobility began with people who behaved ill, and since then they have begun to behave worse; or commoners began as people who behaved ill; and so on. But, according to the unidentified authority in this passage (to make matters worse, in Dialogue 8, 1.6.457 Andreas is quoted as being the author of this rule) the statement will not be false, no matter how one reverses it. Therefore, the only possible sense to be made of this rule, if any can be made, is that people grow good and ill in the eyes of society regardless of social rank, and social rank is attributed regardless of character. The passage in question looks as though it should be arguing, with the classical authors, that bonitate is the original source of social rank. In fact, it says that the ruse of probitas morum is the source of rank. Apparently, then, the passage is suggesting that rank is a social convention developed and supported by those best at conforming to conventions, to the advantage of people like themselves—rank has nothing to do with goodness or anything else that could be called intrinsically valuable. Good manners are learned, acquired, made, not natural to or inherent in a person. No one is born with these, though people are born with rank. The text in fact takes pains to point out the common parentage of human beings, both in the sense of the way people come about through conception and birth, and in the sense of common heritage as children of Adam and Eve, to show that, at bottom, people are people. It seems that rank, like love and money, is created by art, by what might be termed cultural technologies. To challenge the notion that one is born with inherently good or bad qualities, in Andreas’s day, is not far short of

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challenging long-accepted lapsarian theology, which makes people automatically ignoble in God’s eyes because of their birthright of original sin. (Theological doctrine as an inscriptive technology is an issue to which Andreas’s text repeatedly returns, and to which I will return at some length in chapters below.) Andreas’s text also continually returns to the foundational part played by seductive language in creating cultural institutions. Yet his text simultaneously shows that language is only as powerful as the prospective seducee allows it to be. Introducing the dialogues, the Master writes, Sermonis facundia multotiens ad amandum non amantium corda compellit. Ornatum et enim amantis eloquium amoris consuevit concitare aculeos et de loquentis facit probitate praesumi. Quod qualiter fiat, quam brevi potero curabo tibi sermone narrare. (1.6.16) Eloquence of speech frequently compels unloving hearts into loving. The adorned language of a lover is accustomed to excite goads and from discourse makes presumption toward propriety. How that this might be, I will take care to tell to you through speech as briefly as I can.

From this passage, it looks as though language skills should be the foundation of a socially acceptable or good appearance, and that Andreas is going to show Walter how to make himself look good through the art of using language. After this introduction, however, Andreas’s text launches far from briefly into seemingly interminable dialogues, none of which show how eloquent speech (or sermones) make one appear to have a good character and incline the hearts to love of those who do not love. What we see is that eloquence, or sermonizing, has more to do with winning a skirmish, with the attempt to have “power over,” than with actually being able to make oneself look good. None of the exemplary men looks good in these dialogues, and they all speak fluently. The players in these scenes seem more interested in displays of verbal skill than in defending truly held beliefs or in exposing heartfelt emotions, though the speakers continually claim sincerity. Language becomes like cards, like pieces on a chessboard, fungible signs with no real value. Even what those signs might buy or win is never acquired. The woman is never seduced. Not only do we see a lack of earnestness in the arguments, but each dialogue begins with directions from the experienced voice as to how to employ (deploy) the various speeches, most of which are interchangeable even though they are supposed to differ according to class relations. The difficulties of using language as an honest medium, the potential power of language on the human mind and will, and the self-interested use of it by any would-be seducer, especially the institutions of the day—church and court—that prescribe behavior, are expressed in these dialogues by example, explanation and experiment.

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Lovers, clergy, Andreas the Master, and anyone who would seduce through language appears to lack good character. Before Andreas’s text moves on to the dialogues, it returns briefly, but crucially, to the issue of class. Andreas proposes two separate lists of social rank: one for men and one for women, as though the sexes belonged to separate species. Although the lists share terminology, they are presented separately: “Ad hoc imprimis istam tibi trado doctrinam, quod mulierum alia est plebeia, alia nobilis, alia nobilior. Item masculus alius est plebeius, alius est nobilis, alius nobilior, alius nobilissimus” (1.6.17; “Toward this foremost principal [that of seducing by speech] I hand on to you that doctrine: that among women one is common, another is noble, and another more noble; further, one man is common, another is noble, another is more noble, and another is most noble”). Andreas here claims that knowing the givens about social hierarchy will contribute toward acquiring useful language skills; his text’s wording also makes clear that social hierarchies are ascribed. He boldly asserts that “class structure” is a “doctrine.” As such, it can be as fallacious as any. Finally, he asserts that there are not three social classes of people but seven: three for women, corresponding to three for men, with a fourth for men alone. That fourth and highest category is, of course, the clergy. As a rank amongst nobility, it has already been undermined. As if to make impossible any mistake about the arbitrariness of these more or less established divisions and hierarchies, Andreas finishes his instructions about rank as follows: Mulier enim vincta marito ex mariti ordine suam nobilitatem variando commutat. Masculi vero nobilitas mulieris nunquam potest coniunctione mutari. Praeterea unum in masculis plus quam in feminis ordinem reperimus, quia quidam masculus nobilissimus invenitur, ut puta clericus. (1.6.19–20) (Italics mine.) A woman bound to a husband changes her nobility according to the varying rank of the husband. Truly the nobility of a man can never be changed by marriage with a woman. In addition, we find [invent] one rank more in men than in women, because there is found [invented] a man most noble: consider the cleric.

Writing in the plural person of the polite authorial “we,” Andreas claims to find (reperimus) one more rank of men than of women. Although the verb used to describe his discovery does mean “to find,” like invenio, it also means “to invent.” In addition, reperta, a perfect form of reperio, can mean “devices for gain.” It certainly would be to a cleric’s gain to be considered nobler than the highest nobility. Combined with the final puta clericus, as if he offers up the cleric for inspection as well as for admiration, this passage is humorous,

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especially after Andreas names himself as a cleric later in the text. Yet, with Andreas’s text there is always a serious lining attached to the cloak of laughter. This particular gain, that of being the highest in the social hierarchy, was one that the clergy, as an institution, tirelessly sought throughout the Middle Ages, and that goal contributed to war and corruption. War and corruption, and their relation to the church, are issues to which the text returns in the dialogues and in Book III. Finally, this last quoted passage is about marriage as a means of social mobility. Fittingly, the dialogues that follow seem to be more about social institutions than about love. Now that Andreas’s reading instructions and issues of interest have been given their textual bases, let us move on to how Andreas’s text makes meaning through repetition.

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CHAPTER II REPETITION IN ANDREAS’S TEXT

Sed ideo me sciatis in hac parte vos admonere curasse, quia saepius repetita placebunt, maiori soliditate firmantur et attentiori memoria servantur, ac, quum fuerit opportunum, exercentur. (1.6.408) But therefore you must know that I have taken care to advise you in this part, since things most often repeated are eventually approved, become more firmly established and become preserved in the memory more attentively; and, when the opportunity arises, they will be put into practice. Andreas Capellanus, The Man, Dialogue 8, 408 As a process, signification harbors within itself what the epistemological discourse refers to as “agency.” The rules that govern intelligible identity, i.e., that enable and restrict the intelligible assertion of an “I,” rules that are partially structured along matrices of gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality, operate through repetition. Indeed, when the subject is said to be constituted, that means simply that the subject is a consequence of certain rule-governed discourses that govern the intelligible invocation of identity. The subject is not determined by the rules through which it is generated because signification is not a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition that both conceals itself and enforces its rules precisely through the production of substantializing effects. In a sense, all signification takes place within the orbit of the compulsion to repeat; “agency,” then, is to be located within the possibility of a variation on that repetition. J. Butler, 145 Et nonne maius ac laudabilius homini reputatur, si aliquam ex se ipso peroptime artem retineat, quam si eam ex artificio sumpserit alieno? Certe utique est, verum si fateri volueris. (1.6.175) Is it not considered a greater thing and more praiseworthy for a man if he possesses an excellent skill from within himself than if he gets it from the craft of another? Certainly it is so, if you want to acknowledge the truth. Andreas Capellanus, The Man, Dialogue 4, 175

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n this chapter, focusing primarily but not exclusively on the dialogues, I show that the repetition in Andreas’s text, far from being a flaw or mere convention, is a method Andreas uses to draw the reader’s attention to the problematics of acculturated conformity and its transgression. This chapter is divided into two specific areas of focus: “How Repetition in Andreas’s Text Subverts Social Hierarchies” and “How Repetition in Andreas’s Text Subverts Religion.” I read the various types of repetition in Andreas’s text as significant for three reasons. First of all, Andreas nearly always employs repetition with slight to flagrant variation and usually in contexts where a reader would expect to find conformity to the original version. If Andreas does not just quote sloppily, illustrating, as Walsh would have it, the “limitations of his learning,” what do we make of the difference between Andreas’s version and the original?1 What might his “mistakes” suggest we consider? The gaps caused by the differences place the burden of interpretation at least as strenuously as elsewhere onto the reader. Andreas’s use of repetition places the issue of interpretation, especially of certain passages, foremost. Second, although “nonmeaningful variance” is a term often used by medievalists and others to explain (away) difference or which they cannot (or do not want to) account, linguistic research on repetition shows that there is no such thing as nonmeaningful repetition, even where there is no obvious variance.2 The relevance theory, held as a standard presupposition by those in the field, states that repetition is always relevant since, at very least, it exists to emphasize or clarify what has already been stated or written. Linguist Andreas Jucker tried not long ago to challenge this theory by suggesting that perhaps in informal conversation utterances, such as “uh . . . uh . . . uh,” could be considered nonmeaningful. Instead, he found that even

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these repetitions work as repair mechanisms in that they recycle material that was obscured by an overlap or they keep a syntactic frame open while the speaker searches for a lexical item with a fairly high informational load. As a repair mechanism, these repetitions reduce the processing effort required from the addressee. . . . Thus relevance theory stands up quite well to the challenge posed by these seemingly irrelevant repetitions. ( Jucker, 57–58)

If repetition is relevant to the making of meaning at this level of linguistic action, it is certainly significant in writing, which is usually a more careful and intentional linguistic display than informal speech; and repetition must be potentially even more meaningful when there is some variance. Third, I do not believe that calling repetition a medieval rhetorical convention explains anything, and it ignores the breadth of types of repetition in rhetorical practice. According to Brian Vickers, “It seems safe to say that

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no theory could ever embrace all the types of repetition used in rhetoric, in literary or in other texts.”3 Vickers says that Cicero, whom Andreas quotes fairly often, used repetition in its “elemental function” “to fix one point in the minds of the audience.”4 Vickers further states, Repetition of a word or phrase, if done properly, changes the listener: he is not the same person afterwards . . . it changes not just the person but the words themselves. Repetition can induce a sustained scrutiny of a word or idea, often for exegetical or hermeneutical purposes. (Vickers, 98)

This certainly describes part of what Andreas does with repetition. Repetition as a rhetorical convention does not take into consideration the necessity for repetition in any kind of learning or lingual interaction. Andreas Jucker writes, “Repetitions have turned out to be . . . so pervasive in language [that] almost all linguistic frameworks and approaches should have something to say on repetitions.”5 Intertextuality is a kind of repetition for which medieval literature was long devalued or belittled as “derivative” by modern readers who privilege “originality.” But originality is a much more problematic concept than repetition. A.L. Becker makes statements such as “None of us can plumb the depth of the plagiarism of our general discourse. . . . My point here is . . . that we continually plagiarize, and most necessarily when we are original.”6 The final part of Becker’s statement seems to be especially applicable to understanding medieval texts. Rather than take the long standard approach to Andreas’s use of repetition, reiterated by Peter Haidu (“It is generally agreed that medieval literature is the most conventional produced in Europe”7), I would like to suggest with Becker that its “plagiarism” is necessary to its “originality.” And I would like to argue along with Fischer that “repetition and variation . . . are mutually dependent: repetition is a powerful force because of the possibility (or sometimes impossibility) of change, and variation can only be perceived against the background of sameness, that is repetition.”8 Rather than taking as a working presupposition Haidu’s notion that “variation from the norm represented by the pre-determined content is discarded as nonmeaningful variance,”9 I take as a presupposition that variations suggest loci of meaning to be discerned or supplied by the reader. Maria-Elisabeth Conte argues that textual cohesion is a construction dependent upon repeated structures and the interpretation of the reading subject: The coherence of a text is the product of an interpretation, a construction of the interpreter . . . the result of a dynamic interaction between the text

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and the receiver, not . . . a property of a static structure. . . . Structural and configurational patterns of texts . . . determine the expectations of the receiver by activating his intertextual knowledge. . . . When searching for a global sense of a text the receiver may have to project a new interpretation on a part of the text the sense of which had already been construed earlier. . . . Textual structures guide or pilot the construction of coherence, which as such is essentially an accomplishment of the receiver. . . . Cohesion, an intrinsic property of texts, is based on those linguistic devices which connect sentences and parts of texts. The text, the object of interpretation, is generally studded with cohesive devices that function as instructions, as a guide to the reader/hearer for constructing coherence. . . . The text as such is not only a guide to interpretation but is also a mechanism of control; it poses restrictions on possible sets of inferences. At any given point, the continuation of a text may confirm or invalidate inferences drawn previously by the receiver. . . . Interpreting a text is an activity of problem-solving that involves continuous readjustment.10

Andreas seems to be keenly aware of this and to make his reader aware of it, too. The use of repeated structures to this end is especially clear in the Dialogues. As quoted above, repetition, on all its levels, is one of those “linguistic devices which connect sentences and parts of texts.” As Stamos Metzidakis writes, “The new is always seen in terms of the old, the unknown in terms of the known. Repetition is that process which allows the reader to grasp any meaning whatsoever.”11 In the case of Andreas’s text, what is repeated supplies guidance for interpretation, “poses restrictions on possible sets of inferences” (Conte, 197) and offers the reader the opportunity to make what little coherence he/she can. The sections that follow provide copious examples from Andreas’s text. How Repetition in Andreas’s Text Subverts Social Hierarchies Beginning with and returning to the genesis of class that Andreas offers in his introduction to Chapter 6, I would like to show in a bit more detail how precarious this story is as a founding history. For clarity’s sake, it is useful to review several previously established points. First, the story is embedded in an illogical, almost incomprehensible, rule of thumb or paradigm for testing truth. Second, its fundamental argument about morum probitas is circular. Third, sexual activity is identified as the source of life. Here is the passage again: Mulier similiter non formam vel cultum vel generis quaerat originem, quia “nulli forma placet, si bonitate vacet”; morum atque probitas sola est quae vera

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facit hominem nobilitate beari et rutilanti forma polare. Nam quum omnes homines uno sumus ab initio stipite derivati unamque secundum naturam originem traximus omnes, non forma, non corporis cultus, non etiam opulentia rerum, sed sola fuit morum probitas quae primitu nobilitate distinxit homines ac generis induxit differentiam. Sed plures quidem sunt qui ab ipsis primis nobilibus sementivam trahentes originem in aliam partem degenerando declinant: “et si convertas, non est propositio falsa.” Sola ergo probitas amoris est digna corona. (1.6.13–15) Similarly a woman should not seek beauty or adornment or descent of family, because “no beauty pleases, if it lacks goodness”; and propriety of manners alone truly makes a man to be blessed with nobility, and makes him thrive with the beauty of glowing gold. Since all people are derived from one beginning stock [or entering post] and accordingly we are all drawn out of one natural origin, not beauty, nor bodily adornment, nor even opulence of things, but only honesty of character [proper behavior] has been used to distinguish the first nobility and introduce difference of family. But there are indeed many whose seed is sprung from those first nobles who have declined, degenerating into the opposite condition; “and if you reverse this, it is not a false proposition.” So only propriety is deserving of love’s crown.

That the rule of thumb is illogical should be evident. It should also be clear that it undermines the authority of Andreas when he postures as an authority. This rule of thumb resurfaces, and to similarly subversive ends, in Dialogue 8 when it is cited by the cleric in defense of his distinction between genders based upon medical textbooks (1.6.457): just as it contributes to undermining class structure in the passage above, so also it contributes to undermining the construction of gender in Dialogue 8. How circular is the surface argument about morum probitas has already been covered in Chapter I. I would like to add here that not only is morum probitas the behavioral standard of measure according to which a person is supposedly judged and socially ranked, but it is also one of those rules or standards in Andreas’s text that can be used to almost any end. The men claim that they and the women have it; the women claim neither do, both to their own ends; and both parties exhibit bad manners as well as good ones. Morum probitas is a linguistic segment whose semantic value is particularly variable, whose execution in action (like righteousness) can never be completely consistent but whose institutional use is fundamental; consequently, its rhetorical value is high, even though its meaning is minimal or diffuse. That sex is the source of everything also resurfaces in Dialogue 8 and elsewhere, and it will be discussed further in later chapters. Here, I refer to it only to note its essential relation to arguments for human equality: for instance, the acknowledgment that we all came into the world by the same

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means, through conception and birth, and that we are all of the same parentage—Adam and Eve. This argument, along with the precarious genesis of class, undermines the foundation of the institution of nobility. In order to show the extent to which Andreas’s text subverts social hierarchy, specifically with regard to rank, let us now turn to the above quoted story of how nobility came to be, to explore its textual exposition more fully. According to the founding story, the first nobles were singled out as superior for rule because of their proper behavior (morum probitas). This raises some problems beyond those already discussed with regard to morum probitas. Who singled them out? If they singled themselves out, how did they do it? Certainly, anyone with enough power (arms and/or wealth) could put themselves in this privileged position, rendering their distinction military and/or mercenary, rather than qualitative. If others—their inferiors—chose them, there follow two problems. First, how can the uncultivated recognize and judge degrees of cultivation that they do not supposedly know well enough to possess themselves? Second, if the ignoble majority do the choosing, then who is to ensure that they will not choose differently in the following generation (or sooner)? If the nobility were appointed by God, is He then responsible when they go bad (which, according to the passage, they do)? The passage does not give a clue as to how the institution of the nobility really began; it simply raises the question in suggestive ways. Rank seems to have become a cultural habit, for whatever reasons, and to ensure its preservation, the maintenance of life as people know it, reasons are invented to support its existence. The passage points to the inadequacy of genealogy as a supporting argument for hierarchical rule and to the inadequate reasons for the enfranchised of Andreas’s day to be so. Andreas’s twists on Cicero’s genealogy of nobility—that the noble naturally arise by proving themselves to be such—are repeated in one form or another in Dialogues 1–4, and 6. Each repetition adds its own embellishment. In Dialogue 1 (1.6.32–33) it appears in the words of the common man to the common woman. He has just told her, since she found his flattery false, that because he is a true lover, no matter how ugly she might be she would look good to him. He then says, since her probitas and morum digniori, not her birth, have made her appear noble, her nobility is more praiseworthy than that acquired by birth. He continues, “Nam homines universos ab initio prodidit una natura, unaque omnes usque ad hoc tempus tenuisset aequalitas, nisi magnanimitas et morum probitas coepisset homines nobilitatis inaequalitate distinguere” (“For from the beginning one nature produced all people, and one and all would have retained equality to this time had not magnanimity [generosity] and proper manners begun to distinguish people by the inequality of nobility”). Here,

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the man claims that the distinctions between ranks were originally related as much to having the adequate wealth to be generous as it was to manners and that the distinctions are fundamentally unjust. The woman does not disagree with him. She simply replies, in order to avoid him, that since he flatters her by calling her noble she should therefore take a noble lover rather than a common one. In Dialogue 2 (1.6.80) the woman, who is of the lesser nobility, introduces the genealogical argument, appending the argument from nature to claim that “non enim otiose vel sine causa fuit ab aevi primordio inter homines ordinum reperta distinction” (“it was no idle or baseless device to divide men at the dawn of time into social classes”) because “sunt ordinis stabilita natura” (“they are ranks established by nature”). At 1.6.91 and 107–108, however, the commoner who is wooing her, to support his claim to her love on the basis of his qualities rather than his birth, uses the argument that behavior was the original criteria for nobility against her. She responds, Si enim, prout asseris, sola morum probitas amoris invenitur digna muneribus et nobilem facit hominem reputari, superfluo antiquitus nobilitatis fuit ordo repertus et tam aperta distinctione discretus, quum manifestum erat omnem hominem moribus et probitate fulgentem nobilem fore vocandum. Et sic nos oportet instanter asserere nobilitatis ordinis institutiores suos in vanum emisisse labores, quod quam sit absurdum probare non insisto. (1.6.107–108) If, as you assert, only proper behavior is found worthy of the gifts of love and makes a man to be reputed noble, the rank of the nobility invented in ancient times and such manifest marks of distinction are made unnecessary; since it was clear that everyone with manners and polity would by this approach be called “shining noble.” Thus it is immediately necessary for us to argue that those who instituted the order of nobility spent their labors in vain, the absurdity of which I do not press to make good.

She contributes the suggestion that the nobility was invented by a particular group for its own benefit. This is simply called “natural.” The “nature” reflected here is definitely “red in tooth and claw,” not qualitatively judicious or even mannerly. To argue that anyone can be noble by behavior brings the whole system crashing down—the absurdity of this possibility, she does not care to pursue. She seems to glimpse something she would rather not, but the question has been raised. The common man responds, “Quamvis nolim tuos sermones arguere, nulla tamen possum ratione videre, si plebeius nobilem in probitate transcendat, quare ipsum non debeat in suscipiendis superare muneribus, quum ab eodem Adam stipite derivemur” (1.6.112; “I do not wish to refute your words, but I see no reason why a

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commoner who is superior in character to a nobleman should not rise above him in the gifts that he receives. For we are all sprung from the same stock in Adam”). From the plebian point of view, people are fundamentally equal, and his supporting example is based on the “natural” equality that arises from having the same parents. But for the woman, and from the point of view of even the lower nobility, the invented hierarchy is worth preserving by falsely labeling it “natural.” In Dialogue 3, in response to her assertion that he is aiming too high, and to the issue of nature raised by the text, the commoner says the following to the woman of higher nobility: Quibus ego sic respondeo, quia meum genus in mea non potuit persona propriis finibus contineri, instinctu quidem istud cooperante naturae. Quum ergo natura ipsa noluit mihi certos ordinis terminos stabiliri nec sublimiorum ordinum mihi voluit claudere fores, si morum non obstet improbitas, unde vos mihi praesumitis certos praefingere fines et ordinum me subiicere? Nam antiquitus illa ordinum reperta distinctio non nisi illis fuit imposita solis qui praetaxato sibi ordine reperiuntur indigni, vel qui proprium ordinem servant, maiori vero digni nullatenus inveniuntur. Et hoc ad eius assero similitudinem quod in theologica invenitur exaratum scriptura, quae dicit legem non esse positam iusto sed peccare volentibus. Praedicta ergo ordinis antiqua distinctio non prohibet me in quorumlibet maiorum militiam numerare vel maioris ordinis praemia postulare, dum tamen nihil possit aliquis meis iuste obiicere moribus. (1.6.134–136) To these things I respond thus: since my nature was not able to be confined in my person according to proper bounds—this surely being by the overwhelming instigation of nature—since, therefore, nature herself refused to make stable in me set boundaries according to rank, nor desired to close to me entrance to the rank of superiors, as long as improper manners did not prevent it, how is it that you presume to confine me within prescribed bounds and to subject me to rank? From ancient times that invented division of ranks has not been imposed unless solely on those who according to an earlier appraisal were found unworthy of the rank allotted to them, or on those who retain their own rank being found wholly unworthy of a higher. This assertion I justify also by the similitude that is found in theology dug up from scripture, which says the law is not laid down for the just, but for those desiring to sin. Hence the ancient separation of class already mentioned does not keep me from counting in the service of anyone superior, or from claiming the privileges of a greater rank, as long as no one can justly object to my behavior.

He uses the argument from nature, provided in the previous dialogue by the woman of higher rank, to opposite ends. He begins with the earlier premise that the ranks are themselves “natural,” but claims that his case is

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different: he has burst through the constraints of what ought to be his nature into the signifying practices of a much higher rank. Since this unnatural behavior was inspired by nature (which in his case really seems to be a combination of lust and ambition), his behavior must be, in fact, natural; therefore, his pursuit must be “right.” His argument also suggests that the woman is keeping him down (or that those of her rank are keeping those of his rank down). This leaves ambition as the source of nobility and competition as the reason for maintaining it. It also calls into question the definition of nature and natural. A false history accompanies the man’s suggestion that social climbing is natural. According to lines 8–11 of the translation above, “from ancient times” divisions of rank were only imposed upon those who were found unworthy of the rank allotted to them or upon those who retained their own rank being found unworthy of a higher. That is, it is supposedly traditional for those who are “worthy” of a higher rank to get it. Although history shows that people did occasionally become noble who were not originally of noble stock, it was not as common as he makes it sound. For women it would have come by marriage, but for men through some sort of deed (usually military) in support of the existing nobility—not through love or marriage.12 “From ancient times,” is a phrase by which a fictional history or genealogy is given authority. One might call it the argument from tradition, a logical fallacy. Rather than introducing a practice that has become venerable because of its goodness, however, the phrase is empty rhetoric used to gain the speaker’s ends. This is the same way the phrase was and is used d’hors de texte, and it is a rhetorical tool which the Master later doubly undermines: “Cuius sententiae licet veteris non est veneranda senectus, quia maximum nobis propinat errorem” (2.6.15; “Although this teaching is allowed as an ancient one, its age is not to be revered, because it launches on us the greatest error”). That the argument from tradition does not stand to reason has far-reaching implications for both church and court. Finally, the man of the third dialogue appends another argument: since scripture and theology claim that the law was made for sinners and not for the just, it follows, by analogy, that rules about rank should be applied according to behavior. He claims to be among the “just,” therefore above the “law.” The implications suggested by the similitude are not new to the man’s argument, but overtly using religion as a parallel to the argument is new. Problematically, the similitude is offered as though it ought to affect existing social practices related to rank in the same way that the “law,” according to Christian teaching, was offered as an incentive to good behavior. But, according to St. Paul, in the passages to which the man alludes (e.g., 1 Tim. 1.9), what came of trying to follow the law was the discovery that no one was in fact just. Everyone sinned, and consequently there was

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need for salvation by the grace of God; righteousness was to be attributed by faith and grace, rather than earned (e.g., see Rom. 3.10–26). I do not suggest here that Andreas was proto-Protestant, only that, characteristically, he points to problems with accepted interpretations of texts and doctrinal prescription. Likewise, since none of the social climbers in Andreas’s text are worthy of a higher rank through behavior (despite their claims) and since, historically, rank was not attributed according to manners or morals but according to birth and systems of exchange, two questions arise. First, what does the passage suggest about religion? Second, what is the social equivalent of the grace of God that would allow for social climbing? In response to the first, “grace” compared to social rank must either mean that social rank disappears in the grace of God, which makes all people equal (Gal. 3.28), or “grace” must be earned in the same way as rank: bought, taken by force, or inherited. This was certainly the case for any institutional relationship of favor with God in the Church of Andreas’s day. In response to the second question, the woman certainly does not possess the power to bestow rank, as Andreas emphatically noted at the beginning of the dialogues (1.6.19). The “grace” that would allow social climbing seems, in fact, not to exist, unless it were to be bestowed/attributed by people generally, as is rule by rank. If the social/theological parallel is to be consistent, the “voice” of the people with respect to social hierarchy must function like the grace of God. But the parallel seems also to make clear that behavior, whatever the concepts behind it, is difficult to change. The similitude indicates that, whatever scripture says, the Christian is in fact no more free of the law than the would-be lover is free of the rules of rank. The grace of God is as absent as is the voice of the people. What is and what ought to be are greatly at odds, with regard to both religious and social practice, and the enfranchised of both of those spheres are implicated as making effort to retain their power by imposing “law” and preventing “grace.” Certainly the lady of the third dialogue supports the “law” of hierarchy. Her response avoids the implications of the common man’s argument, playing only upon his term “militiam” (he colors himself as a would-be knight in her service), indicating that the superior position to which he aspires must not be as natural as he thinks, since (given his inadequate physique and chubby legs) nature apparently did not fit him out to be a knight. Either she does not take his argument seriously or she takes it so seriously that engaging it in earnest would be too threatening. In Dialogues 4 and 6, the tables are turned: noble men are seeking the love of common women; yet both men repeat versions of the commoners’ arguments. The fourth dialogue (1.6.169) begins with the nobleman telling the common woman that love has sent him to her to solve a knotty problem: “Cuius scilicet sit mulieris magis laudanda probitas, utrum nobilis

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sanguine an illius quae cognoscitur generis nobilitate destitiu?” (“Which is more praiseworthy, the woman of noble blood lauded for her probitas, or a woman similarly praised who is known to be without noble lineage?”) She responds (1.6.171) that “on first sight” it must be the noblewoman since probitas is natural to her. But the common woman finally claims that the nobleman has persuaded her (1.6.176) that morum probitas is more praiseworthy in a commoner than in a noblewoman, since any good thing that is rare is especially precious. Pretending to take him at his word as to her probitas, and placing herself in this special position, she then proceeds to adroitly reject his suit on the grounds that his probitas, evidently being inadequate to win a lady of his own rank, is clearly not adequate to win her. These exchanges show that the arguments for social leveling can be offered by men of any standing in order to get what they want from a woman of any standing different enough from their own to preclude marriage. The women do not counter the arguments so much as the attempts to seduce. The arguments for social leveling therefore gain their own register of discourse in Andreas’s text, working as a kind of counterpoint, often dissonant, against the strains of a supposed discourse of seduction. They also function as one version of the nature/art controversy: Is hierarchy natural or artificial? If artificial, then who is its author, who continues to support it? Whom does the artifice serve? A final example of how a repeated version of the argument develops and resonates is found in Dialogue 6 between a man of the higher nobility and a common woman. He asserts that Love’s command is to follow one’s own desire, regardless of any other rules or constraints (1.6.289). Particularly, a lover should not distinguish according to social rank, since Love “ex quolibet genere suum vult exornare palatium et omnes in sua curia aequaliter militare nulla ordinum praerogativa servata” (“desires to adorn his palace from any [human] progeny and desires all to serve in his court equally without observing the prerogative of rank”). Yet he adds, “Plebeia ergo in amoris cuia aequali cum comite vel comitissa meruit ordine permanere” (1.6.289; “Therefore a common woman has the right to remain in the court of Love with equal rank to that of a count or countess”). Whatever this may suggest about Love’s egalitarianism, it is clear here and on other accounts that the nobleman of this dialogue dangles the possibility of sharing his rank (and wealth) before the common woman as a kind of lure to upward mobility. But the woman does not take the bait because doing so would not accord with her own desire, which she describes as being multiple and divided, not singular or simple: Ea quae dicitis satis ratione nituntur, si cor meum propriae annueret voluntati. Mea namque voluntas esset quae proponitis adimplere, sed cor contradicit omnino et dissuadet per omnia fiere quod plena voluntate desidero. Ergo si

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cor contradicit amare, quaeso ut mihi asseratis cui potius sit favendum, cordi scilicet an voluntati. (1.6.310) The things that you say support themselves with enough reason, if my heart would give closer assent to my will. For my will would be to fulfill that which you propose, but my heart contradicts it and dissuades by all means executing that which I desire with my whole will. Therefore if the heart speaks against loving, I ask you to plainly state for me which is the more to be indulged, heart or will?

This woman impressively flexes what little muscle is allowed her. First, she makes the efficacy of his reason contingent upon her desire, which would accord with “Love’s command” as he has defined it. Second, her action (the result of will, in medieval terms) is mitigated by conflicting desires, like St. Paul being unable to do the good he desires to do (Rom. 7.19–25). The nobleman, however, claims never to have heard of this famous type of division, and says, “debetis eligere quod iustitia et veritate defenditur” (1.6.311; “You ought to choose that which is defended by justice and truth”) as though merely mentioning justice and truth somehow solves the problem. They are in fact part of the problem, if a choosing subject is to consider the justice and truth due herself. She responds that “compulsory service is welcome to none” and that if she were in love, then love’s compulsion would accord with her desire. She is therefore stating that she is not in love. What is the unwelcome compulsory service, if not owing the man what he has paid for or capitulating to a higher rank? To accept his offer would be to owe him herself. She wants to love out of desire, not out of obligation. She says, “Quod autem corde non peto quo modo possem amare non video” (1.6.311; “I do not see how it is possible to love that which the heart does not seek”). This common woman prizes the freedom to follow her own desire, which apparently does not include this man, above any wealth or social standing. Andreas initially offered the story about the establishment of nobility under the pretense of explaining, supporting, and affirming the existing system. But by the time the founding story and its companion arguments have been traced through each locus of their repetition, there can be little doubt that valorizing the nobility is not what the text executes. If it valorizes anything, it seems to be the desire and choice of the individual, especially of women and commoners. The bird metaphor employed in Dialogues 2, 3, 4, and 6 undergoes a similar metamorphosis with respect to hunters and the hunted. In its initial use, the metaphor is supposed to substantiate that people can be excluded from loving based on their rank. By its final use, however, not only has the privilege of noble rank been discarded, but the most profound of social

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divisions, according to Andreas’s text, that between men and women, is brought to light for questioning. Let us look at this development more closely. Although it was not unusual for a medieval author to use hawking as a metaphor for loving, in Andreas’s text the repeated metaphor exhibits a certain consistency not found in similar images outside his text. In Andreas’s text, the woman is always the quarry or the victim, while the man is always the bird of prey. Outside of Andreas’s text, a lady might liken her beloved to a falcon she owns, or lovers might simply engage in falconry as part of an upper-class courtship, or a knight wins a falcon for his lady, and so on.13 The bird is always a signifier for phallic power and is only rarely acquired by the lady for herself, but no one uses it to show the predation of men upon women as consistently as does Andreas. In his text, the metaphor appears for the first time on the lips of the incensed noblewoman of the second dialogue in her attempt to rid herself of the plebe who is wooing her. Yet, even she construes herself as quarry: Quis ergo tu es, qui tam antiqua conaris temerare statuta et sub amoris commento maiorum praecepta subvertere tuique generis tanta niteris praesumptione metas excedere? Nam si adeo mei sensus obliviosa manerem ut tua verba me cogerent his quae dicis annuere, cor tamen tuum non esset tam grandia tolerare sufficiens. Numquid enim lacertiva avis perdicem vel fasianum sua potuit unquam superare virtute? Falcones igitur vel astures hanc decet capere praedam, non autem a milvorum pusillanimitate vexare. (1.6.81–82) Who, therefore, are you to try to violate such ancient rules and subvert our ancestors’ precepts under the pretense of love, and with such presumption to attempt to exceed the limits of your kind? Even if I were to endure the obliteration of my senses so that your words caused me to assent to your proposal, your heart would not be sufficient to endure such lofty undertakings. Is a lizard chaser ever able by its own virtue to overcome a partridge or a pheasant? This booty is suitable for falcons or hawks to seize; it should not be vexed by a petty kite.

Although she compares him to a lizard chaser (lacertiva avis) and a kind of vulture, both raptors whose eating habits could be called “base,” while she compares herself to a sumptuous partridge or pheasant, he remains the would-be consumer and she the consumed. He argues that a bird of prey is only as good as its boldness, and since he is bold and has proven himself to be above his parentage he deserves the title of falcon (1.6.100–101). The metaphor, as she began it, is supposed to reflect natural superiority of social rank; but, in fact, it mirrors men as a rapacious breed and women, regardless of so-called rank, as their prey. This also appears to be an understood arrangement.

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Andreas the Master cites the above account, given by the man in the second dialogue, in his preface to the third dialogue, which is between the plebe and the noblewoman. The citation is problematic for two reasons. First, falcon-like behavior in a lizard chaser is cited as though it were an observable fact of nature rather than a metaphor for social climbing. Second, “nature” in this case appears to be a matter of opinion based on sayings that are “borne about” ( fertur): Nam inter lacertivas fertur aves nasci quandoque quasdam, quae sua virtute vel ferocitate perdices capiunt; sed, quia istud ultra ipsarum noscitur pervenire naturam, fertur quod in eis nisi usque ad annum ab earum computandum nativitate haec non possit durare ferocitas. Post multam ergo probationem, si dignus inveniatur, eligi in amore potest a nobiliori muliere plebeius . . . (1.6.122–223) (Italics mine.) For it is borne about that occasionally amongst lizard chasers are born certain birds that by their courage or fierceness capture partridges, but because this achievement is acknowledged to be beyond their nature, people say that such fierceness cannot endure for more than a year, reckoning from their birth. After much probation, therefore, if he is found worthy, it is possible for a commoner to be selected for love by a woman of the higher nobility.

This passage points to how easily hearsay turns into a “natural” “fact.” It also cites a rule in order to show exceptions to it and the flawed, expedient argumentation of the would-be seducer: the man says that even though this sortie from a bird’s nature does happen, it is rare, and such a bird does not usually live long since its unnatural fierceness is generally too much for its true nature; yet, he says that a commoner can be accepted into the love of a woman of the higher nobility if he is put to lengthy testing (1.6.122–123). We are left to conclude, contrary to the man’s own dictum, not only that some of the mutants must live long, in order to endure the testing but also that “nature” is a concept resulting from a flawed, selfserving argument. Further, since lengthy testing turns out to be the requirement for all suitors, the commoner’s qualifications for service need not be different from those of a man of high standing. Social stratification is as much a construct based on poor reasoning and rapaciousness as is the construct of nature. As much as Andreas and the upper classes of his text protest that proper social standing between lovers is necessary, it is not actually promoted by the text. A slightly more problematic repetition occurs in the fourth dialogue, wherein the bold common woman compares her noble wooer to a talking magpie (1.6.172). He apparently sees this as license to take up the hawking metaphor at 1.6.174, and it becomes painfully circumlocutory

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in his usage. After telling her that her parallels do not work and that morum probitas is more praiseworthy in a commoner than in a noblewoman, he employs this parallel in support of his position: Carior enim reputatur fasianus ab accipitre quam ab asture captus, magisque meretur praemium qui plus quam debet exsolvit, quam qui quod praestare tenebatur exhibuit. (1.6.174) A pheasant captured by an accipitre is reputed to be of greater worth than one caught by an asture; and the man who pays more than he owes deserves a greater reward than he who rendered what he was committed to pay.

Setting aside the man’s admission that the woman is purchasable goods, this is not an easy passage to construe because the two raptors being compared cannot be distinguished from one another with any accuracy. P.G. Walsh tries to make sense of the parallel by glossing accipitre as “sparrowhawk” and asture as “large hawk,” although both simply refer to hawks in general. Because Walsh’s distinction makes no sense, given the purport of the text, he translates the passage as being about women, claiming “the pheasant  worth of character, the sparrowhawk  the common woman, and the large hawk  the noblewoman” (88, n. 80). Although this makes sense by itself, it does not in any way fit the context of the man’s argument. Further, the last qui of the passage is a masculine pronoun: the reward in the parallel belongs to a he, not to a she. I would therefore like to suggest that the two terms for birds are as equal as they appear to be and that the passage is, unintentionally on the man’s part, about the man and his reward, not about the woman or hers. Since the man in this dialogue does not prove himself to be terribly bright (obnoxiously egotistical instead), it makes sense that he should become befuddled and foul up his metaphor by making himself equal to his competitors. That he refers to his common prey as a pheasant is flattery, as the next dialogue shows, as have previous ones, but the woman is attributed noble status because she is pursued by a “hawk.” In Dialogue 6, the man of higher nobility is very clear in his use of the hawking metaphor. Instead of clumsily trying to prove his clever opponent to be foolish, as does the previous noble, the man of the higher nobility in Dialogue 6 responds as follows to the objections of the common woman: Mulier ait: . . . O, quam mirabilis astur debet ille iudicari, qui, perdicibus omissis gruibus et fasianis, ex parvis passeribus et gallinarum filiis sibi curat quaerere victum! (1.6.285) Homo ait: . . . Praeterea pulchrius accipiter suo volatu ingeniosam capit alaudem quam pigram qualiam et linea recta volantem. (1.6.290)

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The woman says: . . . How extraordinary ought that hawk to be judged who, having disregarded partridges, cranes and pheasants, takes pains to seek for himself sustenance from small sparrows and the daughters of chickens! The man says: . . . Then too a falcon is more splendid having caught for himself a clever lark in flight than a lazy quail flying in a straight line.

This man admits that he is engaged in chasing the woman for the sport of it, and that this commoner makes the chase more fun because of her wit. Being compared to a lark, she is credited for her eloquence. He also admits in this metaphor that the object of the hunt is his own glory; he does not even try to pretend it will benefit her. As for her self-comparison with sparrows and chickens, sparrows hint clearly enough at her commonness; but filiis gallinarum (the daughters of chickens) smack of the barnyard, and therefore the term seems to hint at “rustic” parentage or peasants in her genealogy. Perhaps we are to suspect that someone in her family has changed rank, from peasantry to that of a merchant. That the plebia of Dialogue 6 is of the merchant class is likely, given that the plebius in Dialogue 2 (1.6.79) is identified as a businessman by the noblewoman who wonders how he, a man who spends his weekdays in trade, has the effrontery to spend is day off (Sunday) playing at love. If this hint is what it appears, the move from peasant to plebe is the only example of successful social climbing in Andreas’s text. The bird metaphor in each of the dialogues above is engaged by the women in support of class distinctions that will help them escape their pursuers, and it is engaged by the men in order to tear down the barriers of class with which the women would protect themselves. In Andreas’s text, class distinction becomes one more empty sign to be filled with whatever valence a wielder of words or systems happens to need. Class distinction is paraded as a useful means to self-serving ends, not as a legitimate institution. The only social distinction that appears to remain fairly consistent in the dialogues is that between men and women; that hierarchy is eventually challenged as well. In order to complete the discussion of class in Andreas’s text, to make clear that through repetition it promotes social leveling, and to continue my argument that this leveling is not envisioned as being just for men, I turn now to the two “classes” that Andreas supposedly excludes from his lists of possible lovers at the beginning of Chapter 6: peasants and whores. Andreas offers the founding story of nobility and parallel lists of social rank before the dialogues in Chapter 6 supposedly in order to show who can love and who cannot. Yet the dialogues show that loving depends on mutual desire, not on prescription relating to rank. The final two chapters of Book I, which follow the dialogues, address the love of peasants and the

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love of whores, respectively. Chapter 11, “De amore rusticorum,” begins as though peasants, being distinguished even from commoners, are to be completely excluded from love: Sed ne id, quod superius de plebeiorum amore tractavimus, ad agricultores crederes esse referendum, de illorum tibi breviter amore subiungimus. Dicimus enim vix contingere posse quod agricolae in amoris inveniantur curia militare, sed naturaliter sicut equus et mulus ad Veneris opera promoventur, quemadmodum impetus eis naturae demonstrat. Sufficit ergo agricultori labor assiduus et vomeris ligonisque continua sine intermissione solatia. (1.11.1–2) But lest you believe our above discussion of the love of commoners to refer to farmers, we briefly append for you [something] about them. We say that it is very difficult for a farmer to be found in the court of a soldier [knight], but naturally, just like horse and mule, they are impelled to the works of Venus, just as the impetus of nature shows them. So for a farmer hard labor and the continuing uninterrupted consolations of ploughshare and hoe are enough.

In the first sentence, commoners are being compared to farmers apparently with the initial intention of showing that farmers, unlike businessmen, do not love. Yet the sentence that follows it indicates that farmers do in fact occasionally love. The final two sentences are problematic because all lovers in Andreas’s text (not just farmers) seem to be motivated, at bottom, by the impetus naturae. Further, the noblewoman of Dialogue 7 has just informed her noble wooer that she is happily married, enjoying love’s consolations at will (like the farmer and his “plough”) and that this is the best sort of love. The distinction between peasants and nobility is lost in the essentials of human (or bestial, since the farmer is thus compared) sexuality. Andreas then explains why it is that even though farmers can love, it is best not to instruct them about it (and therefore, presumably, why they did not show up in the dialogues): Sed etsi quandoque licet raro contingat eos ultra sui naturam amoris aculeo concitari, ipsos tamen in amoris doctrina non expedit erudire ne, dum actibus sibi naturaliter alienis intendunt, humana praedia, illorum solita fructificare labore, cultoris defectu nobis facta infructifera sentiamus. (1.11.2) But even if it is granted that it may happen however rarely that farmers are aroused beyond their own nature by the prick of love, it is not advantageous to instruct them in the doctrine of love, lest they strain toward actions alien to their nature and we experience human estates, usually made fruitful by their labor, made unfruitful for us by negligence of the husbandman.

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Apparently then, the only reason farmers cannot love is that they might prove unfruitful for the upper classes. Their “nature” is as human as any, and that which binds them to the ground they cultivate for others is not nature, but tradition instituted by people. Why are the estates called humana (human) rather than hominis (of men), if not to point to the selfimposed privilege of the landowners and to the humanity—not to the bestiality—of the laborers? Why does Andreas say the work is done for us (nobis) instead of for the nobility (nobilibus) if not to implicate himself and his reader as being among privileged humans who are dependent upon laboring humans for their food and the leisure for learning and “loving”? From this passage, social hierarchy, including the privilege of reading Andreas’s text, is based upon the greed in human nature, not upon the goodness in it, even the goodness of manners. Loving seems both to be presented as a human inclination and promoted as a right, while the justice of owning or conscripting the bodies of others is brought up for question. Chapter 11 then moves from farmers who love to peasant women who do not. Andreas advises Walter, Si vero et illarum te feminarum amor forte attraxerit, eas pluribus laudibus efferre memento, et, si locum inveneris opportunum, non differas assumere quod petebas et violento potiri amplexu. Vix enim ipsarum in tantum exterius poteris mitigare rigorem, quod quietos fateantur se tibi concessuras amplexus vel optata patiantur te habere solatia, nisi modicae saltem coactionis medela praecedat ipsarum opportuna pudoris. Haec autem dicimus non quasi rusticanarum mulerum tibi suadere volentes amorem, sed ut, si minus provide ad illas provoceris amandum, brevi possis doctrina cognoscere quis tibi sit processus habendus. (1.11.3–4) If truly a strong love of those [peasant] women has drawn you, remember to carry them away with plenty of praise, and should you find an opportune place you should not delay to take what you were seeking nor to gain it by violent embrace. For you will hardly be able to soften their exterior hardness to the extent that they might agree to offer you calm embraces, or perhaps suffer you to have the comforts you hoped for, unless the treatment of a little coercion comes first, suitable to their type of modesty. However, we say this not as if to persuade you to the love of peasant women, but so that, if you are provoked toward loving those women, from brief instruction you may know what course is generally taken.

Disconcertingly, Walsh asserts that this is literature, pastorelle, not rape.14 The passage is about sexual assault. It is brutally and graphically to the point. Andreas is careful to point out that he does not recommend this kind of love, only that what he has described is “the course generally taken.”15 “Love” here is lust, just as in every encounter with women in the text. The

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only difference, besides that most women of rank could be protected by their menfolk, seems to be that the higher the woman’s social rank, the more elaborate the suitor’s flattery and approach must be. Curiously, the praises that are to be lavished upon the peasant women (who ultimately have no choice) are the same ones deployed upon the women in the dialogues, whose “exterior hardness” is just as impossible to soften. As for the compulsion recommended for peasants, the men of the dialogues also attempt to coerce, bribe, flatter, and verbally savage their upper-class quarry into submission. The difference between how a man treats peasant and nonpeasant women seems to lie in how much power he is actually allotted by society over their bodies in a given situation, not in his basic approaches to getting what he wants. Andreas’s text suggests that the honoring of human desire (or the lack of it ) should be the element used to determine human interaction. Just as farmers are supposed to be left out of the ranks of love, and yet are not, so also are whores, the group Andreas considers in Chapter 12. I do not think this means that whores and farmers are to be seen as female and male social parallels. Clearly there are female “rustics,” the victims of rape. Rather, I would like to suggest that whores are a kind of inverted parallel to the “highest” class of men, the class that Andreas invents and appends to his social list: the clergy. (What, then, are the social implications of the famous elevation of the lower half ? Certainly they must be even more threatening than a purely sexual revolution.) Whores are on the lowest end of the scale rather than the highest, but like the clergy they work for a living, they are not supposed to be able to love and they do, and whores seem as unable to be unequivocally wicked as clerics seem unable to be unequivocally righteous. “Whore,” meretrix, prostituta, and occasionally pellex, are the text’s terms of derision for any woman who does not do whatever a man sees fit. In fact, each of the women in the dialogues is either called a whore, treated like one, or compared to one, not because she is oversexed or too easy (although this kind of woman is also called a whore) but because she will not yield to the man. Each of the dialogues begins with the quick and facile words of love that Andreas warns are appropriate only when courting whores (1.6.21–22). In Dialogue 1 (1.6.62–63) the man twists the woman’s reluctance into its opposite, suggesting that she is whorishly eager to consummate their relationship. The woman of the higher nobility of Dialogue 3 accuses the commoner who is wooing her of insinuating she is a whore, since he offers, if she accepts his love, to cover for her if she ever does anything, like lie, that might spoil her spotless reputation (1.6.132). Her sensitivity to the issue of exchange in love sets a standard for interpreting other passages on exchange as well as on whoredom in Andreas’s text.

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The particular lie that is consistently identified as meretricious is giving the suitor hope in exchange for a gift, without any intention of granting love’s consolations. Clearly, this kind of woman would be more accurately called a thief or a cheat than a whore, since there is no exchange of goods. Whatever a woman’s qualities are, if the man in the dialogue finds her unresponsive to the rhetoric of his seduction, he usually calls her a whore for it. This appellation is attributed so often and for so many differing, even opposing, reasons that it begins to be funny. In the parable of the ladies’ hell of Dialogue 5, those who are overeager are called whores. But virgins are ranked and despised as lower than whores when the lady being wooed wants to remain a virgin. The cleric in Dialogue 8 compares the woman of the higher nobility to a whore for preferring the lower part of the body to the upper (1.6.546). In Chapter 9 of Book I, women who accept gifts for their love Andreas judges to be worse than whores (1.9.2–3) since whores are at least honest about their motives. He says a true lover despises gifts from her beloved (which somehow does not ring true), but he is to offer them anyway, especially if she is in need. This particular chapter makes it very difficult to tell the difference between a whore and a beloved. Judgment XIX in Book II, rendered by the queen, says that a woman who accepts a gift without returning love is a whore. Yet clearly if she returns love for a gift she has exchanged “goods” and can be termed a whore. These are just a few of the passages I could cite. By the end of Book III, all women appear to be whores or worse than whores, but given that Andreas’s text tends to valorize whores, against the Master’s official protests, perhaps this is not so bad. Since whores are so often used as a metaphor or a standard of comparison in Andreas’s text, it seems strange when whores are discussed as a living reality in Chapter 12 of Book I. Andreas does this in relatively innocuous even gentle terms: Si vero quaeratur, quid de meretricis sentiamus amore, dicimus omnes meretrices penitus esse vitandas, quia ipsarum foedissima commixtio est, et incestus cum eis crimen semper fere committitur. Praeterea meretrix raro se alicui concedere consuevit nisi primo fuerit muneris susceptione gavisa. Immo etsi quando meretricem contingat amare, eius tamen amorem perniciosum constat esse hominibus, quia familiarem cum meretricibus conversationem habere ab omni sapientia reprobatur, et cuiuslibet inde fama supprimitur. Ad earum autem capessendum amorem doctrinam tibi non curamus exponere, quia, quocunque se affectu concedant petenti, haec semper sine precum instantia largiuntur; ergo ad hoc doctrinam postulare non debes. (1.12) If what were our perceptions about the love of whores were truly sought, we would say that all whores should be utterly avoided because mingling with them is most foul, and irreligious crime is usually always committed

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with them. Then too a whore is rarely in the habit of yielding herself to anyone unless first made joyful by the reception of a gift. Indeed if it does happen that a harlot falls in love, nevertheless it stands firm for her love to be pernicious for men, because to have intimate conversation with whores is disapproved by all good sense, and hence the reputation of whosoever [does this] is sunk. Doctrine on capturing the love of these women, moreover, we do not care to explain, since, however affectionately they yield themselves to a suitor, they bestow these favors without the pressure of entreaties; therefore you should not ask for instruction on this.

Irreligious crime is not always committed with whores. Like other women, whores won’t yield without gifts but they are not included in the relatively long Chapter 9 entitled “On love obtained by money.” They do not need entreaties, but based on the dialogues entreaty is useless in any case. Whores do yield themselves affectionately. Chapter 12 shows that the whore is as capable of loving or being in love as anyone. It is simply not to the social benefit of a man to love one. The reasons given for not loving whores are religious and social—there may be sin involved and one’s reputation will suffer. The chapter describes nothing intrinsically wrong with or disgusting about whores: whatever negative aspects there are about being with them are socially attributed. According to the above passage (Chapter 12), the authority of “all good sense” (or prudence or wisdom) that makes the attribution is on a par with the authority of the vulgi, whose opinion shapes the love-behavior of the upper classes in the dialogues. Who these people with good sense might be or what that good sense means is never broached. Collective “wisdom” simply seems to represent authorship for a body of traditional sayings and practices. Although certain auctors can be cited as saying any of the things “the wise” are credited for, such as the creaky foundation of nobility, no one in particular seems to be responsible for initiating the convention. Further, throughout the text what the wise or the vulgar say is interchangeable, and both are used as authority or leverage toward whatever end the speaker has in mind (e.g., 1.6.29–30, 93, 95, 98–99, 106, 119, 292). The rusticanae are similarly cited (e.g., 1.6.428, 430, 523–524), their proverbs vying with those of the fathers. Yet whoever is cited as responsible, the talk or gossip of the lowest classes holds more sway over the speakers’ behavior than does anything else (e.g., 1.6.524). Before completing the discussion of whores, a little more on “what is said” and how it ought to be taken would be in order since this, too, is a locus of repetition key to understanding the text. Vulgi means simply “the common people” in the twelfth century, as well as the so-called vulgar of any class, a derogatory term for people whose behavior is “below” their station. That the discourse of the lowest stratum of society is credited with

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the power it has in Andreas’s text indicates that the particular power of general opinion is not confined to the empowered elite, with whatever education and rhetoric they may have. In fact, the nobles, especially in the eighth dialogue, complain that they are subject to this particular discourse, that is, vulgar opinion and are not free to behave as they would like. The woman even complains that the cleric is more concerned about what the vulgi think than about what God thinks. And the vulgi are not just upperclass gossips: the vulgi and the rusticani/ae are identified as the same group. One of the most powerful authorities in society as Andreas’s text constructs it is therefore located in the speech of the vulgi and the rusticani/ae. Yet since this speech functions to keep existing institutional systems in working order, it does not always serve the interests of the vulgi or the rusticani/ae. Who really authors this speech becomes a difficult question to answer. But what Andreas suggests can be done about it is much easier to answer: there should be some way for people to find their voices and stop being the ventriloquist’s puppet or dummy. This is especially evident in the dialogues, where Andreas ventriloquizes the brilliant escape efforts of the women, the very efforts that show their equality to men and the insulting nature of the social rules that bind them. In a dense but enlightening passage (2.6.15), Andreas both deconstructs traditions and sayings and connects them to the status of women in his society. First he presents an “ancient” tradition that is not one, then recommends that we change it because it is erroneous: Nunc autem discutiamus veterem errorem, et si mulier fidem frangat amanti, quid fieri debeat videamus. Et antiqua quorundam voluit praedicare sententia ea penitus esse in muliere fallente servanda, quae sunt in fallaci amatore narrata. Cuius sententiae licet veteris non est veneranda senectus, quia maximum nobis propinat errorem. (2.6.15) But now let us shatter the old error, and let us see what ought to be done if a woman breaks faith with her lover. The ancient teaching of some wants to proclaim that the same conventions should be wholly preserved in the case of a deceitful woman as were narrated in the case of the deceitful lover. Although this teaching is allowed as an ancient one, its age is not to be revered, because it launches on us the greatest error.

Clearly this is a fake “tradition.” Historically (in reality) unchastity in women was in fact treated with far greater severity than in men.16 I believe he offers a false tradition here because it is easier to evaluate an obviously false one than a commonly accepted one that happens to be bad. The importance of this passage lies in Andreas’s suggestion that just because a

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tradition or opinion is ancient or generally held does not mean it ought to be revered. And if it is harmful or erroneous, it ought simply to be done away with. After the fake tradition, Andreas then presents the real one as the improved substitution for the supposedly erroneous one—he even “slips” and admits it as such: Absit enim quod tali unquam profiteamur mulieri esse parcendum, quae duorum non erubuit libidini sociari. Quamvis enim istud in masculis toleratur propter usum frequentem et sexus privilegium, quo cuncta in hoc saeculo etiam naturaliter verecunda conceduntur hominibus liberius peragenda, in muliere tamen propter verecundi sexus pudorem adeo iudicatur esse nefandum, quod, postquam mulier plurium se voluptati commiscuit, scortum quasi reputatur immundum et reliquis dominarum choris associari a cunctis iudicatur indigna. (2.6.16) Far be it from me to profess pardon for a woman who did not blush to satisfy the desires of two. Nevertheless this sort of thing is tolerated in men because of custom [or frequent use—usum frequentem] and the privilege of sex by which, in this world, the performance of all shameful acts is conceded to men, naturally free from condemnation. In woman, however, because of the modesty of her sex it is judged to be a sin; once a woman has joined herself to the pleasure of several, she is considered as a filthy whore, judged by all as unworthy to associate with other bands of ladies.

Clearly, “custom” and “judgment by all” treat women and men unequally. If the real convention, the tradition of inequality, were placed in its proper spot in the argument, it would be the one to be got rid of, and the new tradition to replace it would be to treat women as equal to men, allowing both to “more freely engage in shameful acts” on account of their “nature.” The class distinction between men and women, the “privilege” of the male, is here presented for overthrow along with any other erroneous or harmful tradition. There does seem to be method to Andreas’s madness. Returning now to whores, not only do they love, and not only is the term “whore” equivocal, but it also becomes clear that because women’s status and desire should not depend upon general opinion, castigating whores because of that opinion is faulty thinking and ultimately hypocritical. To connect this suggestion more firmly to what Andreas’s text says about desire and rhetoric, let us look again at the final lines of Andreas’s Chapter 12 on whores. He writes, “Ad earum autem capessendum amorem doctrinam tibi non curamus exponere, quia, quocunque se affectu concedant petenti, haec semper sine precum instantia largiuntur; ergo ad hoc doctrinam postulare non debes” (“Doctrine on

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capturing the love of these women, moreover, we do not care to explain, since, however affectionately they yield themselves to a suitor, they bestow these favors without the pressure of entreaties; therefore you should not ask for instruction on this.”) Andreas’s entire text is about the “pressure of entreaty.” For those who actually desire to give what is being asked of them, the rhetoric of seduction is not needed. For those who desire something other than what is asked of them, and who honor that desire, as do the ladies in the dialogues, no amount of seductive rhetoric will succeed. Where desire is acknowledged and followed, the rhetoric of seduction is unnecessary or useless, and whoever employs it is rendered powerless. The rhetoric of seduction is therefore only useful on subjects who, for whatever reason, deny the validity of their own desire or do not know what they want. Andreas’s text undermines seductive discourses and privileges desire and awareness of it. The chapter on whores recognizes that whores are marginalized by the Church, because they are considered to be deep in sin, and that whores are also outlaws in society, because they supposedly follow their desire and do have some control over the exchange of their own bodies.17 “Whore” therefore easily becomes a term of derision for unruly women who avoid the control of whatever male or institution. Reified into a negative or dissuasive term, pronounced by most of the male speakers in Andreas’s text, “whore” becomes part of the rhetorical effort to bend women’s bodies (if not their desires) to the use of men and institutions. In Chapter 12, Andreas’s text “unreifies” the term by redefining it on the basis of his description of real whores, whom the chapter shows to be bad only on the basis of “what is said,” and since what is said turns out to be of dubious authority, the attributed wickedness of whores is equally dubious. The cumulative effect of the undermining of “what is said” in Chapter 12, and the repeated uses of the term “whore” throughout the text, empties the term of its attributed immorality and constructs it as a signifier of marginalized desire and resistance to institutional pre-/proscription. How Repetition in Andreas’s Text Subverts Religion Dialogues 5, 7 and 8 do not talk about divisions of social class as much as about religion. All of the men in the dialogues deify the women to some degree by their language and insinuations, and the men in these three dialogues, especially in the eighth, extend their metaphors to such sacrilegious extremes that they offend the ladies. This is only one of the types of religious reference that make up these dialogues. Since there are more types

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of repetition in Andreas’s text that subvert religion than can be addressed in a single chapter (this would really require a book-length study) I would here like to concentrate on two: how parables or stories—especially hell stories—are used in Andreas’s text and what his text indicates about religious arguments and rules surrounding sex and marriage. Related to the latter, I have already foregrounded and will here discuss two other issues that will be taken up again to different ends in later chapters: what Andreas’s text suggests about amor as the source of all good and what his text tends to signify when it calls something “bestial.” Dialogue 5, between a man and woman, both of the lesser nobility, contains several examples of how stories are used in Andreas’s text. Being of the same social standing, this pair of interlocutors is one of the two in Andreas’s text that could qualify for marriage without disrupting the “natural” order of social hierarchy (this suggestion is found throughout Andreas’s text, but see especially Rule 11, at 2.8.45, and Dialogue 8). The only other speakers who qualify for marriage are the commoners of Dialogue 1, who are divided by age: the man is first too old for the woman, then Andreas pops in and changes the dialogue to suppose him too young. In Dialogue 5 the woman gives the man this reason, based on her desires, for rejecting his love: Nam quod postulas, nullis posses precibus vel laboribus impetrare; firmum etenim est et totius meae mentis propositum Veneris me nunquam supponere servituti nec amantium me poenis subiicere. Quot namque subiaceant amantes angustiis, nemo posset nisi experimento cognoscere. Tot enim poenis atque languoribus exponuntur quod nullus posset nisi experientia doceri. (1.6.210) As for what you demand, you cannot obtain it by any prayers or toils; for it is the unshakable resolve of my whole mind never to submit myself to the slavery of Venus nor to subject myself to the price paid by lovers. The number of difficulties under which lovers place themselves no one is able to know except by experience, for they are exposed to so many torments and weaknesses that one could not be instructed in them save by experience.

Despite her objections to the contrary, she seems to have had experience with love. How else, by her own admission, could she know loving to be so awful? Her objections also begin to jar love from its glorified place in romance and lyric to its place, or rather effects, in the real world. She lists the accompanying pains and sicknesses as reasons for not loving, which could be simply the longing, the absence, the rejections, and so forth, that are supposed to go along with loving. But given her references to being under love’s burdens and to the cost of it all, she may well be referring to the sufferings from love that are experienced specifically by women: pregnancy and childbirth, the loss by

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marriage of what freedom a woman might have, and so on. I base this suggestion also upon what she goes on to say about love: In amoris curiam facillimus est inventus ingressus, sed propter imminentes amantium poenas ibi est perseverare difficile, ex ea vero propter appetibiles actus amoris impossibilis deprehenditur exitus atque durissimus. Nam post verum amoris curiae ingressum nihil postest amans velle vel nolle, nisi quod mensa sibi proponat amoris, et quod alteri possit amanti placere. Ergo talis non est curia appetenda; eius namque loci est omnino fugiendus ingressus, cuius libere non patet egressus. Tartareae etenim talis potest locus curiae comparari; nam, quum Tartari porta cuilibet intrare moretur aperta volenti, nulla est post ingressum exeundi facultas. Malo igitur aere modico Franciae contenta adesse et liberum eundi quo voluero possidere arbitrium quam Ungariaco quidem onusta argento alienae subiici potestati, quia tale multum habere est nihilum habere. Merito ergo amoris aula mihi odiosa exsistit, quare aliunde te oportet amorem petere, frater. (1.6.213–216) It is easy to find and go into the court of Love, but it is difficult to persevere there because of the pains poised above lovers; but people find it impossible and insuperably hard to leave because of the acts of love that they crave. Once a lover has truly entered Love’s court, a lover can say yes or no to nothing except that which is placed before him on Love’s table, and that which can please the other lover. So a court of that kind is not to be approached; we should totally avoid entering a place from which there is no open way to leave easily. Such a place is comparable to the court of hell, for though the gate of hell stays open for anyone desirous of entering, once inside there is no prospect of leaving. Accordingly I prefer to remain content within the restricted clime of France and to keep free discretion to journey at will rather than to be laden with Hungarian silver but subject to the control of another, because to have much on such terms is to have nothing. Deservedly, therefore, the court of Love stands out as odious to me, so take yourself elsewhere to seek love, brother.

She seems in the first quotation to fear subjection to amor, love, or sexual desire, but in the second to fear subjection to a man. Both paragraphs reflect her fear of entering into a relationship or contract from which she can never escape. The power or control (potestati) to which she fears to find herself subjected is that of an “alien” (alienae), a foreigner or stranger, not merely “another” (alterius or utrius). This “alien” is not just a foreign husband, who “like the Hungarian buys himself a French wife,” but he also appears in Dialogue 1 as none other than the man who, in his attempt to secure the woman’s “goods,” compares a woman’s placing herself/her person (suam personam) at the disposal/arbitration (arbitrio) of “another” (alieno) to Christ’s dying for friends. Each of these allusions is worth exploring in more detail before we examine Dialogue 5 any further.

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Walsh identifies the Hungarian historically (100, n. 93) as does Brackett.18 The allusion is to Margarite, a Hungarian noblewoman, betrothed at six months of age to Henry Plantagenet, married to him at two, and later remarried to another, again for the benefit of those in power. The allusion suggests that the woman of Dialogue 5 likens “love” to constrained marriage for the benefit of strangers, as well as to hell. Love, marriage, and hell are seen as equally dire and, if contracted, inescapable. The passage that contains the alien in Dialogue 1 appears at 1.6.64 amidst the suitor’s discussion of the four stages of love. The man has just explained to the woman that in the first three stages she can leave her lover without incurring ill repute. But if lovers have entered the fourth stage, which he defines as consummation (1.6.60), she cannot leave without a very just cause (which would bring what is supposed to be secret up for arbitration). He makes “love” sound very much like betrothal and marriage. He finishes this part of his discourse by saying, “Quid enim mulier maius dare potest quam si suam personam alieno disponat arbitrio?” (1.6.64; “What even is a woman able to give greater than if she dispenses her own person at the will of another?”). To give her body to the arbitrio, or will of another, is what was expected of a woman in marriage. Love, on the other hand, is supposed to be free; yet, at least at the fourth stage, it does not appear to be significantly different from marriage. The way the man poses the question evokes an answer from Chapter 15 of the gospel of John, which the man has been playing upon throughout his attempted seduction. At John 15.13 in Jerome’s Biblia Vulgata, Jesus says to his disciples: “Majorem hac dilectionem nemo habet, ut animam suam ponat quis pro amicis suis.” Or, as the New English Bible puts it, “There is no greater love than this, that a man should lay down his life for his friends.” The alien/man plays throughout the first dialogue upon whatever inclination toward Christian heroism the woman might have, in order to win her final “consolations.” As it turns out, the man in the fifth dialogue is a very similar sort of alien to the man in Dialogue 1. He too tries to manipulate the woman through religion, but unlike the man of Dialogue 1, he does not try to monopolize upon existing injunctions to be Christ-like. The man of Dialogue 5 instead attempts to cash in on the woman’s admitted dread of suffering by constructing for her, out of her own likening of love to hell, a worse hell than love could ever be for women disinclined to love. First, he responds to her fear of slavery to Love with language from the real world: “Liberius nulli potest esse arbitrium, quam si ab eo, quod quis tota mentis intentione desiderat, velle separari non possit” (1.6.216; “A man’s will cannot be more free than if he is unable to separate from the one who he desires with the complete intention of his mind”). This is the language of a religious man. Nearly every writer on mystical theology uses it somewhere.

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For example, although Aelred did not originate the idea, a passage from his Mirror of Charity will serve to illustrate my point: “For loving God means that we join our will to God’s will. It means that our will consents to whatever the will of God commands. It means that we have only one reason for wishing anything, and the reason is that we know that God wills it.”19 Aelred, and for that matter every religious writer who undertakes to explain this, has trouble explaining how such a will can be free.20 Yet, being based on scripture (e.g., see John 8.31–47 and Galatians chapters 5–6) this paradox is generally taken as a given in medieval texts. The man’s allusion to it insinuates that he loves the woman in this divine way and can therefore never give up seeking her; further, her slavery to love (i.e., to him) might really be freedom. Reading the sententiae of the spiritual writers in terms of Andreas’s text, their suggestion that obedience is freedom begins to look like a rhetorical ruse toward the “seduction” of “converts.” Andreas’s love discourse parodies theirs.21 When the man of Dialogue 5 finds that comparing their love to that of God and the soul does not change the woman’s opinion about love, he tries scare tactics. He prefaces a romance of a damned lady with a description of Love’s palace: Fertur enim et est verum, in medio mundi constructum esse palatium quattuor ornatissimas habens facies, et in facie qualibet est porta pulcherrima valde. In ipso autem palatio solus amor et dominarum meruerunt habitare collegia. Orientalem quidem portam solus sibi deus appropriavit amoris, aliae vero tres certis dominarum sunt ordinibus destinatae. Et dominae portae meridianae ianuis semper morantur apertis et ostii semper reperiuntur in limine, sicut et dominae occidentalis portae, sed ipsae extra ipsius limina portae semper reperiuntur vagantes. Quae vero septentrionalis meruerunt portae custodiam, semper clausis morantur ianuis et extra palatii terminos nihil aspiciunt. (1.6.222–223) It is born about—and it is true—that at the center of the world is a palace that is constructed having four highly ornate sides, and in each of those sides is a most beautiful door. In the palace itself only Love and companies of ladies have the right to dwell. The eastern entrance has been approved only for the God of Love himself, while the other three are appointed for particular classes of ladies. The ladies of the south entrance always linger at the open doors and are forever to be found on the threshold. Likewise the ladies of the western entrance, only they are always to be found wandering outside the threshold of the door. But the ones who have the privilege of guarding the north entrance always remain behind closed doors and observe nothing outside the boundaries of the palace.

This description is remarkably like that of the heavenly Jerusalem in Rev. 21.10–27, which says the heavenly city is square with gates at the

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four directions and is lit by the face of God. But the comparison is diabolical, for in “Love’s Palace” the north entrance is also the gate of hell. The heavenly Jerusalem cannot escape its opposite. This is one more of those inversions of probity in which Andreas indulges, in this case in order to satirize church teachings, as well as to suggest the real implications of those teachings. The man of Dialogue 5 explains to the woman that the ladies at the south gate are the right sort, those who allow men in after carefully examining them. Equating the God of Love with the sun, he says these ladies enjoy more of Love’s light than do the others, just as the south enjoys more of the sun’s rays. The ladies at the west gate are promiscuous meretrices who let anyone in, and the ladies at the north gate are those who refuse to love, closing their gates against all comers. This presents several problems all relating to the layout of the palace as described and to the god as the sun. It is a square palace with the god at the east end. If the god/sun is facing into the palace, so as to face/move toward the west, the cold northern ladies are actually on Love’s right, not his damning side, his left. But as the man takes pains to point out, “since they are situated on his left and are accordingly accursed” 1.6.228, Love must be facing out of the palace. Does this mean he is leaving? Or perhaps saying mass like a priest? If the northern ladies are on his left, this means the southern ladies are not in fact blessed by the light of his countenance, since his countenance would be facing east. If he is facing into the palace, the virgins are on his right, and the whores at the west entrance get his direct gaze and are therefore most blessed, the southern ladies least blessed. There is no way the southern ladies could be most blessed, even if the God of Love faced east. The man ends his explanation with the following: “Ex his vero verbis amoris patet palatii dispositio manifesta” (1.6.228; “From these words the arrangement of Love’s palace is clear”). Although the arrangement of the palace is relatively clear, his explanation of its significance does not fit its description (much like a gospel parable) leaving us, in fact, muddled. This is a hell story because people are rewarded or punished according to the teller’s standards of “good” behavior, which he attributes to the resident god, and it alludes to biblical passages wherein the “saved” are on Christ’s right and the “damned” on his left. It is also clearly a fiction concocted by him to manipulate his hearer to his will. What this says about the doctrine of hell promoted by the Church is left for the reader to supply. Logic suggests that hell is a manipulative fiction. The woman, apparently unmuddled by the man’s “clear” account, offers the man a textual reading of his description by proclaiming herself inside the north entrance, but not accursed. Since this hell story fails him because the woman “reads” it carefully, the man tries another one. This

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time he bases the story on his supposed experience rather than on what is said ( fertur—borne about). Unfortunately for his cause, it is also clearly fictional. The type of dream vision that he is about to claim as his own was amongst the most popular literature of Andreas’s day, and the lady to whom he speaks, as well as Andreas’s audience, surely would have been aware of this. The accounts are of visions, usually of hell, but sometimes also of heaven, granted to individuals so that they will not only amend their own lives, but return from their “journeys” with tales to tell that will frighten listeners into amendment of life.22 Few of these “visions” include courtly settings. The few that do include courtly settings tend also to show that knights should give themselves to God rather than to deeds or to ladies. Andreas’s story-telling man strays from this norm, of course, because his purpose is seduction toward his own ends, not toward those of the church. From 1.6.229 to 1.6.275, the man of Dialogue 5 recounts his “experience” in the first person. For brevity’s sake, I will paraphrase, and I conflate the story’s parallel accounts of the ladies and their rewards. (The sexual allusions abound, and the punishments are only traditional in that they relate inherently to the “crime.”) When the man was Lord Robert’s squire, he was riding with a group of the lord’s people through the royal forest of France and stopped in a cool grassy place for a short nap. On waking, he found that his horse had wandered off, and it took him so long to saddle it, once he had found it, that by the time he returned to where they had been everyone else was gone. Now lost, he wandered “aimlessly,” keeping his eyes open. Seeing a huge crowd of riders in the distance, thinking they were his group, he rode to meet them. Instead of his master, he finds a procession that includes three bands of ladies (1.6.232–236). The first group of ladies is well dressed, seated on beautiful horses led by knights to ensure their comfort, and followed by infantry to ensure their safety (from what, in this “otherworld,” one wonders—men, as in the real world?). These ladies are eventually led to a place called “Pleasance” where they are comfortably couched with a sedulous knight by a clear stream. These are the right sort of ladies, equivalent to the ladies of the southern gate, who allow men into the court of love after carefully examining them. The second group of women is followed by so many noisy offers of service that they are made uncomfortable. They eventually stop in a place called “Wetness” where the weather is scorching hot but the flooded streams are so cold that they find no more relief from the heat or the cold than from the suitors. These are the whores, or ladies of the western gate, who accept most, if not all, comers. The third group, which brings up the rear and eats the dust of all the others, are clad in wolf skins and ride nags. They eventually stop in a place called “Dryness” where there is no water, the

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ground scorches their feet, and a pair of men rotate a bundle of thorns upon which the ladies are forced to be seated (1.6.232–236 and 1.6.250–263). These are the ladies of the northern gate who refuse to love. It is one of these with whom the man begins a conversation. The virginal woman cursed to “Dryness” and a horribly thorny seat explains that this large group of people is the army of the dead. The knight at its head is the God of Love (deus est amoris; 1.6.242) who judges all according to their deserts. She says that besides the punishment her interlocutor witnesses, she and her group have been sentenced to many others, far worse, echoing the words of the very lady the narrator of the story is trying to seduce: “quas nullus posset nisi per experientiam scire docentem” (1.6.246; “which none could know unless schooled by experience”). There are many overt references to traditional depictions of hell in this story, and the parallels to Christian mythology are unmistakable. The man in the story responds to the suffering virgin, however, by citing the injustice rather than the justice of this god, and the constraint effected by the evidence of his unjust punishment: Ut video et manifeste cognosco, qui amori elegerit beneplacita facere centuplicata illa retributione suscipiet, et, eundem qui offendere fuerit ausus commissum impune transire non poterit, sed, ut mihi videtur, ultra millecuplum quam fuerit commissum in eum constat vindicari delictum. Talem igitur deum non est offendere tutum, sed in omnibus est sibi servire tutissimum . . . (1.6.247) I see and understand clearly that he who chooses to do pleasing deeds for love will obtain them in repayment a hundredfold, and the one who dares to offend will not be able to escape with impunity, but, it seems to me, the offense will be avenged a thousand times more severely than the wrong inflicted. So it is not safe to displease a god like this, but safest to please him in all things. . . .

In order to see even more clearly that Andreas’s text questions the justice of a God who would invent hell, we will need to explore the scriptural allusions in this passage more closely. The language alludes to a chapter in Matthew’s gospel that was generally interpreted as being about punishment and rewards. In this chapter, Jesus’ interpretation of the parable of the scattered seeds (some of which yield fruit a hundredfold) and his explanation of why he speaks in parables are sandwiched between the repeated, evocative quantities. The repeated quantities, centuplicata and millecuplum, in Andreas’s text, evoke the gospel context in which similar numbering, centesimum, sexagesimum, and trigesimum in the Vulgate, appears both before and after a section in which Jesus explains why he uses parables at all (Matt. 13.8–23).23 He claims he does so because people have become dull—those who would

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understand must sharpen their wits. The disciples finally understand what at first they did not, because they are interested enough to inquire further. The allusion seems to point to Andreas’s direction to readers, as well. Andreas’s text also uses stories that point, like parables, to more or less covert meanings, the understanding of which depends upon the assiduousness of the interpreter. Further, the passage of Andreas’s text under scrutiny not only compares the God of Love and the God of Christianity but also suggests that the Christian God, when preached as a judge, condemns unfairly and perhaps to the advantage of his mediators. Returning to the story that the man of Dialogue 5 tells the woman, the knight begs leave of the damned virgin, who has informed him so thoroughly, that he may depart so that he might save others from a fate such as hers: Talem igitur deum non est offendere tutum, sed in omnibus est sibi servire tutissimum qui talibus suos novit praemiis munerare et suos contemptores tam gravibus poenis affligere. Rogo itaque, domina mea, et pro viribus supplico ut recedendi mihi licentiam largiaris, ut haec valeam dominabus quae vidi ita narrare. (1.6.247–248) It is therefore not safe to displease a god like this, but safest to serve him in everything, for he knows how to pay his followers with such rewards, and to afflict the contemptuous with such harsh punishments. So I ask, my lady, and beg you with all my strength to grant me permission to leave, so that I can recount what I have seen to ladies.

She says that only the rex amoris can give him permission. He prays to this king (1.6.265–266) and is not only granted permission to leave but is also commissioned to tell all ladies what he has seen, so that they might be saved from punishment (1.6.267). The man of Dialogue 5 is thus claiming to be a savior or missionary, as in the conventional and popular hell stories. The king of the story even sends with the man a list of rules of love (principalia amoris), which the king subjects to the authority of “the book addressed to Walter” (1.6.268–269). The woman of Dialogue 5, for whose benefit the “missionary” is recounting the story, responds that “whether the story is true or not,” it frightens her enough that she agrees to become a lady of the southern gate and to carefully screen lovers (1.6.276–277). However, since these lovers apparently do not include her interlocutor, she retains her freedom for the time being. There can be no doubt that this hell story is a fiction used by Andreas to show how hell stories are used—to conscript desire and to gain whatever else may be wanted from people. The stories debunked, people are free to say “no” not only to the constraints of the church but also to any story used to such ends.

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As surely as Andreas’s text suggests that hell is a myth invented to inspire a desired action, the text also opens the possibility for the reader to accept his or her own desire by disengaging (as a convenient fiction) the deterrent that hell presents. Hell stories and threats are found throughout Andreas’s text and tend to work in similar fashion, though with varying nuances. They provide a conspicuous locus of repetition which tends to disclose the (ab)uses of fiction. I would now like to explore the use of repeated religious arguments and rules about sex and marriage in Andreas’s text, particularly when they are placed side by side with prescriptions from other authorities. Dialogues 7 and 8 discuss religious rules about sex and marriage in the most detail. Dialogue 7, between a man of the higher nobility and a noble lady, is mostly about marriage and related rules, and I will begin with it. The basic disagreement in this dialogue is over whether ease or difficulty is preferable in love: the woman prefers ease; the man prefers amor de lonh (love from afar) and obstacles generally (1.6.359–362). She eventually calls his bluff and announces herself to be happily married, making herself unavailable by law as well as by inclination (1.6.366). Although the reader tends to reel at this revelation, the man seems familiar with the fact (1.6.367). Marriage throws both interlocutors into a series of pseudoscholastic redefinitions of love that begin with the man’s assertion that marriage and love are incompatible because “Quid enim aliud est amor nisi immoderata et furtivi et latentis amplexus concupiscibiliter percipiendi ambitio?” (1.6.368; “What else is love than an uncontrolled desire to obtain the sensual gratification of a stealthy and secret embrace?”). Since sex in marriage can never be secret, he argues, love and marriage are incompatible. He supports his position by citing Cicero’s De amicitia, saying that married couples can no more be lovers than fathers and sons can be friends (1.6.370). Unfortunately for the man’s argument, Cicero’s De amicitia indicates that fathers and sons can and should be friends,24 as Andreas and nearly any reader able to read his text at the time would have known. The man follows up his misuse of authority by citing the rule that jealousy is the nurse of love and the bane of marriage (1.6.371). She counters that jealousy is always bad, that it is the woman who suffers at the hands of a jealous man, and that jealousy has always been condemned as loathsome (1.6.373). She then redefines love from her own experience, using scholastic methods of inquiry and definition as a way to validate her experience in the man’s eyes: Sed si recte definitionem intelligatis, ea inter coniugatos amor impediri non potest. Namquod in ea ponitur “latentis amplexus,” expositionem denotat termini praecedentis translate prolati, et latentes amplexus sibi vicissim

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porrigere coniugatos non videtur contradictionis timore omnimoda perficiendi facultas. Ille enim amor ab omnibus est eligendus quem obsequendi securitas assiduis facit amplexibus enutriri, immo, quod maius est, qui sine crimine quotidianis potest actibus exerceri. Talis igitur est meis fruiturus amplexibus eligendus, qui mecum valeat mariti et amantis vice potiri, quia, quidquid definitio tradat amoris, non videtur aliud esse amor nisi de aliquo habita immoderata carnalis dilectionis ambitio, qua nil inter coniugatos contradicit haberi. (1.6.374–376) But if you understand the definition rightly, love between married people cannot be hindered by it. In fact, “secret embrace” is placed in it [the definition], it specifies the explanation of the preceding [term] in its metaphorical extension, and secret embrace on the other hand does not seem to extend to itself the impossibility of married persons offering to each other unlimited opportunity of consummating love without fear. In fact that security should be elected by all that makes continual embraces to be nurturing; on the contrary, better yet, all should choose what can be practiced daily without reproach. Such is the man whom I must choose to take joy in my embraces, who in my company can attain the role of both husband and lover; for whatever the definition of love lays down, love seems to be nothing other than an uncontrolled desire of physical affection for someone, and there is no contradiction to this for married people.

Not only is love in marriage possible, she argues, but marriage is to be preferred since love’s consolations can be practiced without sin. He responds with a lengthy scholastic redefinition of jealousy that is supposed to clearly show that it is praiseworthy between lovers, but, in fact, his definition obfuscates anything he might have been trying to show. Jealousy seems to be introduced more as an irrelevant distinction or smokescreen to cloak the real point being made in the text. More convincingly, the man cites the authority of the Church against her: Quod autem voluistis vestra responsione firmare talem esse penitus eligendum amorem qui possit sine crimine exerceri, stare non posse videtur. Nam quidquid solatii ab ipsis coniugatis ultra prolis affectionem vel debiti solutionem alterna vice porrigitur, crimine carere non potest; immo satis acrius vindicatur, si sacrae rei usum deformet abusus, quam si consueta utamur abusione. Gravius est in uxore quam in alia reperitur. Nam vehemens amator, ut apostolica lege docetur, in propria uxore iudicatur adulter. (1.6.382–383) But the contention in your reply that the love that can be practiced without sin is certainly to be preferred appears unable to stand. For whatever consolation is extended to each other by the married couple beyond affection for their offspring or discharge of obligations cannot be free from sin; on the contrary, the punishment is all the keener if abuse disfigures the use of something sacred than if we follow an abuse that is customary. The sin

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is more serious in a wife than in another woman. For a lover, as we are taught by apostolic law, who shows eagerness toward his own wife is accounted an adulterer.

This argument serves not only to counter the woman’s satisfaction with her love arrangement, but it brings the Church’s self-contradictory prescriptions up for examination. This latter seems to be the real issue for scrutiny. Walsh writes in a footnote, “The influence of Jerome is obvious here.”25 Jerome was notoriously antiflesh, but the topic remains prominent in twelfth-century discussion; see, for example, Peter Lombard (Sent., 4.31) and Alan of Lille (Summa de arte praed., 45).26 It is not, however, to be found in “apostolic law,” as the cleric asserts. The Church had seen marriage as a legitimate way to control sexual desire since St. Paul (e.g., 1 Cor. 7), but Paul’s concern is about adultery and fornication, not about lust in marriage. For the medieval church, excessive lust, wherever it might be found, was still sinful. The problem then became to define or delineate exactly how much lust was excessive. Hugh of St. Victor, for example, wrestles with this in discussions of marriage in II.11 of his De sacramentis. Hugh is finally unable to provide such a definition, since he attempts to establish the God-ordained goodness of marital relations.27 The twelfth-century church, being very much concerned with establishing laws and definitions, and often being expected to adjudicate over marital matters for the nobility, struggled with nearly everything related to sex and marriage.28 What is unusual about Andreas’s passage above is not the man’s assertion but that it highlights the fact that marriage was as potentially sinful as any other state, perhaps even more so, since its abuse is the abuse of a sacrament. What little sexual safety St. Paul found in marriage was undermined by the proscriptions of the medieval church. Even so, the woman of Dialogue 7 does not capitulate but suggests that an arbitrator help them decide the issue. The man does not like the idea but concedes on the condition that a woman be the arbitrator. The woman of the dialogue chooses Marie, countess of Champagne, but the man of the dialogue dictates the letter to Marie. Who dictates, narrates, copies, or invents Marie’s response, which ends the dialogue, is not disclosed by the text. Andreas is, of course, ultimately in charge of the direction of this fiction. “Marie” judges in the man’s favor but not for his or for the church’s reasons. Rather, exhibiting one more problem with what scripture and the church say about sexual relations in marriage, Marie says that married people do not belong to themselves but to each other and therefore owe one another the desired consolations.29 Marie then claims that love cannot exist in marriage since in love “amantes sibi invicem gratis omnia largiuntur

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nullius necessitatis ratione cogente” (1.6.397; “lovers bestow all they have on each other freely, and without the compulsion of any consideration of necessity”). This freedom in love sounds like a laudable ideal; yet Marie finally and apparently unintentionally shows love to be no more free than marriage, and for the same reasons. Marie accomplishes this when she finishes the letter by quoting the God of Love (rather than the church) as her authority, referring to the list of rules offered at the end of Andreas’s Book II. She argues with circularity that true jealousy cannot exist in marriage, since love cannot exist in marriage. Therefore, since Love’s rule states, “qui non zelat amare non potest” (“he who is not jealous cannot love”) love cannot exist in marriage. This is rule 2 (2.8.44). The reader, left to peruse the list of rules, finds them to be as prescriptive about sex as the Christian rules. Here are the relevant ones, which I translate very literally: 5. “Non est sapidum quod amans ab invito sumit coamante” (“The feast is not tasty that a lover takes from an unwilling partner”); 8. “Nemo sine rationis excessu suo debet amore privari” (“No one ought to be deprived of his love without extraordinary reason”); 26. “Amor nil posset amori denegare” (“Love is never able to deny anything to love”); 27. “Amans coamantis solatiis satiari non potest” (“A lover can never be sated by the consolations of the beloved”); 29. “Non solet amare quem nimia voluptatis abundantia vexat” (“It is not usual for one to love who an excessive quantity of sensuality vexes”). It seems, therefore, that lovers do in fact try to wrest sex from reluctant partners, that partners (coamans) should not deny themselves to their lovers, that lovers are insatiable; yet they should not be excessive. These paradoxes are reminiscent of the kinds of mutually exclusive prescriptions about sex and marriage put forward by churchmen. As for sensitivity to the woman’s desire (or lack of it), which is promoted here and elsewhere in Andreas’s text as being proper to a lover, the adjudicating Marie (like the men in the dialogues) seems singularly uninterested in it. She “writes” that by Love’s command a woman must love outside marriage in order to deserve love’s “crown” (the reward of the ladies of the southern gate). So much for freedom in love. Or, at least, so much for freedom in any relation that is defined, categorized, and adjudicated. The effect of Marie’s judgment is the same as that of the judgments repeated ad nauseam in Book II. In these judgments, the love between people supposedly devoted to one another, which must remain secret to be authentic, is made public for adjudication when mutual devotion becomes somehow impaired. Impaired devotion, or love that does not last, seems to be the usual course of events in Andreas’s text. This makes the perpetual love promoted both by the church and by lovers an ideal that is never realized. As the events leading to a particular problem are rehearsed, the

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“accidents” (in the scholastic sense) of love seem to erase its “essence”— nothing seems to be left of love but the nomina, the verbal representations of a fictional category. Andreas prefaces the judgments in Book II with six chapters that are supposed to help the lover read the signs of love, but in fact they only manage to show that the same signs can indicate opposing things. Book II constitutes one of the main loci of Andreas’s parodic performances of the church’s tendency to create nonmeaning through overdefinition. Besides criticizing the Church’s tendency to undermine itself intellectually and conceptually through overcontrol, Book II dramatizes the Church’s tendency to overcontrol human behavior, that is, to oppress. The judgments in Book II show how the details of human experience shatter the categories meant to keep people manageable. The lovers in these judgments beg the powers that be to impose order on their lives; but conflicting desires and haphazard events inevitably cause chaos and an ensuing chain reaction of inventing more rules to which, when broken, as they inevitably are, are appended several more rules. Once rules are pronounced in these judgments, the lover’s desire becomes irrelevant. The need for which the law was designed is disregarded. Andreas’s text parodies the Church’s attempts to impose order on human behavior, but it does not flout all need for order or all need for socialization of desire. The dialogues dramatize both real and superficial needs that are the outgrowths of human pettiness and stupidity. I draw the following examples of challenges to religious authority from Dialogue 8, between a cleric and a woman of the highest nobility. It is about questions that were religious in the twelfth century, questions as to what is the ultimate source of life, good, and evil, and whether there is only one source. Dialogue 8 suggests in places, against the mainstream, that love, or sex, is the source of all good as well as the source of all people. This otherwise simple ontological principle is complicated by overlapping definitions of love and of God scattered throughout the text, as well as by the arguments of Neoplatonic Christianity presented by the cleric in Dialogue 8. That ladies are the source of all good behavior in men has been rehearsed by each of the men at least once in their respective dialogues. Dialogue 8, however, not only repeats this saying but also explores its meaning and philosophical or theological implications. This is accomplished in a number of ways, but for the sake of brevity I will focus mainly on the story of top and bottom presented by the lady, first tracing the arguments that lead to it. The man begins the dialogue by reversing Eve’s infamy but increasing women’s responsibility: Credo quidem et est verum bonos omnes ob hoc a Deo in hac vita disponi, ut vestris et aliarum dominarum voluntatibus obsequantur, et lucidissima videtur

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mihi ratione constare quod homines nil esse possunt nilque de bonitatis valent fonte praelibare, nisi dominarum hoc fecerint suadela commoti. Sed quamvis et mulieribus cuncta videantur bona procedere, et multam eis Dominus praerogativam concesserit, et omnium dicantur esse causa et origo bonorum, necessitas sibi tamen evidenter incumbit ut tales se debeant bona facientibus exhibere, ut eorum probitas earum intuitu de virtute in virtutem modis omnibus crescere videatur. Nam, si nulli lucem ipsarum claritudo contulerit, erit tanquam candela sub modio latenter abscondita, cuius radius nullius meruit tenebras propulsare nec cuiusquam splendere profectui. (1.6.403–404) I believe and it is true that all good men are set in this life by God to serve the desires of yourself and of other ladies, and it seems to me established by the clearest reasoning that men can be nothing nor drink of the fount of goodness, unless they so act under the persuasion of ladies. But though all good things clearly derive from women, and the Lord has granted them so exalted a preference, and they are said to be the cause and source of all good things, a clear obligation lies on them that they must show themselves to men who perform good deeds so that the worth of such men seems to grow in every way from virtue to virtue under their gaze. For, if their brightness bestows light on none, it will be like a candle hidden under a bushel, whose light is not worthy to insufficient to drive off anyone’s darkness or to shine for anyone’s benefit.

A similarly back-handed way of making women responsible for the evils of the world has been perpetuated by the men in each dialogue. But the cleric continues, using not only scriptural allusion but also the language of mysticism to deify the woman, besmirching God in the process. The man/cleric is ultimately unable to infuse his praise with credibility. He says good men speak well of women (1.6.405–406) yet later in the dialogue he is himself as unable to do so, despite his efforts to remain “courteous.” Even when he does speak well of women, it is more manipulative than authentic. Of women who refuse to love, he speaks in religious and derogatory terms: Pietas ergo vestra conversa respiciat et meae solitariae cogitationi adminiculum praestet augmenti. Et vos quidem attentissima prece deposco ut amoris non studeatis curiam evitare. Nam ab amoris aula semotae sibi tantummodo vivunt ex earum vita nemine sentiente profectum; prodesse autem nulli volentes pro mortuis saeculo reputantur, et earum fama nullatenus est digna relatu sed momumento prorsus silentii subhumanda. (1.6.406) With a sense of duty, therefore, turn and gaze on me and offer my lonely contemplation the prospect of gain. In particular I request with most intent prayers that you do not seek to avoid the court of Love. For all those who live outside the hall of Love live only for themselves, and no one experiences profit [from them]. They are regarded as dead by the world, and their fame utterly unworthy of mention but completely buried in silence.

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The man asks her not to behave like a nun, dead to the world and buried in silence, but to be productive—toward the growth of good in men (1.6.407). He has apparently approached her in this way a number of times, since he follows this speech with the passage about repetition quoted at the beginning of this chapter: “Sed ideo me sciatis in hac parte vos admonere curasse, quia saepius repetita placebunt, maiori soliditate firmantur et attentiori memoria servantur, ac, quum fuerit opportunum, exercentur” (1.6.408; “But therefore you must know that I have taken care to advise you in this part, since things most often repeated are eventually approved, become more firmly established and become preserved in the memory more attentively; and, when the opportunity arises, they will be put into practice”). She sarcastically responds, “quamvis vestra verba sint alta nimis et profunda et amoris subtilitatis attingentia muros” (1.6.409; “words are so lofty and pregnant in sense that they assail the walls of Love’s subtlety”). The image is one of siege or rape—she does not find him subtle in the least—and the dynamic she sets is one of matching wits. She agrees that her duty is to inspire good in others, but she argues that to offer love offends God and is the cause of death for many (1.6.410–411). The man then quotes scripture at her, insinuating that she is a tease, complaining that she has “one foot in the world,” since she is nice to men, and that she should either love them or not show them any courtesy (1.6.415–417). Continuing to play upon religious precepts and scripture, he argues, Credo tamen in amore Deum graviter offendi non posse; nam quod natura cogente perficitur, facili potest expiatione mundari. Praeterea fas nullatenus esse videtur id inter crimina reputare, a quo bonum in hac vita summum habet initium, et sine quo nullus in orbe posset laude dignus haberi. (1.6.417–418) I believe nevertheless that God cannot be gravely angered by love, because that which is performed by nature’s compulsion can be easily atoned for and erased. Besides it seems in no sense right to repute a crime that from which the highest good in this life has its start, and without which no man in the world could be considered praiseworthy.

Summum bonum was the medieval philosophical term used for God. But here this highest good, whatever it is, has its source in sex, according to the cleric. Believing readers are left with real questions: How can something so enjoyable, which we are made by nature to do and which is the source of our lives, be a sin? Since God made nature and people, how can He condemn their functions? Laying aside for now the theological debates, misuses of scripture, and mutual condemnations that ensue between the speakers, I move to a similar

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kind of questioning, this time of the medieval Christian doctrine of the fall, this time presented by the woman. In response to her earlier (stock) accusation that he, like most priests, is given to “serving the belly” on account of his excessive leisure, he uses Eve in an outdated supporting example of how women are in fact the ones most likely to “serve the belly.” Earlier theologians had argued that the Eve’s primary sin was gluttony, but by the twelfth century, more complex explanations existed. Hugh of St. Victor, for instance, says that Eve’s sin was only partly gluttony and began as a desire to be like God and to know good and evil. “Nowhere is it read that God prohibited man from desiring likeness of divinity or knowledge of good and evil,” writes Hugh in 1.7.7 of De sacramentis. Then because of the devil’s wiles, and because of the beauty and pleasure associated with the fruit, gluttony was added to pride and avarice as Eve’s sins (De sac., 121–126). Hugh goes on to argue that the man and the woman are equally culpable; yet he says the devil chose the woman as his prime target because she was naturally weaker and more credulous. He also writes, “She herself, then, to some extent began malice, who gave to the tempter the boldness of iniquitous persuasion” (1.7.4). The woman’s response to the cleric of Dialogue 8, however, is a commonsense argument against lapsarian theology—how can anyone, or everyone, be justly held accountable and punished for what someone else did? She levels the question at her would-be seducer on her own behalf in such a way that it is not necessary to read it as her argument against the doctrine of the fall, although it works as such. The reader is therefore left responsible for his or her own heretical answer. Along the lines of Hugh of St. Victor, she continues with more sophisticated theological thinking than the man’s on why Eve sinned: Si ex meis dictis vester sit animus concitatus, mihi soli debetis proverbia convitiosa rependere, et pro unius offensa contra omnes non decet vos mulieres generaliter desaevire. Nam, quod mulier primo fuit propter gulam divina transgressa mandata, hoc fecit daemonis calliditate decepta non quasi ventris appetitum cupiens effrenare, qui nullus erat, sed tanquam stulta decipientis daemonis dicta credendo, boni cupiens et mali Domino prohibente scientiam possidere. (1.6.500) If by my words your spirit be agitated, you ought to pay back the owed proverbs to me alone; it is inappropriate to rage against all women in general because of the offense caused by one. As for the woman’s having been the first to transgress the Lord’s command through gluttony, she did this because she was deceived by the devil’s cunning, not because of her belly’s appetite, which was nonexistent, but rather she was foolish, believing the words of the deceiving devil, and desired to possess the knowledge of good and evil prohibited by the Lord.

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Although she ends her response in accord with theologians, her initial comment is one that could be made to them: it is inappropriate to rail against all women because of Eve. And, what one must be wary of is the words of deceivers. When it becomes clear to the man that the woman is adequately informed and mentally equipped to be the one to pose the problem, he ends the discussion: “super praesenti articulo cito nobis disputandi materia non decesset, et ideo hac verborum altercatione dimissa ad principale mihi peto propositum responderi” (1.6.503; “The present subject has matter for dispute not soon exhausted, and accordingly I want to abandon the argument and ask for a reply to my main point”). The doctrine of the Fall presents a number of problems for which there are no solutions, and it begins arguments that become interminable unless they are simply cut off. Even though he calls for a “cease-fire” for reasons contributing to his own amorous advantage, his discourse combined with hers indicates that it would make a great deal of sense to call a cease-fire between the church fathers and women, particularly over the issue of the Fall. Coming at last to the infamous problem of top and bottom, the woman seems to call her own cease-fire by beginning to draw their conversation to a close, presenting the man with some story problems. Under the pretense of asking his advice she says, Nam quum mulier quaedam mirae probitatis industria duorum amorem petentium alterum vellet ex propria electione repellere et alterum prorsus admittere, taliter in se ipsa amoris est partita solatia. Ait enim: “Alteri vestrum mei sit pars superior electa dimidia, et pars inferior sit alteri designata petenti.” Quorum uterque morae cuiuslibet intermissione reiecta propriam sibi partem elegit, et uterque potiorem se partem elegisse fatetur et altero se digniorem in amoris perceptione pro dignioris partis electione contendit. Praenarrata vero mulier suum nolens improvide praecipitare arbitrium, litigantium consensu, uter istorum sit potior in eo quod postulaverat iudicandus, meo quidem quaerit iudicio definiri. Quaero igitur, quis vobis videatur in sua magis electione laudandus. (1.6.533–534) A woman of admirable probity wanted by her own choice to reject one and eagerly accept the other of two men diligently seeking her love, and this was how she allotted her consolations of love. She said: “One of you must choose my upper half, and the other have the lower part allotted to his request.” Each then rejected any period of delay and chose his own part, and each confessed that he had chosen the better part and contended that he was worthier than the other in the acquisition of love because of his choice of the worthier part. In fact, the woman I told of was unwilling to precipitate a judgment [arbitrium] without thought, and with the consent of the litigants [litigantium] she sought my judicial investigation [iudicio] to define [which

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was to be pronounced most worthy]. I ask, therefore, which seems to you more praiseworthy in his choice.

At the outset, the issue is said to be the woman’s choice, but the woman in the story cannot make up her mind, so she gives her power to men and resorts to arbitrium, litigantium, and iudicandus (all terms used in courts of law). The men in the story have no trouble making up their minds and, fortunately, do not opt for the same part. The woman, however, does not want to make a final decision improvide—without prudence or foresight— a word that generally describes a man who has carelessly (improvide) jeopardized his love by an act of infidelity (e.g., 1.11.4; 2.1.4; 2.6.22). She therefore asks the lady of the dialogue to pronounce her judgment on the matter, who in turn is asking the man of the dialogue, the cleric, his opinion. The narratives of both interlocutors of Dialogue 8 are couched in a mise en abyme that disassociates the teller from his or her story yet implicates every subject involved, including the reader. After the woman’s story, the speakers go on to discuss the alternatives, and it becomes clear that the story is a fiction the woman employs like a parable, in order to expose the man’s position on women and religion. It works. The man of the dialogue, like the men of the story, has no trouble deciding which half to choose. He spouts all the reasons for his choice that a man of his position, a cleric, should (plus some): Ad hoc petitis a me vobis super eo consilium exhiberi, super quo neminem decet haesitare prudentem. Quis enim dubitat partis eminentioris solatii electorem inferiora praeferendum petenti? Quantum enim ad partis pertinet inferioris solatia, a brutis in nullo sumus animalibus segregati, sed eis nos hac parte ipsa natura coniungit. Superioris vero partis solatia tanquam propria humanae sunt attributa naturae et aliis animalibus universis ab ipsa natura negata. Ergo inferioris partis elector tanquam canis ab amore repellatur indignus, et superioris tanquam naturae amplexator admittatur elector. Praeterea nullus unquam fuit superioris solatii fatigatus inventus vel eius usibus satiatus; inferioris vero delectatio partis cito fastidit utentem et operis peracti poenitere cogit agentem. (1.6.536–537) You ask me next to show my counsel on a matter over which no prudent person should hesitate. Who could doubt that he who chose the consolation of the upper part is to be preferred to him who chose the lower? So far as the consolations of the lower part is concerned, we are in no sense separated from the brute animals, nature herself having joined us to them in this respect. Truly, the consolations of the upper part have been attributed in particular to human nature and denied to all other animals by nature herself. Therefore, the elector of the lower part should be rejected from love as unworthy, and he who chose the upper part should be

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accepted as an embracer of nature. Besides, no one was ever found to grow tired of the consolations of the upper or satiated by their use, while pleasure in the lower part quickly disgusts the user, and he powerfully thinks to repent of his troubled [peracti has the valence of “completed” and “thrust through” as well as of “troubled”] works.

It should not seem overly strange that the woman poses the question in terms of a divided female body, for the answer she seeks is an exposition of the conceptual vivisections of lived reality resulting from thinking in terms of Neoplatonic hierarchies. The man’s answer is based upon four Neoplatonic divisions. First, he brings up the division of humans from animals; second, the division in human nature, between mind and body; third, the division between male and female; and, fourth, the assignment of one in each of these pairs as being superior to the other. Finally, he appends some information, apparently either from his own experience or from his learning as a cleric, which is unnecessary to his argument: his disgust with the consolations of the lower half. She picks up on this and on the fact that he actually chooses the men rather than the body parts in his answer, for after her response to his Neoplatonism, she hints at possible homosexual inclinations in him or even impotence (1.6.539–540). Her response to his Platonism is quite bold: Vestra multum in hoc iudicio videtur errare sententia et a veritatis tramite deviare. Quaecunque enim homines interponunt solatia curis, exeo quod in parte latitat inferiori sua semper initia sumunt, et eorum omnium inde procedit origo. Si enim sit aliqua mulier cuius forma cunctis vigeat in orbe praeclara, Veneris autem operibus omnino reperiatur inutilis, eius nullus vellet solatia capere, sed tanquam immunda reprobaretur a cunctis. (1.6.538) Your teaching on this judgment seems to err greatly and to deviate from the path of truth. All the consolations that alleviate men’s cares always take their origin from the hidden area of the lower part, and all of them proceed from that origin. If there were any woman whose beauty flourished outstandingly before everyone in the world, but she were found to be completely useless for the works of Venus, no one would desire to gain her consolations, but she would be rejected by all as though unclean.

She locates the origin of human life and happiness in sex. The God of Christianity and the rules of the church are absent. She continues her line of argument by comparisons from nature that make natural acts sound wholesome rather than, like his, filthy. By analogy with eating, she argues that sex should satisfy, but as with food, there should eventually be room for more (1.6.541–542). Rather than addressing the issues she raises, he responds by descending into an “is-not/is-so” kind of argument, plying her

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with more hierarchy, as though to inform her that Neoplatonic hierarchy is simply the nature of reality (1.6.544–549). Although she seems to capitulate to him in the end, it is one of those equivocal and dismissive capitulations the women in the dialogues proffer when they want to end the discussion: Licet opinio vestra multis videatur rationibus impugnari, quia tamen omnimoda cernitur aequitate iuvari et rationabiliori firmitate vallari, meo iudicatur arbitrio comprobanda et tanquam subnixa veritate sequenda. (1.6.550) Though it appears that your opinion can be attacked on many grounds, nevertheless since it is understood to be supported by humanity uniformly, and to be fortified by the strength of the more reasonable, in my judgment it is decided by having been sanctioned and followed as if resting on truth.

This “capitulation” is only an acknowledgment that she is outnumbered and that whatever she may have to say against what has been established is expressed in futility. Since his opinio is the sanctioned one, she might as well let him “win,” even though the opinion does not rely on truth. The woman’s “doctrine,” the opinion not supported by aequitas or the strength of the rationabilior, is that love, or sex, is the source of life and of good, a concept that the cleric at one point seems to have shared (1.6.417–418). Although the woman seldom speaks of the Christian God, He is nevertheless accepted as the author of nature in their dialogue, so it seems that Andreas’s text would like to rewrite Christianity in her terms, rather than in the Neoplatonic terms in which it was actually written. When the man enters with his widely held Neoplatonic notions, sex becomes more the source of evil than of good, and women become degraded along with anything else that resides on the bottom of a given hierarchy. The woman’s argument in the eighth dialogue seems more beautiful, consistent, and convincing than any of the commonly accepted arguments presented by the men. As Peter Allen astutely points out, a reader cannot “unread” what he/she has just read.30 When we approach Books II and III, where Andreas the Master appears to side with his male counterparts and their Neoplatonic arguments, it is with the eighth dialogue already in mind. The woman finishes the eighth dialogue with a final story problem for the man, who argues almost entirely from what was taught as truth to clergy, and the woman covertly but precisely aims her story to drive him into a corner of self-contradiction. The story she presents is of a lover who was reported dead but did eventually return to his beloved. While he was missing, she agreed to love another man and consummated that love. On the first lover’s return, he demanded his “accustomed embraces,” but the

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second lover forbade them. What, then, is a woman to do (1.6.551–553)? The woman couches her dilemma in terms of the scriptural allusion to serving two masters—God and money (Matt. 6.24; Luke 16.13). The man initially replies that the resolution of the problem “instantis quidem enodatio quaestionis ex mulieris potius pendet arbitrio vel voluntate quam ex regularis intellectu praecepti vel amoris speciali mandato” (1.6.554; “depends more on the will or desire of the woman than on an understanding of precept of law or special command of love”). Yet he proceeds to prescribe what the woman ought to do, moving from a little consideration of her desire (1.6.554) to none at all, finally arguing that she really ought to return to the first lover whether she likes it or not (1.6.555). If she cannot manage to dredge up any feelings for the first, however, and really loves the second, “dicere quod ad primum debeat praecise redire . . . esset asserere turpe et amoris praecepta fraudare” (1.6.556; “To say that she ought to return to the first without qualification . . . would be a base claim and cheating of Love’s commands”). Yet he does not take back his prescription. Therefore, “Love’s precepts” remain cheated by the teachings of the clergy, and it is their conscription of desire that appears to be fraudulent. Speaking here as a cleric, the man severs desire from action by prescribing what ought to be done. In so doing, however, he defeats himself as well, since the woman he courts then claims to be in mourning for an absent other. He says, “Sed si aliquis eius studeat subvertere fidem, eum curialiter conetur reiicere; si nimia fuerit instantis improbitas, ultimo sibi loco respondeat quod alterius se iam colligavit amori” (1.6.558; “But if anyone endeavors to subvert [her] faith, [she] should try to repel him in a courtly way; if [he] bears his impropriety [against her] too hard, finally she should answer him that she has already bound herself to the love of another”). This is exactly what she has been doing. The woman keeps herself safe by living within prescription about fidelity, even if she does not believe in the premises upon which it is based, much like the other women of the dialogues. Although the woman is the one who sees sex to be to some degree divine, the man, who defames it, is the one who seems to want it at any cost. The speakers and the exchanges between them in this dialogue indicate that most of what passes for sexual wickedness is not essentially so, but deemed to be so by society; that outside a Neoplatonic system certain kinds of crimes simply do not exist; that sex and nature are good; and that it is a historical or philosophical accident based on old authorities, rather than an inherent necessity, that Christianity is Neoplatonic. Finally, as a brief reminder, I would like to point out once again the kind of repetition found in the introductions to each dialogue. This is where the reader is made aware that the speakers are the inventions of Andreas, that their dialogue is ventriloquized. The effect of this reminder is far-reaching: all the

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voices must sooner or later be identified as belonging in some way to Andreas. Looked at in this way, his text seems to be a cross between a psychomachia and a Sic et non. If we combine this perception with what Andreas tells Walter about repetition at 2.1.5—that repetition gives away what a man’s interests are or what his secret is—we are on our way to understanding what the text is about. So far it is clear that subversion of existing hierarchies is one of the main items on Andreas’s agenda and that he accomplishes this and protects his enterprise through repetition. At the beginning of his article on medieval repetition, Peter Haidu quotes Jacques Derrida: “La pure répétition, ne changeat-elle ni une chose ni un signe, porte puissance illimitée de perversion et de subversion”31 (“Pure repetition, changing not a thing nor sign, carries unlimited power for perversion and subversion”). If Derrida is right, then repetition that varies a bit, as it does in Andreas’s text, is arguably potentially most perverse and subversive. What Haidu intends by beginning his article with this quotation is not clear, since he argues that repetition in medieval literature was intended to comfortably support existing systems, pointing particularly to Neoplatonic hierarchy as such a system. However, I hope I have shown that at least one medieval text proves procedures such as Haidu’s to be overly general. I have tried to show that not all medieval writers found Neoplatonic hierarchies to be comforting or convincing and that not all medieval writers who engaged in the primary discourses of their day were antiflesh. Each historic text should be evaluated on its own, within its context, without being inaccurately predetermined by an attributed context. I hope also to have demonstrated that Andreas’s text is engaged in a subversive project that can be ascertained through careful employment of exegetical method. In order to solidify my contentions that Andreas’s text is at least as concerned with desire as such as it is with sexual desire alone, and that his text is particularly concerned with ecclesiastical discourse on desire, I must turn attention in the next chapter to religious writing that is intertextual with Andreas’s. Intertextuality is itself a form of repetition.

CHAPTER III ON CLERICAL INTERTEXTS AND THE SUBVERSION OF SEDUCTION

Ea quae dicitis satis ratione nituntur, si cor meum propriae annueret voluntati. Mea namque voluntas esset quae proponitis adimplere, sed cor contradicit omnino et dissuadet per omnia fiere quod plena voluntate desidero. Ergo si cor contradicit amare, quaeso ut mihi asseratis cui potius sit favendum, cordi scilicet an voluntati. (1.6.310) The things that you say support themselves with enough reason, if my heart would give closer assent to my will. For my will would be to fulfil that which you propose, but my heart contradicts it and dissuades by all means executing the full desire of my will. Therefore if the heart speaks against loving, I ask you to plainly state for me which is the more favorable, heart or will? Andreas Capellanus, The Woman, Dialogue 6 I discover this principle then: that when I want to do the right, only the wrong is within my reach. In my inmost self I delight in the law of God, but I perceive that there is in my bodily members a different law, fighting against the law that my reason approves and making me a prisoner under the law that is in my members, the law of sin. Miserable creature that I am, who is there to rescue me out of this body doomed to death? God alone, through Jesus Christ our Lord! St. Paul, Rom. 7.21–25 Ut a Magistri verbis sermo exordium sumat: “Qui non amat Dominum Jesum, anathema sit.” Valde omnino mihi amandus est, per quem sum, vivo, et sapio. Si ingratus sum, et indignus. Dignus plane est morte, qui tibi, Domine Iesu, recusat vivere. . . . Bernardus, S.B. Opera, 1:114

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ntertextuality is a common form of repetition especially ripe for the making of meaning. This chapter explores the relationships between Andreas’s text and some of its less often discussed religious intertexts. The outcome is fourfold. First, it shows that discourses of desire were of central importance in the twelfth century and that Andreas’s text contributes to them uniquely. Second, the chapter shows that perhaps the most prominent discourse of desire focused specifically on conversion or on training the devotee’s will to love or desire God above everything else. Third, the rhetoric employed toward the “seduction” of such converts was most successful where the appeals were specifically erotic. Finally, the chapter demonstrates how Andreas’s text engages, exposes, and deconstructs existing rhetorics of seduction, especially religious ones. This chapter and book do not devote much space to the connections between Andreas’s text and Ovid or between Andreas’s text and the troubadour lyrics, because both have been explored thoroughly and for a long time. Peter Allen and Paolo Cherchi are among the most recent critics to continue critical discussion of these traditional intertexts, and I have addressed their points of view in the introduction to this book. Once again, however, not only is it my contention that we have continued to misread Andreas’s text partly because we continue to see it as having to do primarily with sexual relationships but also because we see it as couched in secular love literature rather than as participating in the discourse of desire generally, which in the twelfth century was at least as religious as it was “secular.” Nevertheless, this chapter does touch upon the relationship between Ovid and Andreas in order to throw into relief the profound differences regarding the expectations surrounding gender and sexuality in each text: Ovid, in the Ars amatoria and Remedia Amoris, displays none of the moral anxiety of Andreas the Master and is not at all interested in the point of view of the woman who is to be seduced. The comparison shows just how different were social expectations regarding sex in Andreas’s day from those of the venerable pagan, and Andreas’s reader is left to distinguish between authorities. As for the troubadours, Marcabru will be cited in particular primarily to show that Andreas understood that the employment of abasement and elevation to seduce come from secular as well as religious texts, which are the focus of the chapter. Of the many authors, texts, and events that could be chosen to illustrate my observations, the lives and works of Bernard of Clairvaux (1079–1142), of Peter Abelard (1090–1153), and of Richard of St. Victor (d. 1173) are of

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particular relevance. Bernard and Abelard had considerable impact on the socialization of desire, both through their lives and their texts; and they were both immensely popular, Abelard as a teacher in the so-called secular schools, Bernard as a preacher and monk. There were deep differences between them that went beyond training, proclivities, and position, however. The strained relations between Bernard and Abelard (they might even have been called archenemies on more than one occasion) are well documented.1 Given how powerful they both were, their struggle was probably as much over the minds and hearts of men as it was over their intellectual differences. Bernard emerged victorious, according to contemporary witnesses, perhaps more because of the accidents of history (Abelard’s castration) than because of a societal preference for Bernard’s teachings. Although Bernard and Abelard lived two generations before Andreas, their lives and texts bore with them issues that were far from dead by Andreas’s time. Beryl Smalley comments, “We picture the conflict between cloister and school in terms of Bernard and Abailard . . . because these men strike us as both individual and typical.”2 Bernard and Abelard can be seen as emblematic of a conflict staged in Andreas’s text between kinds of reading: the literal, with the ensuing logical and contextual issues (Abelard) versus the “spiritual” or metaphorical (Bernard). Andreas’s text reproduces in the various registers of its own discourse the conflict between monastic and scholastic approaches to reading or interpretation. But in Andreas’s text, neither of these great men nor his approach emerges the winner. Rather, out of the shards of their conflicts, Andreas pieces together a way of reading that is different from either. This recombination is one of several tactics that Andreas shares with his nearer predecessor, Richard of St. Victor (d. 1173), who was famous for his exegetical skills. Although the differences between Andreas and Richard are significant, a comparison with some of Richard’s work clarifies Andreas’s enterprise. Richard’s work, like those of Bernard and Andreas, occupies itself with the relations between rhetoric and the conscription of desire. An examination of it will prove useful not only toward our understanding of Andreas’s text, but also toward the lay of the rhetorical land, as well as toward an understanding of the discourse of desire in the twelfth century. The texts of Bernard upon which the chapter focuses are mostly from his sermons on the Song of Songs, because they show his method of conscripting desire as well as his rhetorical and exegetical styles. I shall argue that Andreas’s text exposes Bernard’s method and styles, and any approach like his as disingenuous. As for Andreas’s use of Abelard, as useful as an exploration of the Sic et non would be for my purposes (since its exegetical method and implications are akin to those of Andreas’s text) I will expend very little space on it, since the comparison has been done brilliantly and to sophisticated, if different, ends by Catherine Brown.3

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However, the Historia calamitatum and the ensuing letters, authored by Abelard and Heloise, provide a literary-historical record of the conscription of the desire of two twelfth-century people, as well as a dialogue on the subject, and will be discussed in relation to the development of Andreas’s text and its engagement in twelfth-century discourses of desire. Finally, I include discussion of Richard of St. Victor’s Benjamin Minor, since the Victorines combined the approaches of the scholar and the monk, since Richard’s work was geographically and temporally close to that of Andreas, and since the Benjamin Minor very consciously provides a set of rhetorical and exegetical methods used toward the conscription of desire. Ultimately those methods allow the reader the freedom to choose what to do with his desire, much as Andreas’s text leaves the reader free to choose the seduction it offers. This chapter consists of four sections: “Author/ity,” which compares stances toward and uses of authority in the texts of Andreas, Abelard, and Bernard, with some discussion of St. Paul and Ovid, and begins to discuss the relationship between self-presentation, seduction, and authority, which will be addressed throughout the chapter. “Positions of Mastery and the Rhetoric of Eros” discusses intertexts (especially Bernard’s) that seduce the reader by elevating him or her and shows what Andreas does and does not do with that rhetorical method. “Seduction and Critical Distance” shows that Andreas not only exposes and repudiates Bernard’s method of seducing the reader by erotic imagery but also that Andreas’s text displays the same sophisticated awareness of methods of seducing readers that Richard’s Benjamin Minor does, without embracing its goal of sublimating the reader’s desire into religion. “On Confession and the Charm of Free Choice” is a small concluding section that, using Paul, Augustine, and others, shows how Andreas twists and uses confession very differently from his intertexts and, unlike them, allows the reader to choose whether or not to be seduced by the text. Author/ity Intertextuality is a type of repetition that makes for loci of particular meaning. Don Monson cites six types of intertextuality that apply to Andreas’s text and that he sees as citations of authority:4 (1) the citation of authority by name; (2) the use of a generic common name (antonomasia) such as apostolus for St. Paul; (3) verbatim quotations from unidentified literary sources, including familiar biblical passages; (4) nonverbatim quotations, general allusions, and vague reminiscences based on literary sources; (5) commonplaces referring to an entire genre or tradition; (6) references to nonliterary, “perhaps even non-verbal traditions such as social ‘reality.’ ” This latter category is where Monson

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places the sayings of the vulgares, the sapientes, dicitur, fertur, and so on. It not at all clear to me that the “sayings” of Monson’s sixth category reflect a social reality external to the text, although it does seem probable that they represent the kind of argument that is often employed toward psychological manipulation, and they do point to the power of hearsay and popular opinion. Although I have addressed and will continue to address all of Monson’s categories to one degree or another, this chapter is mostly occupied with the last three, particularly the fifth. Monson also classifies the authorities that Andreas invokes as “clerical” and “courtly,” clerical including secular as well as religious sources. These are very adequate distinctions that also serve my purpose. I do not in any way intend to make an exhaustive exposition, or even list, of the works that are intertextual to Andreas’s—there are far too many. Again, we will here focus on the less often mentioned but significant ones named above. Abelard’s Sic et non is one of the most commonly noted of Andreas’s intertexts. For instance, Monson sees Andreas’s text as “assembling all the pertinent opinions on . . . love, in the traditions of Abelard’s Sic et non and Peter Lombard’s Sentences.”5 Catherine Brown’s study shows the level of sophistication and dialectical engagement of both Abelard’s and Andreas’s texts.6 Surely Andreas’s text engages the philosophical tradition begun and handed on by Abelard and others. Andreas’s text shares with Abelard’s the underlying presupposition that one learns by examining evidence, questioning, and exploring oppositions. As with Andreas’s text, scholars continue to argue about what Abelard’s work was intended to teach. Some, basing much of their argument on the objections of Abelard’s monastic contemporaries, contend that the Sic et non was meant to undermine the authorities it juxtaposes as contradictory;7 others argue that the authorities were presented thus so that a reader’s dialectical skills might be honed in the attempts to show that the authorities in fact agree.8 Brown takes discussion of the Sic et non to a whole new level of sophistication, nevertheless ending her discussion in the latter camp.9 Unlike the Sic et non, however, Andreas’s text does not set forth the conflicting authorities in an orderly or systematic fashion; and it conspicuously undermines itself, which a text of Abelard’s never consciously does, unless we read the letters of Heloise to Abelard as Abelard’s, an option that is no longer taken very seriously.10 A. Victor Murray calls the Sic et non “a source book containing pros and cons from the scriptures and the Fathers on various questions in theology,”11 questions that arise out of “orthodox” doctrines.12 Abelard’s “typical method of argument” is presented therein, Murray writes, the effect of which is to discredit the use of “authorities” as a method of discovering truth. Authority speaks with a divided voice and you can prove

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almost anything from the Bible or the writings of the saints. It might be thought therefore that Abelard’s position was one of pure scepticism, and so indeed it would have been had he ever based his theology on “authority.” Scepticism is essentially a position of disbelief in the validity of human experience, and a reliance upon external expressions alone—a Bible, a creed, an institution—with whose historicity or “authority” faith stands or falls. The human mind has in that case nothing of itself to contribute to faith save to accept or reject these external things. Abelard did not believe this . . . [but that holy] writings . . . where they are not giving us facts, are of value simply as evidence . . . [that is] no more sacrosanct in itself than the evidence of the philosophers [which] has to be weighed, like all other evidence in the light of reason. . . . We are not, therefore, left in a purely negative position when “authorities” conflict. (Murray, 144–145)

Neither the Sic et non nor Andreas’s text hesitates to show the discrepancies between authorities that were fundamental to the institutions of its day, and they both assume that a reader will ply his/her skills to make sense of the conflicts presented. Andreas’s text seems to push the questioning further, however, to include hallowed scholarly methods, such as exegesis itself, and unlike Abelard, Andreas’s text debunks Christian teachings. In part because of Abelard’s intellectual creativity and scholarly methods, he has come to be well known as the father of the universities.13 But he is at least equally famous for his scandal with Heloise. The Historia calamitatum is as obvious an intertext for Andreas as is the Sic et non, because it provides a missive, dialogic, historical account of consummated desire followed by religious and social retribution. There is no doubt that the subject matter of the Historia calamitatum—desire—overlaps with that of Andreas’s text. Since the Historia calamitatum started circulating sometime after 1132 and was composed in the relative vicinity of both authors, it seems very unlikely that Andreas, the “expert on love,” had not heard of this particular scandal and text. As for Abelard on the socialization of desire, according to the Historia calamitatum, his own desire was confessedly far from what was socially acceptable, as well as from what he himself taught, until his unfortunate dismemberment. Yet, there does seem to be some equivocation in his “repentance” as it is presented in his text. The Historia calamitatum begins thus: ABELARDI AD AMICUM SUUM CONSOLATORIA

Sepe humanos affectus aut provocant aut mittigant amplius exempla quam verba. Unde post nonnullam sermonis ad presentem habiti consolationem, de ipsis calamitatum mearum experimentis consolatoriam ad absentem scribere decrevi, ut in conparatione mearum tuas aut nullas aut modicas temptationes recognoscas et tolerabilius feras. (Abelard, Historia calamitatum, ed. Monfrin)

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CONSOLATIONS FROM ABELARD TO HIS FRIEND

There are times when example is better than precept for stirring or soothing human passions; and so I propose to follow up the words of consolation I gave you in person with the history of my own misfortunes, hoping thereby to give comfort in absence. In comparison with my trials you will see that your own are nothing, or only slight, and will find them easier to bear. (Radice, 57)

Although this letter turns out to be addressed more arguably to Heloise than to an anonymous male friend, as it initially pretends, the example offered therein appears to be for any reader. This introduction claims that Abelard’s experience (as his text presents it) should serve as a kind of comfort, although ultimately it is very difficult to see it as such. And the introduction reads, “for stirring or soothing human passions,” which indicates it could be as much an incitement to any kind of passion as a “soothing” of a particular one. Abelard’s example takes up all of the remaining letters, but he outlines the example initially thus: Cum igitur totus in superbia atque luxuriae laborarem, utriusque morbi remedium divina mihi gratia licet nolenti contulit. Ac primo luxurie, diende superbie; luxurie quidem his me privando quibus hanc exercebam; superbie vero que mihi ex litterarum maxime scientia nascebatur, juxta illud Apostoli “Scientia inflat,” illius libri quo maxime gloriabar combustione de humiliando. (Monfrin, 70–71) Since therefore I was wholly enslaved to pride and lechery, God’s grace provided a remedy for both these evils, though not one of my choosing; first for my lechery by depriving me of those organs with which I practiced it, and then for the pride which had grown in me through my learning—for in the words of the Apostle, “Knowledge breeds conceit”—when I was humiliated by the burning of the book of which I was so proud. (Radice, 65)

The example Abelard provides is that God will punish, even mutilate—as an act of mercy, of course—those who let their desire get out of hand. However, whether Abelard intended it or not, the discourse that follows this suggestion makes it clear that the end of his organs and book, which were the supposed ends in both senses of his own desires, were not the end of Heloise’s desire either for sex or for learning. Abelard’s exemplum did not work for her. Is it therefore supposed to work for the reader? Passion, rather than being assuaged by his story, is not only heightened for Heloise (by her own admission) especially where she or Abelard describes their sexual encounters, but passion also becomes wrath (especially in Heloise’s discourse) over the unfairness of social, religious, and circumstantial constraints. She records wicked people as the authors of Abelard’s distress,

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not God. Heloise’s responses to Abelard’s supposed attempts to comfort her or make her content with her lot are especially full of rage and passion, the emotions that constitute the discourse of this rebellious and particularly eloquent woman. Heloise’s responses are significant for Andreas’s text since the voice of frustrated or conscripted desire sounds from a woman in both texts (cf. Dialogue 6), and it is the voice of a woman in each who calls the rectitude of the patriarchy of their day into question (cf. Dialogue 8). Whether Abelard intended it or not, these letters form a protest not only against what happened to Abelard but also against using his misfortunes as an example to others to deter their desires.14 That Abelard and Heloise retire more or less resignedly to their monastic posts, after years and pages of impassioned exchange does not leave the reader (or apparently Heloise) feeling as if all ended justly or completely. There is no comfortable sense of closure. The Historia calamitatum seems to be one of those biographical confessions intended to sway the reader, but it is not clear. Whether the reader chooses to embrace the repentant Abelard or the angry, resigned Heloise seems to be a matter of interpretive choice. Like Abelard, Andreas stages his self-representations amidst discussions of desire between men and women. Andreas’s women, however, do not function as repositories for possibly male rage, rebellion, or frustrated desire in the same way Heloise may for Abelard. Instead, when Andreas’s men attempt to make this happen, the women deflect it, leaving the men to remain with their own rage, rebellion, and frustrated desire. In Andreas’s text, the men’s sexual frustration becomes verbal abuse as well as attempted psychological manipulation of the women. It is also the men, except for the cleric, who recommend the subversion of social systems toward attaining their desires. On the other hand, the women voice frustrated desire for the freedom to choose. They lack this, given their socioeconomic position; yet they proclaim maintenance of the status quo in order to protect themselves from their “predators.” Like the Historia calamitatum, a dialogue between male and female is set up, but unlike Abelard’s text, none of the men speaks the discourse of righteousness, neither do the women act out frustrated sexual desire so much as voice desiring sovereignty over their existence. Only in Dialogue 8 are the tables turned. It is the woman here who speaks out for an inversion of the Neoplatonic world of the empowered cleric. This inversion would allow people to celebrate sexuality (as would Heloise’s world, were she mistress of it), and though the cleric in no way supports her propensity for carnival, he too questions the authorities that would block his sexual desire. The woman’s recommendations that the priest behave consistently with his calling serve more to point out to him his own (and the Church’s) hypocrisy than to support a system that leaves even the enfranchised wanting.

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The letters of Heloise and Abelard’s calamitous history, however subversive, remain a monument to both people. Depending upon how the texts are read, they record both people’s greatness (or pride), their conversion (or rebellion), and Abelard’s inability to acknowledge the claims of feminine/subversive desire, or his consummate ability to do so, which he nevertheless finally refuses to overtly exhibit for the sake of his own reputation. Andreas’s text, on the other hand, seems to be very much for the reader, for women, and for the disenfranchised. That is, not only does it seem to support and defend them, but it also seems to offer advice as to how the lot of each can be improved (which this and later chapters of this book will continue to elucidate). Finally, like the chastised converted Abelard of the Historia calamitatum, Andreas can be read as a hero or a coward. If the reader overidentifies Andreas the author with what I call his “decoy” (Andreas the Master of Love), Andreas can emerge as hypocritical, confused, and fearful of the authorities he undermines. Yet it is possible to see the text’s author as heroic, once his agenda is discovered, as long as the reader finds that agenda attractive. Attractive self-presentation seems to be a main ingredient of the most successful of texts intended to seduce the reader into a reformation of desire. This is one of many rhetorical vehicles used by Abelard’s slightly older contemporary, Bernard of Clairvaux. Jean Leclercq cites a contemporary opinion: William of Saint-Thierry states—and on this point we may believe him— that the young man Bernard, after his conversion, when he spoke in favour of the monastic life, had a real gift for seducing people: “Mothers hid their sons and wives their husbands, friends prevented him from meeting their friends, for the Holy Spirit gave such efficacy to his voice, that only the strongest antipathy could resist him.” (Leclercq, Monks and Love in Twelfth Century France, 20)

William is also cited as bestowing the appellation “God’s fisherman” upon Bernard.15 There are many reasons for Bernard’s success, but his projection of personal charisma is not among the least of them. Bernard’s fame, popularity, and power started early in his monastic career and spread rapidly,16 making him even as a relatively young man a living authority to be consulted.17 Bernard maintains this self-presentation in his texts, as I shall show. Andreas, on the other hand, is nearly unknown outside of his text, where, as I have argued and will continue to show, he goes out of his way to appear unattractive in the guise of his decoy. The possibly historical Andreas who emerges from the text appears to be brilliant but very human.

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Bernard did not rely on charismatic self-presentation alone, however. He used rhetoric and a particularly powerful formula. His formula for socializing desire, simply put, was to replace his reader’s/listener’s desire for anything with a desire for God. He argued that all a man really desires is his own good but that people are usually mistaken as to what constitutes that good. The highest and most satisfying good a person could desire for himself is to return to a correct relationship with his maker. The surest way to accomplish this is to become a monk, since the focus of Cistercian monastic life was the individual’s ascent up the mystic ladder.18 Bernard’s teaching on the ladder combined the Dionysian threefold path of purgation, illumination, and contemplation, with a return to prelapsarian innocence.19 The movement on an anthropological level, was from a bestial state, that of fallen man immersed in his senses, to true or unfallen man, who is also the likeness of God, capable not only of reason but also of understanding or wisdom. The final end, of which only a “taste” can be experienced in this life, is union with God, who is called the summum bonum. Conversion then, was not just a matter of changing lifestyles, but of a thorough reformation of outlook, action, and inclination. The formula is clear and simple enough. What makes Bernard and his formula persuasively attractive, however, is the rhetoric in which Bernard envelops both. His rhetoric was considered to be an aspect of his personal charm. His way with words, however, tends even today to be equated with his style as a speaker—the fact that what we have of his preeminent but lost voice is textual is often neglected by his biographers. But it is precisely the rhetorical aspects of his textual “voice” and self-representation that concern us here. Bernard appealed to his listeners and readers by depicting himself as one of the spiritual elite who humbly condescends to address his readers on their own terms, as though he is one of them. He was even criticized by the educated for stooping to the vulgar, though effective, appeal of presenting exempla in a jaunty manner.20 Yet he pleased authorities and became one by continually appealing to scriptural authority, particularly Pauline authority. His writing, mostly sermons, assumes the fiction of his presence and his friendly disposition toward the reader. In order to explore the seductive dynamics he creates between his authorial persona and his reader, let us focus on a few of his sermons on the Song of Songs, beginning with a look at the fiction of intimacy with an authority that he creates in order to gain the upper hand. The eighty-four sermons on the Song of Songs, which were the most widely read and copied works of their kind, are supposed to represent oral deliveries by Bernard to his own monks at refectory.21 Since we know the works to have been copied and circulated widely in their own day, even amongst secular readers, this setting is clearly fictitious, as is any suggestion

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that the sermons were copied down as they were delivered. Their art prevents any ultimate intention but a text.22 The sermons engage exegetical discourse on the Song of Songs, which was of particular interest to religious scholars of all kinds at the time.23 They are clearly not just private spiritual direction for Bernard’s monks. Bernard’s allure and tactics can be discerned from his very first sermon on the Song of Songs: Vobis, fratres, alia quam aliis de saeculo, aut certe aliter dicenda sunt. Illis siquidem lac potum dat, et non escam, qui Apostoli formam tenet in docendo. Nam spiritualibus solidiora apponenda esse itidem ipse suo docet exemplo: Loquimur, inquiens, non in doctis humanae sapientiae verbis, se in doctrina spiritus, spiritualibus spiritualia comparantes; item: Sapientiam loquimur inter perfectos, quales vos nimirum esse confido, nisi frustra forte ex longo studiis estis caelestibus occupati, exercitati sensibus, et in lege Dei meditati die ac nocte. Itaque parate fauces non lacti, sed pani. Est panis apud Salomonem, isque admodum splendidus sapidusque, librum dico, qui Cantica canticorum inscribitur: proferatur, si placet, et frangater. (S.B. Opera, 1:3) The instructions that I address to you, my brothers, will differ from those I should deliver to people in the world, at least the manner will be different. The preacher who desires to follow St. Paul’s method of teaching will give them milk to drink rather than solid food, and will serve a more nourishing diet to those who are spiritually enlightened: “We teach,” he said, “not in the way philosophy is taught, but in the way that the Spirit teaches us: we teach spiritual things spiritually.” And again, “We have a wisdom to offer those who have reached maturity,” in whose company, I feel assured, you are to be found, unless in vain have you prolonged your study of divine teaching, mortified your senses, and meditated day and night on God’s law. Be ready then to feed on bread rather than milk. Solomon has bread to give that is splendid and delicious, the bread of that book called the Song of Songs. Let us bring it forth then if you please, and break it. (K. Walsh, 1:1)

As in Andreas’s preface, the tone established here is personal, confidential, and intimate. But Bernard’s introduction supposedly excludes certain people—those in the world, philosophers, and monks who are spiritually lazy. Such people may read Bernard’s texts, but only Bernard’s “special” monks/readers are being addressed. The relationship suggested here is exclusive I/thou like the lover/beloved relationship of love poetry, whether it is sacred or secular.24 Fictions of intimacy or exclusivity are an acknowledged part of the rhetorical engine of seduction, called the benevolentiae captatio, already discussed.

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Since the reader of Andreas’s or Bernard’s text is addressed as “you” or vobis, as well as “Walter” or fratres, any reader can slip into identifying with the special one(s) to be seduced. Short of this identification, the reader will find him/herself eavesdropping on a supposedly personal or exclusive bit of advice, being “let in on” a tantalizing bit of information. Sliding between being the desired object and being an “outsider” is the position of the reader in much medieval advice literature, most of which is about the spiritual life, or conversion. The movement, conscious or not, from being an outsider to being an insider is a locus of seduction. Bernard’s work makes this slippage as undetectable as possible, whereas Andreas’s text makes it uncomfortably visible. Positioning the reader so as to facilitate selfidentification with the “special” one or with a trespassing outsider is a tactic at least as old as St. Paul, the most famous example of which lies in 2 Cor. 12.4, where he refers to a transcendent experience that allowed him to hear “words so secret that human lips may not repeat them.” Yet he is telling any reader about the experience, drawing him or her into the charmed inner circle. Similar tactics will be further explored below in the section of this chapter titled “Positions of Mastery and the Rhetoric of Eros.” For now, let us look at what both Andreas and Bernard do with Paul’s authority and methods. Although both Andreas and Bernard claim Paul’s authority in their own way in the beginning sentences of their respective texts, Bernard takes on Paul’s methods while Andreas exposes such methods as manipulative or erroneous. A look at the beginnings of both the sermons and Andreas’s text should show that the differences in their rhetorical approaches not only exist but are specifically referenced by Andreas’s text. In the introduction to the sermons on the Song of Songs, quoted above, Bernard explicitly claims to be “following St. Paul’s method of teaching.” “The apostle” is established as Bernard’s authority for reading the Song of Songs “spiritually” (rather than literally) and for teaching his readings “spiritually” in the eighty-three sermons that follow. Bernard got his license for interpreting scripture “spiritually” not only from St. Paul, who contended that the letter kills while the spirit gives life (2 Cor. 3.6), but also from lectio divina, the ancient and hallowed method of monastic reading, which posited that reading was to facilitate prayer. Reading was to be slow, careful, and ruminated upon, and there were generally three levels of interpretation to digest: literal, moral, and spiritual, the latter being generally privileged over the others.25 The Cistercian contribution to lectio divina was to identify with the various characters in the passages, to imagine being “there.”26 Bernard’s and Aelred’s works both elicit this kind of experiential reading. They are in the tradition of Origen—interpretation of scripture is a grace; the same spirit that inspired the prophets inspires the

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interpreter, and the Holy Spirit speaks especially through Bernard.27 And since all of the “spiritually enlightened” whom he addresses presumably already accept the preeminent authority of St. Paul Bernard’s way to their hearts is fairly well paved for him. Andreas’s references to St. Paul are almost inverse and converse to Bernard’s, possibly because his ultimate aim is inverse and converse as well. Here are Andreas’s opening words: Cogit me multum assidua tuae dilectionis instantia, Gualteri venerande amice, ut meo tibi debeam famine propalare mearumque manuum scriptis docere qualiter inter amantes illaesus possit amoris status conservari, pariterve qui non amantur quibus modis sibi cordi affixa valeant Veneris iacula declinare. (Praefatio 1) My most unremitting and insistent affection for you forces me, o reverend friend Walter, to make open to you from my sayings and to teach by the writing of my own hands how it is possible for the state of love to be preserved between lovers, or equally, how those who are not being loved might somehow be strong to deflect the darts of Venus affixed in their own hearts.

Andreas’s position here, like Bernard’s, is that of an authority. He claims, like St. Paul, to teach by the writing “of his own hands,” as though his script or signature bear physical evidence of his widely accepted authority. It was a standard practice of Paul to point out that he was writing in his own hand, to prove his love for the recipients of his letters and to prove the authenticity of those letters. (See, e.g., 1 Cor. 16.21: “I Paul write this greeting with my own hand”; Gal. 6.11: “See what large letters I make when I am writing in my own hand”; Col. 4.18: “I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand.”) Andreas’s use of St. Paul’s tactic accomplishes several things. First, the allusion to St. Paul brings the respective authorities of Andreas and St. Paul into comparison—Andreas must therefore appear to be a very small, presumptuous, and unholy authority. The allusion not only undermines the seriousness of any claim to authority that Andreas might be seen to proffer, but it also evokes comparison of the two authors’ aims and rhetorical techniques. Bernard, on the other hand, compares favorably with Paul, both of them being evangelists par excellence. When Paul, newly converted himself, naturally zealous, and with the added impetus of guilt (Acts 7–9), takes on his Christian calling to convert the gentiles and the Christian Jews to his way of thinking, he admittedly uses any and every ploy available, becoming all things to all men or anything his audience needs him to be (1 Cor. 9.19–22). Bernard does the same but without

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Paul’s forthrightness. Andreas does the opposite. It is precisely the Pauline and Bernardian kind of intellectual and emotional seduction against which Andreas’s text proves in the end to stand. The second problem raised by the allusion to St. Paul in Andreas’s preface is that of authenticity. The copy of St. Paul’s letter to which Andreas had access was no more in St. Paul’s “hand” than the copies of Andreas’s text available to us or to most of his readers are or were in Andreas’s hand. To most readers, the authentic letter to Walter or that to the Church at Corinth (if there were ever exactly such documents) remain imaginary, misplaced by their privileged “original” recipients, or lost by the accidents of history. For someone of Andreas’s time and position, the necessary and likely “gaps” accompanying manuscript transmission were unavoidable and well known. Andreas’s text places holy writ in an equivocal position: as a text accurately reflecting “the truth,” it lies because Andreas’s “hand,” like Paul’s, must finally be a fiction. The gap between author and text suggested in the first passage of Andreas’s text undermines the authoritative, truthful position of texts and writing generally, including Andreas’s own and that of holy scripture in particular. Finally, since Andreas presents writing and speaking as separate pedagogical tools, the passage calls attention to the differences between speaking and writing, rather than pretending, like Bernard’s text, that none exists, or like Paul’s, that they can be erased. The empty divide between the author and the reader is palpable in Andreas’s introductory sentences, while Bernard’s text conveys the warm fictional presence of both parties. Although Paul’s fictions are not always of “warm presence,” they are at very least of concerned authority to eager, if wayward, listeners. Before leaving the passages in question to discuss Bernard’s further mollification of the reader, there is an important aspect to Andreas’s above quoted passage that should be noted. Andreas’s teaching on love differs oppositionally from the teaching of Paul, of Bernard, or of almost any of the church fathers. Whatever the surface claims of Andreas’s text, it presents both the prevention and the maintenance of love as impossible. Even as early as the passage quoted above, the text’s opening words, Andreas writes that he will teach how to preserve love “pariterve qui non amantur quibus modis sibi cordi affixa valeant Veneris iacula declinare” (Praefatio 1) (or equally, how those who are not being loved might somehow be strong to deflect the darts of Venus affixed in their own hearts). But, as we have already seen, darts already affixed cannot be deflected. The non sequitur asserts that the text will teach how to “maintain inviolate” the love between lovers in the same way that it will teach how to deflect the dart already affixed. In other words, it will not teach how to maintain love or prevent it, because love is,

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according to this grammatical analogy, a priori impossible to maintain or prevent. The rest of the text enacts this “truth” in one way or another. St. Paul, on the other hand, writes, “Love will never come to an end,” in his famous pronouncements on love in one of the very letters Andreas’s passage has alluded to, one that Paul claims to be writing with his own hand (1 Cor. 13. 8). Given its allusions to St. Paul, Andreas’s text could and should at this point make the traditional distinction between caritas and amor, if Andreas intended to keep them as separate categories. But he does not. He omits the distinction, leaving the reader to supply the expected but missing contrast between God’s love and sexual love. Perhaps the reader will fill in the blank: caritas, being of God, is eternal; amor, being human, is subject to change. But if the reader revisits the passage after having read the rest of Andreas’s text, as will likely be the case, God’s love appears to be as whimsical and cruel as human love, and the passage becomes an opportunity to challenge notions of divine love prevalent in Andreas’s day. Since Andreas’s references to classical authority pertain as much to his subversion or contradiction of religious authority as does his supplanting of Paul, and since Ovid is another authority on love, let us take a brief look at what Andreas does with Ovid. Ovid begins his Ars amatoria: Siquis in hoc artem populo non novit amandi, Hoc legat et lecto carmine doctus amet. Arte citae veloque rates remoque moventur, Arte leves currus: arte regendus amor. ... Usus opus movet hoc: vati parete perito; Ver canam: . . . Principio, quod amare velis, reperire labora, Qui nova nunc primum miles in arma venis. Proximus huic labor est placitam exorare puellam: Tertius, ut longo tempore duret amor. (Ovid, Ovid II: The Art of Love and ther Poems, ed. and tr. Mosley, 12, 14) This is a book for the man who needs instruction in loving. Let him read it and love, taught by the lines he has read. Art is a thing one must learn, for the sailing, or rowing, of vessels, also for driving a car; love must be guided by art . . . I have learned what I know from experience, take my word for it. . . . First, my raw recruit, my inexperienced soldier, take some trouble to find the girl whom you really can love. Next, when you see what you like your problem will be how to win her. Finally, strive to make sure mutual love will endure . . . (Ovid, The Art of Love, tr. Humphries, 105–106)

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The echoes of Ovid’s passage in Andreas’s preface should be clear. But since Walter is supposedly already in love, and already out of control, finding someone suitable is rendered moot. Further, Ovid is very clear that art is necessary to loving, whereas Andreas, at least superficially, questions the propriety or use of loving at all and supposedly offers his text as sermones toward a cautior approach to love. Most importantly, Ovid’s text bears no evidence of the sexual constraints of Andreas’s time. Ovid’s text proceeds only to question the morality of certain kinds of dealings or social arrangements between women and men as they relate to sex and love. It does not question the integrity of sex itself. Andreas’s text, through its closeness to Ovid, calls up the problems inherent in the church’s defamation of sex and the consequent blockage of desire. Ovid’s fictional lovers, almost all referred to in the first person, “get the girl” many times over. Andreas’s Christian lover is not so fortunate. Except for one or two undescribed barely alluded to acts of possible improvidus infidelity on the part of Andreas or an unknown, and except for the supposed success of the Briton knight at the end of Book II, Andreas’s text does not exhibit even one sexual success, whether in the first, second, or third person. The only sex in Andreas’s text that seems to have a chance at being acceptable to the authorities is that between the happily married woman of Dialogue 7 and her husband. Unfortunately, they are “proven” by religious authority to be wrongly enjoying sex and by the secular authority of courtly ladies to be unable to truly love one another. Volitional and involuntary blockage of desire resulting from the demands of twelfth-century Christianity are problems to which Andreas’s text continually returns, and his use of Ovid, combined with his use of religious authorities, makes this all the more obvious. Returning to the comparison with Bernard, a passage in Andreas’s preface following the one just examined is mock-serious, and Andreas undermines himself as a religiously right-thinking authority by showing that he is himself subject to love whether he approves of it or not: Asseris te namque amoris militem novaque ipsius sauciatum sagitta illius nescire apte gubernare frena caballi, nec ullum posse tibi remedium invenire. Quod quam sit grave quamque molestet meum animum nullis tibi possem sermonibus explicare. Novi enim et manifesto experimento percepi quod qui Veneris est servituti obnoxius nil valet perpensius cogitare nisi ut aliquid semper valeat suis actibus operari, quo magis possit ipsius illaqueari catenis; nihil credit se habere beatum nisi id quod penitus suo debeat amori placere. (Praefatio 2–3) You claim, as a new soldier of love, wounded with a new arrow, not to know how to aptly govern the reins of the horse that soldier himself rides, nor to be able to find any remedy for yourself. How serious this is, and how

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much it disturbs my soul, I am unable to explain to you with speeches [sermonibus]. Yet I know by proven experience and have observed that he who is the submissive [obnoxius] servant of Venus is able to consider nothing carefully—unless it be how he might achieve something by his actions, whereby he may be bound more in Venus’s chains. He believes himself to have no happiness unless it be that which ought deeply to please his love.

Lacing the preface with allusions to and half quotations from Ovid’s Ars amatoria, Andreas describes Walter as a new soldier in the army of love, who claims to be so raw as to be unable to control his mount. This presents a comic picture, since the description of the soldier is thoroughly undignified and since the soldier’s mount may well be a sexual one. But the joke is not on Walter. Andreas says he too has been the fool on horseback, unable to consider anything more weighty than becoming further enchained by Venus. He can identify Walter’s condition because he knows it “by proven experience.” Andreas presents himself as an authority who has not only been in love but remains in love. In fact it is his love for Walter that binds him against his better judgment to write of improper things. In 2.6.22 Andreas also claims he is in the fetters of an unrequited (and nameless) love. Bernard, as we shall see, is also an authority who has “been there,” but he is now further up the ladder of contemplation than the brothers to whom he “speaks”: he is beyond and above them. There is clearly a difference in how Bernard and Andreas represent themselves as authority figures to their readers. Bernard is humbly superior, while Andreas paints himself as being in pain, incurable, and inconsistent. Obnoxius is a term Andreas uses to describe himself, along with lovers generally, in the comic scene his preface describes. In the twelfth century obnoxius carried, in classically allusive contexts such as this one, the classical meanings of “guilty, servile, addicted, submissive and subservient” and therefore bore negative connotations.28 But obnoxius was also commonly used in religious writings of Andreas’s time to carry very positive connotations of “dutiful” or “selflessly serving.” Self-abasement and servitude, if to the right master, were qualities that monastic writers claimed to be good and necessary toward cultivating the spiritual life.29 Although the passage resounds with the clearly negative, classical usage of the word, the quasi-religious tone and allusions of the Prologue evoke the word’s Christian usage as well. I call the tone quasi-religious because Andreas parodies St. Paul, not only by alluding to his letter to the Corinthians about love, and in his claims as an authority, but also because Andreas and Paul both claim to be unable to do what they ought (Rom. 7.19–20). Although Paul finds he cannot always do the good thing

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he wants to do, and instead does the bad, Andreas does not even desire to choose the right but claims he should do so because of the ensuing social or religious consequences. Andreas and Paul both present themselves as weak authorities, but Paul falls back on the power of Christ and claims it as his own. Andreas does not. Bernard relies on both Paul and Christ. The way obnoxius is employed in Andreas’s above quoted passage seems not only to undermine Andreas’s ability to help Walter out of love but also sullies its monastic usage. The drawback to being either the obnoxius monk or the obnoxius lover seems in the following passage to be the loss of one’s free will, or the submission of it to another: Quamvis igitur non multum videtur expediens huiusmode rebus insistere, nec deceat quemquam prudentem huiusmodi vacare venatibus, tamen propter affectum quo tibi annector, tuae nullatenus valeo petitioni obstare; quia luce clarius novi quod docto in amoris doctrina cautior tibi erit in amore processus, tuae prout potero curabo postulationi parere. (Praefatio 2–3) Although it does not seem very expedient to dwell upon these kinds of things, nor is it yet fitting for a prudent man to give himself over to huntings of this kind, nevertheless, because of the affection by which I am bound to you, I am strong in no way to withstand your petition; because I know clear as day [another Pauline expression] that once you have been instructed in love’s teaching your progress in love will be more careful, I shall see to the fulfillment of your request to the best of my ability.

The discomfort I hear in these lines lies in the expressed constraints on his desire. Andreas can resist talking of love no more than he can resist being in love, nor can he do what he claims to see as “right.” Unlike Paul, in Rom. 7.21–25, Andreas does not name Christ as his relief from this dilemma. Andreas says that he will grant Walter’s request, sure (at least) that his instruction in love lore will leave Walter more cautious than he would otherwise be. Although he seems to be warning Walter against love, cautious progress in love is progress nonetheless; though what is finally meant by progress, in the context of the rest of the work, is (at this point in the text) unclear. Whatever it is, it will not be expected. Bernard, on the other hand, is very clear. He offers his brothers “bread,” which in Pauline terms constitutes “meat”—entrance into spiritual knowledge or experience of the mature or elite (1 Cor. 3.1–2; Heb. 5.12–14; cf. also 1 Pet. 2.2). It should be clear why Bernard was more acceptable to the prevailing powers. Bernard addresses desire mainly in terms of ought. He calls his program the rerouting of desire, or establishing “right” desire, not blockage of or subterfuge from one’s desires. Yet, all the while, Bernard plays upon his reader’s carnal desires, specifically sexual ones, before proscribing them,

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as I shall show. It is ironic, when comparing the texts of Andreas and Bernard, that Bernard’s have the appearance of honesty because of the authority of their subject matter and because of the illusion of “reality” and presence that they perform; yet they bear a hidden agenda, not because the reader is unaware that his conversion is Bernard’s aim but because the moment of conversion or benevolent capture is never made conscious by his texts. The reader is never really allowed to see that he (women are never addressed) has a choice; rather, his complicity is assumed, and the moment of the reader’s identification with the seduced beloved slides by while the reader is engaged with Bernard’s erotic images and rhetoric. Andreas’s text, on the other hand, forces readerly self-consciousness, perhaps even self-defense, by presenting itself as weak, naughty, and dishonest or equivocal from the beginning, so that the reader is almost forced to look for a hidden agenda. Positions of Mastery and the Rhetoric of Eros Returning once again to the opening lines of Bernard’s first sermon on the Song of Songs and to those of Andreas’s preface, I would like to complete my comparison of the author/reader relations established in both. Besides the differing fictions of intimacy previously discussed, in both texts the author “elevates” the reader. The elevation is accomplished by flattery of the reader and by placing the reader in a privileged position. Further, reference to the author’s learning, authority, and experience is intended to awe the reader, so that the author’s “humility” toward the reader then functions to boost the reader’s ego. While Andreas notes his own vast experience in love, his learning in its lore, and his store of love-related sententiae, Walter is called “venerable” and “beloved.” Andreas claims that if Walter were not so special to him, he would not take the time or the risk to write an improper text. Bernard claims to teach by Paul’s authority what Paul would have taught the spiritually mature, suggesting he already has the impressive training and experience necessary to prepare his readers for revelations or experiences of divine mystery; Bernard calls his audience “mature,” appealing to what spiritual pride they might have left. Both authors place the reader on the bottom of the master/student, older/younger, experienced/naive, seducer/seducee relationship, to make the nature of the relationship clear and to lend force and credence to the elevation when it occurs. When the inferior is elevated by the superior, when the reader is being honored, there is an implicit suggestion that he ought to feel honored, that he owes the author , if nothing more than his humble attention. This duplicitous dynamic is a

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motif found in diverse kinds of medieval literature: romances, love lyrics, prescriptive treatises on love, and sundry religious writings of medieval Christianity that exploit their own versions of what I call “the manipulative Christ.” By this I mean how Jesus is often used in religious discourse: “Jesus did x for you therefore you should/must____.” Bernard uses a form of this manipulation in the passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter: “I would like to begin with a word from St. Paul: ‘If anyone does not love the Lord Jesus, let him be anathema.’ Truly, I ought to love the one through whom I have my being . . . If I am ungrateful, I am unworthy too. Lord Jesus, whoever refuses to live for you is clearly worthy of death.” This recitation of scripture is delivered as a statement of fact, not as the kind of legal or economic bargain it proves psychologically to be. In instances other than those that employ “the manipulative Christ,” such as in secular love literature, seducing an inferior by elevating him/her, while at some point also pointing out his or her lowliness, is never presented as an honest endeavor but is always proven to be condemnable in some way. I would like to give a few examples. I will begin with Ibn Hazm’s Arabic treatise on love,30 then briefly discuss an example from a poem of Marcabru, followed by a brief reading of “Equitan” of Marie de France. Finally, I will return to a more thorough discussion of Bernard and his means of seducing the reader. Ibn Hazm’s Dove’s Neckring (c. 1022), is clearly an important text for understanding Andreas’s. Much more work needs to be done on it as well as on its connections with Andreas’s text. Its similarities to Andreas’s work are so unmistakable as to make it a possible prototype.31 In it the author is writing to a friend about his experiences with women, with advice as to how to succeed in seducing them. He recommends elevating women above their station, while he simultaneously admits his own misogyny.32 He even points out the propriety of gracing the beloved by addressing her, in poetry, with masculine pronouns.33 Versions of this dynamic are inherent in troubadour tradition even when not visibly self-conscious, since the poets and their ladies were rarely of similar stations. The motif appears in one of Europe’s earliest vernacular pastorals, for instance: Marcabru’s poem about the lord and the peasant girl (1129–1150).34 It is one of those situations in which the lord tries, unsuccessfully, to seduce the peasant by telling her she must in fact be of noble birth, and so on, and that she should consider herself his equal. She tells him that he is only offering her an appearance. “Don, fetz el, qui que msia, ben conosc sen e folia;

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la vostra pareillaria, Seigner, som dis la vilana, lai on se tang si s’estia, que tals la cuid’ en bailia tener, non a mas l’ufana.” (Goldin, 72, ll. 22–28) “Master,” she said, “Whatever I may be, I can tell sense from foolishness. Your comradeship, Lord,” said this girl of the fields and pastures, “let it stay where it belongs, For such as I, when she thinks she has it For herself, has nothing but the look of it.” (Goldin 73, ll. 22–28)

“La vostra pareillaria” (“your equal”) she knows is a ruse. Like the commoner of Andreas’s Dialogue 6, her rejection of the false suitor protects her virginity, reestablishes the hierarchical status quo, and exposes false elevation as manipulation toward seduction. The dynamic—superior falsely elevating inferior for the benefit of the superior—is explored in some detail and clearly criticized in one of the lais of Marie de France, who was a contemporary of Andreas (lais composed c. 1160–1199). Like Marcabru’s peasant, the besought woman in “Equitan” understands the bad faith inherent in this type of play for her favors, but, in this case she, the wife of the king’s seneschal, concedes to the king’s wishes on the condition that she actually be made his equal, that is, his wife and the queen. The obvious obstacle is her husband, who is the man closest to the king and the kingdom’s only active ruler, since, “unless the king was making war, he would never, no matter what the emergency neglect his hunting, his hawking, or his other amusements” (ll. 25–29) which are “sport and lovemaking” (l. 15).35 In order for her to gain the actual empowerment suggested by the king’s flattering blandishments as to her equality with and even her superiority to him, she must plot (with the king) to do away with her husband. The less visible obstacle is the king himself. If she were queen, he would either have to do his job as king, find himself another seneschal who would cover for him, or give the job of ruling to her. His philandering would become more difficult, as there would be someone of high status familiar with his ways who would have an investment in changing them. Life as he knows it would be over. He apparently would rather literally die than have this happen, since he exposes the illicit liaison at the last moment, committing suicide and

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exposing the woman to her husband the seneschal, who kills her. Empowerment of the seducee, the inferior in the dynamic, is out of the question. Although Marie’s moral is superficially simple enough—“ Tels purcace le mal d’autrui/Dunt tuz li mals revert sur lui”36 (“Whoever plans evil for another will have that evil rebound on him”)—evil belongs to the masculine pronoun not to the feminine as should be expected from this story. Marie’s exposé seems clear enough: the enfranchised have an investment in remaining so, and therefore they ensure that the power to bestow enfranchisement remains in their hands. Offers of social elevation in exchange for “love” should not be taken seriously. Her moral, like the tools that Andreas offers, is meant to make the seducee, not the would-be seducer, cautior. Andreas’s text self-consciously engages these kinds of psychotextual dynamics and in so doing exposes them as potential members in the anatomy of seduction. Each of the men of the dialogues tries in one way or another to elevate the woman he woos, as a form of flattery and as a mode of entrapment. But the approach to Walter or the reader is not of this type, since the text seems determined to undermine Andreas as an authority and since it seems to show reverence for the reader’s freedom. Bernard’s texts, on the other hand, evince a certain naivété with respect to the dynamic of elevation, as well as to that of the manipulative Christ. Perhaps this apparent naivété is one reason Bernard’s texts were historically so successful—their readers were duped by an appearance of innocence into their interpretive choices. But just how naive was Bernard? Both Andreas and Bernard also appeal to readers by using sex as a way to discuss their real interests. Ironically, Andreas pretends the approach is transgressive, while Bernard pretends it is not. Andreas claims to take up an improper discussion of human lovers, of those enslaved to Venus; Bernard says he will break open a splendid and juicy (splendidus sapidusque) book, which happens to be the only erotic book in the Bible. But they differ in terms of their comfort with the material and their honesty about the level of its appeal. Andreas claims in the preface that his work crosses at least some socially acceptable boundaries and that he is somewhat uncomfortable with this but feels compelled, for love of Walter, to share it anyway. Bernard does not describe what he is doing, he simply does it—smoothly, cheerily, though passionately, and with great ease. Bernard invites the reader to transgress the common boundaries of human experience in order to know God, to some degree firsthand, through mystical experience and through an erotic text, one that is about sexual intercourse and being in love. Yet Bernard writes that he is not going to discuss real sex, only metaphors or spiritual levels of interpretation. The sexual aspect of the spiritual transgression/transcending at which he hints seems to be

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simultaneously suggested and denied. Bernard admits that he uses sexual language and imagery, and he defends this practice as the Spirit’s lure toward higher things. Since Bernard’s sermons on the Song of Songs show how a literal (even if literary) seduction can be a metaphor for conversion, it is likely that Andreas’s text, being a deconstruction of the arts of seduction in any context is also about how to avoid being converted. In order to complete this argument, as well as to show Bernard’s disingenuousness, let us now turn to his tactics for conversion or seduction that are specifically sexual. Bernard states in his first sermon on the Song of Songs what he sees to be the use of overtly sexual references: Quam quam ne hoc quidem dicit: “Osculeture me ore suo”, sed aliquid profecto insinuatius: OSCULO, inquit, ORIS SUI. Et quidem iucundum eloquium, quod ab osculo principium sumit, et blanda ipsa quaedam Scripturae facies facile afficit et allicit ad legendum, ita ut quod in ea latet delectet etiam cum labore investigare, ne fatiget inquirendi foret difficultas, ub eloquii suavitas mulcet. Verum quem non valde atttentum faciat istiusmodi principium sine principio, et novitas in veteri libro locutionis? Unde constat hoc opus non human ingenio, sed Spiritus arte ita compositum, ut quamvis sit difficile intellectu, sit tame inquisitu delectabile. (S.B. Opera, 1:5) But yet she does not say: “Let him kiss me with his mouth”; what she says is still more intimate: “with the kiss of his mouth.” How delightful a ploy of speech this, prompted into life by the kiss, with Scripture’s own engaging countenance inspiring the reader and enticing him on, that he may find pleasure even in the laborious pursuit of what lies hidden, with a fascinating theme to sweeten the fatigue of research. Surely this mode of beginning, that is not a beginning, this novelty of diction in a book so old, cannot but increase the reader’s attention. It must follow too that this work was composed, not by any human skill but by the artistry of the Spirit, difficult to understand indeed but yet enticing one to investigate. (K. Walsh, 3–4)

Bernard says that erotic language and subject matter make studies—reading and investigation—more enjoyable. He notes that Eros is especially useful toward getting a reader’s attention, hence his choice of the Song of Songs upon which to base his teachings on the spiritual life. By his own admission, what other text would get him more attentive listeners? Leclercq claims that Bernard engages sex in his campaigns because most of his monks, converts to Cistercian monasticism, were experienced former men of the world.37 This may be true, but he never appeals, in the case of sex, directly to his listeners’ former experience. Bernard’s references to sex assume and engage

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general interest in the subject. Bernard’s tactic does not seem to me to be particularly innocent. He admittedly uses sex as “bait.” Perhaps by analogy with conversion by the sword, he felt the ends justified the means.38 He makes an argument in support of using flesh as bait in Sermon 20 (S.B. Opera): Hanc ego arbitror praecipuam invisibili Deo fuisse causam, quod voluit in carne videri et cum hominibus homo conversari, ut carnalium videlicet, qui nisi carnaliter amare non poterant, cunctas primo ad suae carnis salutarem amorem affectiones retraheret, atque ita gradatim ad amorem perduceret spiritualem. (S.B. Opera, 1:118) I think this is the principal reason why the invisible God willed to be seen in the flesh and to converse with men as a man. He wanted to recapture the affections of carnal men who were unable to love in any other way, by first drawing them to the salutary love of his own humanity, and then gradually to raise them to a spiritual love. (K. Walsh, 152)

Bernard defends his methods by attributing them to God himself. But rather than embrace the sexual eroticism inherent in the Song of Songs, however much he uses it to inflame desire, he finally allegorizes it away, allowing the reader only a moment of titillation before the desire roused is channeled into a desire to prepare to meet God. By the end of the first sermon, Bernard incorporates a somewhat reified Eros into his text. Of the Song of Songs he says:39 Istiusmodi canticum sola unctio docet, sola addiscit experientia. Experti recognoscant, inexperti inardescant desiderio, non tam cognoscendi quam experiendi. Non est streptius oris, sed iubilus cordis; non sonus labiorum, sed motus gaudiorum; voluntatum, non vocum consonantia. Non auditur foris, nec enim in publico personat: sola quae cantat audit, et cui cantatur, id est sponsus et sponsa. Est quippe nuptiale carmen, exprimens castos iucundosque complexus animorum, morum concordiam, affectuumque consentaneam ad alterutrum caritatem. Ceterum non est illud cantare seu audire animae puerilis et neophytae adhuc, et recens conversae de saeculo, se profectae iam et eruditae mentis, quae nimirum suis profectibus, Deo promovente, in tantum iam creverit, quatenus ad perfectam aetatem et ad nubiles quodammodo pervenerit annos—annos dico meritorum, non temporum—facta nuptiis caelestis sponsi idonea, qualis denique suo loco plenius describetur. (S.B. Opera, 1:7–8) Only personal experience can unfold its meaning. Let those who are versed in the mystery revel in it: let all others burn with desire rather to attain to this experience than merely to learn about it. . . . It is an inward pulsing of delight. . . . It is preeminently a marriage song telling of chaste souls in

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loving embrace, of their wills in sweet concord, of the mutual exchange of the heart’s affections. The novice, the immature, those recently converted from a worldly life, do not normally sing this song or hear it sung. Only the mind disciplined by persevering study, only the man whose efforts have borne fruit under God’s inspiration, the man whose years . . . make him ripe for marriage is truly prepared for nuptial union with the divine partner, a union we shall describe more fully in due course. (K. Walsh, 6–7)

Not only does Bernard recapitulate the various lures with which he began the sermon, but he also relocates (displaces?) sexual desire from a secular beloved to God in the person of Jesus. It should not be very surprising then that when he actually goes on to describe stages in this union between Jesus and the soul—the kiss of the feet, hands, and mouth—they sound homoerotic. The homoeroticism, which shows up in many of the sermons, usually lasts only a moment before vanishing into a moral allegory that prescribes what the reader should do to make himself ready for this encounter. For instance, in Sermon 2, while “burning with desire” like the patriarchs for the incarnation of Christ, Bernard says, “Let him who is the most handsome of the sons of men [ Jesus] . . . kiss me with the kiss of his mouth . . . in his own person let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth.” Yet he says this kiss is not “an adhering of the lips that can sometimes belie a union of hearts, but an unreserved infusion of joys, a revealing of mysteries, a marvelous and indistinguishable mingling of the divine light with the enlightened mind, which, joined in truth to God, is one spirit with him” (K. Walsh, 8–9). Jesus, the incarnation of God, is identified as the kiss of God’s mouth; this kiss is the kiss of peace, since “not even a shadow of mistrust can then exist, for after all he is my brother, and my own flesh” (K. Walsh, 12). Jesus is both the kiss of God and the one who kisses the mystic. He is also flesh. In Sermon 3, Bernard writes that “any one who has received this mystical kiss from the mouth of Christ at least once [and they are few] seeks again that intimate experience, and eagerly looks for its frequent renewal” (K. Walsh, 16). Anyone who would aspire to the lips must begin at the feet. “Prostrate yourself on the ground, take hold of his feet, soothe them with kisses, sprinkle them with your tears and so wash not them but yourself . . . you may not dare to lift up a face suffused with shame and grief, until you hear the sentence: ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ to be followed by the summons: ‘Awake, awake, captive daughter of Sion, awake, shake off the dust’ ”(K. Walsh, 17–18). The monk’s gender shifts. In a kind of “identification in humility” with the feminine, the monk takes on the role of Mary Magdalene and keeps his identity as “daughter” even after his sins are forgiven. Next is the kiss of Christ’s hand, which is the acquisition

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(“adornment”) of virtues. The monk has by this point become male again: “Then we reach out for the hand that will lift us up, that will steady our trembling knees. And finally, when we shall have obtained these favors through many prayers and tears, we humbly dare to raise our eyes to his mouth, so divinely beautiful, not merely to gaze upon it, but—I say it with fear and trembling—to receive its kiss” (K. Walsh, 19–20). Bernard addresses the problem of such a physical encounter with Christ in Sermon 4: “This poses a problem for you? God is spirit, his simple substance cannot be considered to have bodily members, so then . . . I allow of course that God does not have these members by his nature, they represent certain modes of our encounter with him” (K. Walsh, 23). In Sermon 8, Bernard identifies the kiss with the mystical experience of the love of God, given by the Spirit, of which St. Paul speaks (K. Walsh, 47–48; 2 Cor. 12.4). Bernard is therefore able to counter a further objection through the use of scriptural authors and authority. He does it again with St. John, the mystic seer and beloved of Jesus, in the same sermon: “But I feel that one of you may now want to say: ‘What voice thundered forth to you a secret that, you insist, was made known to no creature?’ Unhesitatingly I answer: ‘It is the only Son, who is in the Father’s bosom who has made it known’ . . . not to the sorry and unworthy creature that I am, but to John, the Bridegroom’s friend . . . the disciple whom Jesus loved . . . [whose soul was] worthy both of the name and the dowry of a bride, worthy of the Bridegroom’s embraces, worthy of leaning back on Jesus’ breast” (K. Walsh, 50). But John is not the only one privy to this secret embrace, Paul is, too, as are all to whom Jesus has said “I call you friends, because I have made known to you everything I have learnt from my Father” (K. Walsh, 50). Bernard shows himself, despite his protestation of humility, clearly to be one of those to whom Jesus has pronounced these words. Bernard is able to placate any reader discomfort about his presumption by pointing to scripture; yet it is his own innovative reinterpretations and interconnections of scriptural passages that make his experience authoritative—like what John, Paul, and Jesus have been talking about all along. Sermon 8 identifies the soul of this type of man as the bride of Christ, and Christ as the Bridegroom of the Song of Songs: “let such a soul recognize herself as a daughter of the Father, a bride or even a sister of the Son . . . the proof is ready to hand . . .‘ I come into my garden, my sister, my bride’ ” (K. Walsh, 52). Despite his protests that his words and those of the Song of Songs embody spiritual truths, Bernard’s metaphors become almost tangible in places. Sermon 9, for instance, is “On the Breasts of the Bride and the Bridegroom.” When Bernard describes his own experience here, the homoeroticism lingers. After listing all the things he has done, all the

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obediences and the hardships he has endured for love of the Lord, calling himself “another Ephraim, a well-trained heifer that loves to tread the threshing floor,” making of himself a kind of subservient chattel, he says, “In so doing my soul thirsts like a parched land. If therefore he is to find my holocaust acceptable, let him kiss me, I entreat, with the kiss of his mouth” (K. Walsh, 54–55). Although the reader supposedly knows what Bernard really means at this point, that the kiss of the mouth is a rare spiritual experience, Bernard has chosen to couch his own desire for experience of God in sexual terms. Since the Song of Songs says, “your breasts are better than wine,” Bernard suggests that the consolations of breasts help slake the lover’s thirst that he has just claimed to have. The breasts signify compassion and joyful sympathy (K. Walsh, 61). Continuing to take interpretive license, since Solomon (or the Holy Spirit) does not say to whom the breasts belong, Bernard also claims that since “the author does not say who spoke these words, . . . we are free to assign them to the person whom we think they best suit” (K. Walsh, 55–56). Rather than attributing them to the more likely gender, the bride, he first attributes them to the Bridegroom who is Christ. His breasts bestow expectancy and forgiveness as refreshment. When Bernard attributes breasts to the bride in Sermon 10, she turns out to be male—in fact, she turns out to be the abbot Bernard himself, who suckles his monks with the milk of preaching (K. Walsh, 58–60). Although Bernard’s “milk” is arguably “bread” in the case of these particular sermons, his intentions are clear enough: he wants to kindle and reroute his reader’s desire through means that are not just intellectual or moral but specifically sensual and, at least to some degree, sexual. His success lies with whether the reader finds his self-presentation and metaphors to be attractive. I find Bernard’s appropriation of female organs, even if “only” allegorical, to be somewhat strange, even macabre when they are finally detached from any human body whatsoever and pressed in a wine press toward the end of Sermon 10 (K. Walsh, 60). I find the image of him suckling his monks, given the context of the Song of Songs in which it is embedded, to be at least as homoerotic as it is nurturing or maternal. The images of Christ suckling him feel similar.40 Besides this sort of disturbance (and there are all kinds of disturbances) Bernard employs obvious non sequiturs. Here is one example, found in my second quotation of Bernard above. I will not repeat the Latin, just the English: “Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth.” How shall I explain so abrupt a beginning . . .? . . . How delightful a ploy of speech this, prompted into life by the kiss, with Scripture’s own engaging countenance inspiring the reader and enticing him on, that he may find pleasure even in the laborious pursuit of what lies hidden, with a fascinating theme to sweeten the fatigue of research.

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Surely this mode of beginning . . . this novelty of diction in a book so old, cannot but increase the reader’s attention. It must follow too that this work was composed, not by any human skill but by the artistry of the Spirit, difficult to understand indeed but yet enticing one to investigate. (K. Walsh, 3–4)

It does not follow from what Bernard has just said about the charm of sexual subject matter that the Song of Songs is the work of the Spirit, needing exegetical attention, although the latter was a given for all scripture. He represses the following chain of logic: since the fathers and the church take exception to most sexual behavior (they had in fact thrown it out of the realm of what could be called holy) and since scripture is holy, the Song of Songs must not be about bodily sex but must in fact be a metaphor for something holy or spiritual. Yet he acknowledges the sexually erotic nature of his text by pointing out the charm it has for its readers. Bernard’s appeal is in fact more visceral than intellectual. He sweeps his reader up in the passion of his rhetoric, leaving the reader little opportunity to consider what is being done with him. However exciting or enjoyable this may be, I find it a bit disingenuous of Bernard. His concern is the salvation of souls, not the gift of freedom to choose, and he was not the only monastic writer to rally appeals to the senses to his righteous cause, but not all monastic writers shared Bernard’s approach. In order to show this, I shall now turn to some of the works of Richard of St. Victor, particularly to his Benjamin Minor. Seduction and Critical Distance Bernard died in 1153, which was roughly the same year Richard, probably from Scotland, entered St. Victor. St. Victor was founded at a meadow chapel on the left bank of the Seine by William of Champeaux when William left the schools of Paris in 1108, after having been publicly defeated by Abelard, his pupil: St. Victor was in the forefront of the movement to renew the life of cloistered religious discipline under the aegis of the Rule of St. Augustine. It also maintained a vigorous intellectual life, open to the new theological developments in the schools of Paris, developments that monastics, Benedictine and Cistercian alike, tended to shun. (Zinn, 2–3)

The Rule of Augustine was for secular clergy, but the Victorines crossed over between the cloistered life and life in the world. Their black cloaks over white habits symbolized their refusal to admit the division between the cloister and the world as well as that between the monk and the scholar.41 Gilduin and Hugh were the ones to establish St. Victor’s peculiar nature after William left the community to become bishop of Chalons in 1113.

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St. Victor was an open school, also serving as a kind of chaplaincy to the students at Paris. It therefore became “a wealthy corporation whose chief benefactors were the French royal family.”42 It had a magnificent and diverse library, as well as wide contacts, and it had daughter houses as far away as Wigmore and Bristol. Amidst its involvement with stormy current politics, it lived an orderly routine, “austere but temperate . . . where dishes must be wiped before being laid upon the table-cloth.”43 Hugh, whose work on the sacraments has been quoted, was called a second Augustine in his own day because his mission was to turn the latest learning and scholarly tools to the study of the Bible, although he warned against the hasty, superficial readings done in the schools. This is one of many reasons I see Andreas’s text to depend at least as heavily on monastic reading as on scholasticism. Further, Hugh published a refonte complète of the De Doctrina in his Didascalicon: de Studio Legendi.44 He changed lectio divina, the standard monastic course of divine reading, to include a special course of studies preliminary to the investigation of each interpretive sense. According to Beryl Smalley, there were three: the historical or literal, the allegorical or doctrinal, and the tropological or moral. She apparently reads the anagogical—the spiritual or mystical interpretation—as overlapping with the tropological, unlike some scholars who read it as a fourth interpretive sense.45 When a Victorine student had a proper grounding in the arts and sciences, he could then study the historical or literal sense of scripture, beginning with parts of the Old Testament. The student could then move on to the allegorical or doctrinal reading of scripture, beginning from the New Testament and returning to the Old. The tropological or moral, the prayerful mystical search for God in all things, came last and could be pursued apart from studies.46 Hugh stressed the importance of the historical or literal sense; he did not contrast it as “lower” than the “high” spiritual senses, as did many monastic exegetes. Hugh in fact criticized the Gregorian tradition “with its sublime disregard for the letter of Scripture.”47 He shared Abelard’s conviction that sense can be made out of the problems inherent in the literal and should be tried before spiritualizing it, unlike Bernard, who felt that time spent on the literal was time wasted, and who emphasized his own spiritual interpretations inspired by the Holy Spirit.48 Hugh of St. Victor died in 1141, but his was the intellectual and spiritual milieu into which Richard came in the early 1150s. Richard of St. Victor (d. 1173) is known primarily for his work as an exegete who used all of Hugh’s levels of interpretation brilliantly. His writings constitute systematic literary presentations of the ascetic life and careful analysis of contemplative, or mystical, experiences, intended to teach forms for discipline of self that lead to interior quiet and contemplation. His stature and influence were greater than tends to be

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recognized today.49 His works are practical and aimed at the individual. Although he employs scholastic methods of distinction, he does so in order to understand experience rather than to map out theory. The ultimate result of contemplation is a return to and fiery power for service of one’s fellows. Because contemplation and its results are based upon the interior states of the individual, Richard’s emphasis is on interiority. In Richard’s Benjamin Minor, the successive stages of an individual’s awareness and discipline are presented via personification allegory. The figures for the personifications are drawn from the story of Jacob’s twelve sons and one daughter from the Old Testament and from the disciples’ experience of Jesus’ transfiguration in the New Testament. Unlike Prudentius’s Psychomachia (fourth century) or Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus (c. 1183) Richard’s personifications do not simply exhibit symbolic characteristics; they are connected by narrative so that a “historical” (biblical) sequence of events becomes symbolic of a sequence of events in the inner life (psychology) of a person.50 Richard’s interests, like Bernard’s, were in the socialization of desire. Like Bernard, Richard also uses appeals to carnal desire and the possibility of mystical experience, to make the way of life he suggests attractive. Unlike Bernard, however, Richard makes his rhetorical methodology clear, leaving the reader a critical distance from which to choose how and whether to engage in a particularly religious conscription of his/her own desire. Further, Richard’s is an intellectual appeal rather than an emotional one. Intellectual appeal as well as the critical distance allowed the reader are two elements the Benjamin Minor shares with Andreas’s text. Richard of St. Victor’s Benjamin Minor is an elaborate allegorical interpretation with parallels so precisely drawn that the allegory almost seems to be inherent in the text rather than merely imposed upon it. In this case, the story of Jacob and Rachel becomes not just a vehicle for discussing the ascent to divine ecstasy but also a way of literally incorpor ating the teachings of the author, as well as all the goods the world has to offer. It is a text concerned with obtaining pleasure in the short run as well as in the long run. Its immediate pleasures are the result of calculated excesses—of its own verbal display, of its levels of meaning and their application, of its subject matter (ecstasy), and of imagining that one has all that the world can offer. It appeals to its reader’s love of pleasure, both intellectual and sensual. In the long run, it offers the ecstatic experience of divine union—a taste in this life and an eternity in the next. The first chapter of the Benjamin Minor, which appears below almost in its entirety, establishes Richard’s modes of seduction—literary, intellectual, sensual, and sexual: Audiant adolescentuli sermonem de adolescente, evigilent ad vocem Prophetae: Benjamin adolescentulus, in mentis excessu. Quis sit Benjamin iste,

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multi noverunt, alii per scientiam, alii per experientiam. Qui per doctrinam noverunt audiant patienter; qui per experientiam didicerunt, audiant libenter. Qui enim eum experientiae magisterio semel nosse potuit (fidenter loquor), sermo de eo, quamvis prolixus, illum satiare non poterit. Sed quis de eo digne loqui sufficiat? Est enim speciosus forma prae omnibus filiis Jacob, et qualem Rachel generare decuit. Nam Lia quidem, quamvis plures, pulchriores tamen liberos habere ono potuit. Duas namque, ut legitis, uxores Jacob habuisse cognoscitur; Rachel, formosior, Lia fecunda, sed lippa; Rachel fere sterilis, sed forma singularis. Sed jam, quae sint istae duae uxores Jacob, videamus, ut qui sint earum filii facilius intelligamus. Rachel, doctrina veritatis, Lia disciplina virtutis. Rachel, studium sapientiae, Lia desiderium justitiae. Sed scimus Jacob septem annis pro Rachel servisse, et tamen videbantur ei dies pauci, prae amoris magnitudine. Quid miraris? Secundum magnitudinem pulchritudinis erat magnitudo dilectionis. Certe si in laudem sapientiae aliquid tentare voluero, minus erit quantumcunque dixero. Quid enim sapientia ardentius diligitur, dulcius possidetur? Ejus decor omnem superat pulchritudinem, ejus dulcor omnem excedit suavitatem. Est enim, ut ait quidam, speciosior sole, et super omnem stellarum dispositionem: Luci comparata, invenitur prior (Sap. vii.). Illi enim succedit nox, sapientiam autem non vincit malitia: attingit ergo a fine usque ad finem fortiter, et disponit omnia suaveter. Hanc amavi, inquit, et exquisivi a juventute mea, et quaesivi sponsam mihi eam assumere, et amator factus sum formae illius (Sap. viii.) Quid ergo mirum, si Jacob in hujusmodi sponsae amore flagrabat, si talis ignis, si tantae dilectionis flammas temperare non poterat? O quantam amabat, o qualiter in ejus amore flagrabat, qui dixit: Super salutem et omnem pulchritudinem dilexi sapientiam? (Sap. vii.) Nihil enim hac, ut diximus, sapientia, ardentius diligitur, nil dulcius possidetur. Hinc est enim quod sapientes omnes esse volunt, pauci tamen admodum sapientes esse possunt. (PL 196.1) Let young men hear a discourse about youth; let them awaken to the voice of the Prophet: “Benjamin a young man in ecstasy of mind” (Ps. 67.28). Who is this Benjamin? Many know, some by knowledge, some by experience. Let those who know by teaching listen patiently; let those who have been taught by experience listen gladly. For a discourse concerning him—no matter how lengthy—can never satisfy anyone who has been able to know him even once by means of the teaching of experience (and I speak confidently). But who suffices to speak worthily of him? For he is more handsome of form when compared with all the sons of Jacob, as was proper for Rachel to beget. . . . Jacob is known to have had two wives. . . . Leah was fruitful but with poor eyesight. Rachel was nearly sterile but of singular beauty. Now let us see what these two wives of Jacob are so that we may more easily understand what their sons are. Rachel is teaching of truth; Leah, discipline of virtue. Rachel is pursuit of wisdom; Leah, longing for justice. But we know that Jacob served seven years for the sake of Rachel, and yet the days seemed few to him because of the greatness of love. Why do you marvel? The greatness of love was according to the greatness of beauty. . . . For what is

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loved more ardently or is sweeter to possess than wisdom? For her comeliness surpasses all beauty, and her sweetness exceeds all pleasure. . . .“ She is more beautiful than the sun, and above the whole ordering of the stars . . .” (Wisdom 7.29). For night follows day, but evil does not overcome wisdom: “She reaches powerfully from one end to the other and she sets all things in order pleasantly. I have loved and sought her out since my youth; I have desired to take her as my bride, and I have been made a lover of her beauty” (Wisdom 8.1–2). Why marvel if Jacob burned with love for such a bride, if he was unable to govern the flames of such a fire and so much love? O how much he loved, O he burned in his love who said: “I have loved wisdom above health and all beauty” (Wisdom 7.10). . . . For this reason all wish to be wise, yet few are able to be wise. (Zinn, 53–54)

Divine Wisdom is later identified both as Christ and as a beautiful woman. These are both fairly common images in medieval texts; but conflating them, as Richard does, is not common.51 The erotic appeal of the passage should be obvious. Further, Richard’s readers would have known they were being invited to hear St. Paul’s secret.52 This is the same invitation to divine transgression that Bernard offered, only in his system it is a retracing of one’s steps backward through the seven deadly sins, forward through the virtues to innocence, allowing for union with God; Eve’s sin sanctified; paradise regained.53 In Richard’s view, the recruit follows God’s “footsteps” through intellection, meditation, and contemplation, in and through all his “creatures”; that is, everything leads the pilgrim not to a regained paradisal innocence, as in Bernard’s teaching but to consort with Wisdom and give birth to true caritas. For the Victorines, Eve’s sin came from her desire to know and from the love of sensual pleasure; Victorine righteousness is built upon the same desires.54 Andreas’s point of view is not far from this but without the adherence to right religion. Richard’s work is very abstract, but the reader is lulled, coddled by the sensuous labials, liquids, nasals, and the general auditory persistence of the ebb and flow of parallels in his Latin. The reader is ultimately dazzled by the brilliance of Richard’s invention, the seemingly endless levels of interpretation pulled out of holy writ, embodied as anthropomorphic signs for the reader’s own inner workings, which, if appropriated, are received (changed) back into the reader. The reader is repeatedly invited to enjoy the embraces of a most beautiful, desirable woman—Wisdom—as well as to couch in the arms of Rachel, Leah, and their handmaids. The reader’s progeny from these liaisons are virtues that also behave like members of a family. For Richard, the “household of the soul” becomes a very real, clearly depicted set of psychological situations, in which the reader must function as the family patriarch, protecting his daughters and ordering his sons. But the reader also gives birth to these virtues with pain and longing,

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and in so doing is feminized. Even the boundary of gender can be overcome by the assiduous scholar-monk. Part of him dies with reasonable Rachel on giving birth to the ecstatic Benjamin. An aspect of the reader’s interior experience is identified with each of the characters, so the reader’s experience is not limited to the cloister. The reader not only gains rule of entire cities, through this peopled inner life, but he also becomes the nobility of God through contemplation and the habits of soul required to cultivate it, even circumventing ecclesiastical hierarchy by building and peopling his own interior church. He is also the bride who makes love, conceives, goes into labor and gives birth. He thus entirely transcends his social as well as his gender status. Inside the monastery, amidst the fictions of his inner world, the Victorine possesses and experiences everything. He stands to relinquish more of the world by remaining in it. All of this was clearly attractive. Andreas’s text acknowledges the human desire to transcend the limitations imposed by life and society without offering religious fictions as the solution to the problem. The “body” of Benjamin Minor is arguably less seductive than Bernard’s sermons, simply because it is more work to read and its appeal is less directly emotional. But it is far more attractive than the many texts that try to persuade the novice/reader to a devout or cloistered life by painting foul portraits of life outside the monastery. To deny that the world and the flesh are desirable seems to be to protest too much—except perhaps in the case of married women.55 Generally, the debated point has never been whether or not the world and the flesh are desirable but whether they are enough. Most medieval writers argue that they are miserably inadequate. But Richard keeps the world and the flesh, rather than rejecting them. He simply makes these desires conscious to his readers, then he names and subordinates them. Richard’s writings seem to address this question: how does one attain the most intense and prolonged pleasure both in this life and the next? His answer is that if a person can turn what is normally considered to be unpleasant (trials, pain, etc.) into occasions for joy, action, and conquest, then this life becomes consistently enjoyable. This is accomplished by defeating the enemies of a quiet soul. “These enemies [carnal delights] continually provide the material for triumph” he says (Zinn, 86). They are the cause of “two great evils: misery and craving. . . . That which I crave I find lacking, that which I flee I find everywhere,” says Richard (Zinn, 95). The victor therefore follows Christ’s injunction to love his enemies, these carnal delights and looks forward to contending with them through ascetic discipline, because the spoils of battle become his riches: his quieted soul, the offspring of a controlled body, is free to contemplate the beloved, God. Richard makes ascetic practices sound almost fun, like a challenging game. Additionally, whoever spends his life in the mystic’s

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quest makes himself available to receive a taste in this life of the joy he is gaining in the next. The only real trials and pains of the Victorine are those of the lover—the burning, the longing, the passion for the beloved that is both pain and pleasure.56 Andreas, on the other hand, deconstructs the uses of fiction. Richard is very clear about the use of fiction in creating truth. In Chapter 18 of Benjamin Minor, he writes, somewhat dangerously, of heaven and hell as motivating fictions. The two sons of Jacob, Dan and Naphtali, are the interior rhetoricians of the speculative imagination who narrate, even elaborate upon these fictions, seducing the soul into complicity and obedience through the beauty of their eloquence, as well as by fear: Ad Dan itaque specialiter pertinet consideratio futurorum malorum: ad Nephtalim autem speculatio futurorum bonorum. . . . Infernalia tormenta longe a sensu corporeo remota non dubitamus, quia ubi vel qualia sint videre non possumus, sed tamen haec quoties voluere non possumus, sed tamen haec quoties volumus, per ministerium Dan prae oculis cordis habemus. (PL 196.12) To Dan especially pertains consideration of future evils; to Naphtali, speculation of future goods. . . . We do not doubt that infernal torments are far removed from bodily sense because we are not able to see where and what kind they are, but nevertheless as often as we wish we have these things before the eyes of the heart through the service of Dan. (Zinn, 70)

As though Richard meant to retract what he has just written, he hurriedly negates any possibility that he might have implied that hell is not an actual physical place: Nemo fidelium cum infernum, flammam gehennae, tenebras exteriores in Scripturis sanctis legit, haec figuraliter dicta credit, sed ista veraciter et corporaliter alicubi esse non diffidit. (PL 196.12) None of the faithful who reads in holy scripture about hell, the flames of Gehenna and the outer darkness believes that these things have been said figuratively, but he does not doubt that these things exist somewhere truly and bodily. (Zinn, 70)

Yet, a few lines later, of accounts of heaven found in scripture he writes, Sed cum terram lacte et melle manantem, coelestis Hierusalem muros ex lapidibus pretiosis, portas ex margaritis, plateas ex auro legerit, quis sani

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sensus homo haec juxta litteram accipere velit? Unde statim ad spiritualem intelligentiam recurrit, et quid ibi mysticum contineatur, inquirit. (PL 196.13) But when we read about a land flowing with milk and honey or heavenly Jerusalem having walls of precious stones, gates of pearl and streets of gold, what person of sane sense would wish to interpret these things according to the literal sense? Therefore immediately he has recourse to spiritual understanding, and he seeks what is contained there mystically. (Zinn, 70)

The reader is then left to ask what person of sane sense would wish to interpret hell literally. Who would not prefer pearly gates to eternal flames? The upshot of even the appended, self-protective annotation about hell is that belief, even if it is in figures or fictions, affects action. Fiction can create truth. In Chapter 24 Richard makes it clear that he is doing the same sort of thing as Dan and Naphtali and that he is aware of his methods and motives. With reference to Naphtali he writes, Ecce quomodo sit cervus emissus. Sed quomodo dans eloquia pulchritudine, fortassis hoc per exempla evidentius ostendemus, persuadebimus plenius. Vultis audire eloquia pulchritudinis, eloquia suavitatis, plena decore, plena dulcedine, qualia Nephtalim formare consuevit, vel qualia eum formare convenit: Osculetur me, inquit, osculo oris sui (Cant. i). Fulcite me floribus, stipate me malis, quia amore langueo (Cant. ii). Favus distillans labia tua, mel et lac sub lingua tua, et odor vestimentorum tuorum sicut odor thuris (Cant. iv). Quid, quaeso, dulcius huiusmodi eloquiis, quid jucundius invenitur? Quid talibus eloquiis libentius, quid avidius auditur? Ista verba carnale aliquid sonare videntur, et tamen spiritualia sunquae per ipsa describuntur. Sic novit Nephtalim carnalia cum spiritualibus permiscere, et per corporalia incorporea describere, ut utraque hominis natura in ejus dictis inveniat unde se mirabiliter reficiat qui ex corporea et incorporea natura constat. (PL 196.16–17) Behold how he is “a hind sent forth.” But how is he “giving words of beauty”? Perhaps the more evidently we show this by an example, the more completely we can persuade. You wish to hear words of beauty, words of pleasantness . . . full of sweetness, such as Naphtali is accustomed to form . . . “Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth” (SS 1.1). “Stay me with flowers, comfort me with apples, for I am sick with love” (SS 2.5). “Your lips, O my spouse, drip like a honeycomb; honey and milk are under your tongue; and the smell of your garments is like a aromatic odor” (SS 4.11). What, I ask, is found sweeter or more joyful than such words? These words seem to sound like something carnal, but nevertheless spiritual things are described by means of them. Thus

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Naphtali knew to mix carnal things with spiritual things and to describe incorporeal things by means of corporeal things so that the twofold nature of man finds in his that from which he who consists of both corporeal and incorporeal nature might marvelously refresh himself. (Zinn, 76)

Richard not only admits the legitimate claims of the human body in this passage, and the usefulness of addressing its inclinations, but he also admits that part of the meaning of the Song of Songs, its literal meaning, is in fact sexual. Bernard only admits the seeming of a sexual sense and the claims of the body as the “fallen” place where he must start his appeal. As for what else Richard has to say about the pleasure of the text in this chapter, it is that for “us” the pleasure of difficult interpretation exceeds even that of sexual titillation: Illud autem in ejus dictis est valde mirabile dignumque admiratione quod tunc fere semper delectabilius blanditur, quando juxta litterae sensum nihil sonare videntur quale est illud: Capilli tui sicut greges caprarum quae ascenderunt d monte Galaad. Dentes tui sicut greges tinsarum, quae ascenderunt de lavacro (Cant. iv). Nasus tuus sicut turris Libani quae respicit contra Damascum, caput tuum sicut Carmelus (Cant. vii). Haec et hujusmodi alia cum audiuntur, vel leguntur, jucunda valde esse videntur, et tamen in his omnibus, si solum litterae sensum sequimur, nil in eis invenimus quod digne miremur. Sed forte in hujusmodi dictis hos est quod tam libenter amplectimur, quod ex jucunda quadam, ut ita dicam, litterae fatuitate ad spiritualem intelligentiam confugere coarctamur. (PL 196.17) However, in his words, that is marvelous and worthy of wonder which almost always pleases more delightfully, when according the literal sense they seem to mean nothing. This is of such sort: “Your hair is like a flock of goats that ascend from Mount Gilead. Your teeth are like a flock of shorn sheep that come up from the washing” (SS 4.1–2). “Your nose is like the tower of Lebanon which looks toward Damascus. Your head is like Carmel” (SS 7.4–5). When we hear or read these and other such things, they seem to be very delightful. Nevertheless, in all of these, if we follow only the sense of the letter, we may find nothing in them at which we may worthily marvel. This is what we so gladly embrace: that from a kind of pleasing silliness, so to speak, of the literal sense, we are forced to take refuge in spiritual understanding. (Zinn, 77)

It is even more fun to make something of nothing or sense out of nonsense through interpretation than to think about sex. In this chapter of Richard’s lies his defense for overtly appealing to his readers’ exegetical curiosity as well as to their sensual and sexual interests. Nor does Richard cease to appeal to readers through sex and sense and intellectual delight as he takes them higher up the contemplative ladder. What changes during the ascent

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is not the appeal but the construction of the appeal. The further up he goes, the less domestic the images become, and gender becomes interchangeable. Benjamin Minor ends with Christ as the beloved and beautiful bride (144) brothers kissing (146) and a description of how appropriate and necessary it is that holy scripture be manhandled (146). Clearly, Andreas was not the only twelfth-century writer aware of the uses of fiction and rhetoric toward the conscription of desire. He was also not the only one to understand how coercive these could be and to leave his reader some options. Richard’s texts, being self-consciously occupied with the uses of fiction, particularly as they relate to the cultivation of desire, unlike Bernard’s texts, allow the reader a modicum of critical distance, leaving him free to embrace the text, or not. Bernard, on the other hand, does not seem to want his reader to be aware of what is being done to him. Andreas, like Bernard and Richard, used discourse about sex to get to supposedly more significant issues. But for Andreas the significant issues are the social and personal ramifications of desire rather than the mystical sublimation of it. Andreas’s only interest in the God of Christianity seems to be to criticize the Church’s concept of that God. Andreas’s text evinces a psychological and social awareness as complex and profound as Richard’s, although it does so in terms far different from Richard’s scholastic distinctions and personification allegories. Neither are the models of self that Andreas’s text offers prescriptive, proscriptive, or paradigmatic for the reader but, rather, confessional, experimental, and transgressive of social norms. In fact, Andreas’s use of mystical discourse exposes the efforts of writers such as Bernard and Richard for what they are. This look at the works of Richard of St. Victor has been intended to show that discourses of desire were among the most relevant in the twelfth century and that they were not univocal or monolithic. It has also been intended to show that Andreas had intellectual precedent for deconstructing the uses of fiction and rhetoric in those discourses, leaving the reader a modicum of freedom. Finally, I hope it has provided a background against which the difference of Andreas’s contribution to twelfth-century discourses of desire may continue to be seen in the final chapters of this book. On Confessio and the Charm of Free Choice In order to foreground further discussion of Andreas’s self-representations, especially the religious ones and to complete the material presented in this chapter, an examination of some of the religious language used by the seducers in Andreas’s text is necessary. In the final three dialogues (6, 7, 8), all of the male speakers are of the higher nobility, and each engages the discourse of religious mysticism to falsely elevate his prey.

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The protest of the woman from Dialogue 6, that her heart and her will are at odds, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, is her response to the man’s attempt to mitigate her freedom to choose. He has tried to coerce her to his ends by arguing along the lines generally put forward by the church: he has just told her that Love gave her the freedom to choose, not so that she would abuse that freedom by not choosing him, but so that she could gain honor and rewards by using it wisely. God gave people free will, but there is a catch: we have to choose what he wants us to (or go to hell). The scriptural basis for this thinking can be found in Paul’s letter to the Romans (Rom. 6.15–23): “Are we to sin because we are not under the law? Of course not. You have put yourselves at the disposal of a master to obey him,” and so on. With the “freedom” has come a debt. As St. Paul says of the Christian again in 1 Cor. 6.20, “You do not belong to yourselves, you were bought at a price.” In both of these passages, Paul is trying to prevent specifically sexual sins in his flock. The conscription of their desire is based on what they owe God for what he has supposedly freely done for them. This should remind us of Bernard’s Sermon 20, when he quotes Paul on the disobedient: “Let them be anathema!” This false freedom and the manipulative nature of God as taught by the church are among the underpinnings of medieval Christianity that I see Andreas’s text to point out and to challenge. In the face of this so-called freedom, the woman of Dialogue 6 asserts not only the problem of her desire but also the problem that her desire is divided. Her final question opposes the “heart” (desire) with “will” (action aided by reason). In the end, she does not want what might be to her advantage nearly as much as she wants what she wants. Further, her final response—rejecting the suitor—seems to be preferable (even to the reader) to her accepting the rather slimy lord who would seduce her. The grace of God that St. Paul calls upon to deal with his similar problem appears in no form or circumstance in Andreas’s text. All subjects therein are simply stuck with their desires. The man fills Dialogue 6 with flattery reminiscent of St. Paul, who reckons everything as dung in comparison to gaining Christ (Phil. 3.8–9), and with the parables of the Kingdom in which all is traded for the pearl (Matt. 13.46) or the field with buried treasure (Matt. 13.44). The man tells the woman, “Sciatis . . . nihilique me posse in saeculo isto beare nisi pretiosissimum personae vestrae thesaurum. Nam sine ipso nihil mihi videtur in saeculo possidere, et omnium saecularium rerum abundantia pro summa mihi reputatur inopia” (1.6.282–283; “You must know . . . nothing in this life can bring me happiness except the most precious treasure of your person. Without it no worldly possession seems to me worth having, and abundance of all worldly things I regard as the height of poverty”). His

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flattery puts her on a par with Christ or kingdom of God. She is no more comfortable with this false elevation and deification than is the woman of Dialogue 7, and she sees it for what it is. After the man’s suggestion that she will go to Love’s hell if she does not make herself ready to accept Love’s grace, she says that the man will just have to wait until Love bestows his grace on her, inflaming her desire, because now there is none. The dialogue then ends with the man’s mock pious offer of prayer on her behalf. Like a mystic, and like Paul, the man of Dialogue 7 tells the woman he has been praying “to gaze upon her with outward eye,” to see her “face to face” (1 Cor. 13.12). The man of Dialogue 7 says it is not surprising that he has been “affected with so great a longing”57 to see her, for “the whole world sings the praises of your beauty and sagacity” (cf., Rom. 1.20, 8.18–25; Ps. 48.10). The man continues, Et ego nunc aperta veritate cognosco quod nec lingua nec animus hominis vestram speciem atque prudentiam esset narrare vel cogitare sufficiens. Et ideo maxima quam habebam vos videndi ac serviendi voluntas non modica suscipit augmenta et maiora ulterius incrementa cognoscet, quia liquide mihi constat et est manifestum quod vobis servire solum est cunctis in hac vita regnare, et sine ipso nihil posset ab aliquo in hoc saeculo dignum laudibus adimpleri. Deum quidem exoro coelestem, ut id mihi solum ex sua gratia concedat propriis actibus semper operari quod vestrae debeat omnino dignitati placere. Nulla enim me posset demum perturbare adversitas vel sinistrum impedire fortunae. Et ego bona semper cuncta, quae fecero, vestris volo laudibus indulgere et per omnia vestro nomini deservire. Nam quidquid boni peregero, intuitu vestri et assidua contemplatione noveritis esse perfectum. (1.6.324–326) I too now realize with the clarity of truth that neither tongue nor mind of man would suffice to tell or to ponder your beauty and wisdom (2 Cor. 12.1–5). Accordingly that greatest desire which I entertained to see and serve you now increases markedly, and will experience greater increase still,58 for I have the clear certainty that merely to serve you is to have universal kingship in this life, and aside from that service nothing praiseworthy could be achieved by anyone in this world ( John 15.1–6). In fact I pray to God in heaven that by His grace He grant me the one boon always by my deeds to act in a way which must be wholly pleasing to your worthy person. No misfortune, no unkindness of Fortune could trouble or impede me then. I desire to devote to your praises all the good deeds I perform, and to serve your name in all of them; for whatever good I achieve you must know has been performed with eyes and sedulous thoughts on you. (P.G. Walsh, 133, 135)

The man’s language echoes that of St. Paul’s description of his vision of God, comparing the woman to that vision. The woman takes exception to

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being elevated to such heights, and she sees such misplaced praise as offensive to the One for whom it was intended. She responds subtly: Grates vobis multas constringor offerre, quod tantis me vultis commendare praeconiis tantisque vobis placuit me laudibus exaltare . . . Volo tamen quandam vobis admonitionem dare praecipuam, ut neminem vestris tantum debeatis laudibus exaltare, quod postea vobis verba pudeat detractione supprimere; et nullius curetis tantum famae vestro derogare sermone, ut ipsum proinde non possitis nisi verecunde laudare. (1.6.327–328) I am obliged to tender many thanks to you for your desire to praise me with such glowing eulogies . . . But I wish to give you a little advice, chiefly that you should not so glorify anyone with your praises that you may later be ashamed to recall and eat your words. Nor should you seek in your speech to detract from anyone’s reputation to such a degree as to be unable subsequently to praise him without a blush. (P.G. Walsh, 135)

Although the woman goes on to describe how this kind of praise of one lady is to the detriment of all other ladies, it is clearly the man’s possible approaches to God that will cause him shame in the end. That the man’s praise is disingenuous is clear from how the other types of elevation function in previous dialogues. But this man actually points out the use of his praise: it allows him to manipulate her. He also suggests that she is in fact capable of evil, and he offers to cover for her: “etsi a vobis mala perpetrata reticeam . . . at tamen vestras desistam attollere laudes” (1.6.333; “If you do evil deeds I shall admittedly say nothing of the wickedness you have committed . . . but I shall cease to ring your praises”). Since the man has staged himself as the suppliant mystic and the woman as God, the dialogue parodies the discourse of mystical religion, exposing two of its aspects. First, the discourse does not allow for honest discussions of the problem of evil, given an indisputably good God who is also the judge; even though the context leaves the responsibility for evil at God’s doorstep, any theological attempt to postulate God as the source of evil as well as of good was considered heretical. Second, the mystic—or any devotee— becomes responsible for preserving God’s reputation. My suggestions are further supported by the man’s strange citation of Donatus around 6.1.348. Arguing that he dishonors no one in doing all he does in the woman’s name, the man adds the following as authoritative support: . . . imperari non potest peritissimi hoc Donati vobis insinuante doctrina: in tantum enim liberrima reperitur humana voluntas quod nullius eam posset a firmiter concepta dispositione conatus avertere. (1.6.348) The will cannot be given orders, as the teaching of the most experienced Donatus instructs you. The human will clearly has such great freedom that

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no man’s efforts could divert it from an attitude it strongly holds. (P.G. Walsh, 141)

Unfortunately, the citation is spurious. Not only is it untraceable,59 but Donatists were spiritually pure to the point of claiming their exclusive salvation on that basis. This purity was the outcome of an especially strong will, guided by right-minded reason.60 To whom, then, can we ascribe the “doctrine” of the ultimate freedom of the human will as it is described in this passage if not to Andreas?61 This doctrine completely contradicts the religious discourse that the man has engaged in order to seduce the woman. The passage simultaneously subverts the man’s intention, which is the mitigation of the woman’s free will, subverts the religious tradition that submission of the individual’s will to God’s is the only way to have true freedom of will, and supports the argument that whatever society prescribes or the sword enforces, people are free to think and feel as they do, as least in an interior way, whether they know it or not. Despite himself, the man of the higher nobility in Dialogue 7 supports the common woman’s decision in Dialogue 6. Like the man of Dialogue 7, the man of Dialogue 8 makes possession of the woman’s love equivalent to mystical union with God. He begins generally, Credo quidem et est verum bonos omnes ob hoc Deo in hac vita disponi, ut vestris et aliarum dominarum voluntatibus obsequantur, et lucidisssima videtur mihi ratione constare quod homines nil esse possunt nilque de bonitatis valent fonte praelibare, nisi dominarum hoc fecerint suadela commoti. Sed quamvis et mulieribus cuncta videantur bona procedere, et multam eis Dominus prerogativam concesserit, et omnium dicantur esse causa et origo bonorum, necessitas sibi tamen evidenter incumbit ut tales se debeant bona facientibus exhibere, ut eorum probitas earum intuitu de virtute in virtutem modis omnibus crescere videatur. Nam, si nulli lucem ipsarum claritudo contulerit, erit tanquam candela sub modio latenter abscondita . . . (1.6.403–404) (Italics mine.) I believe, and it is true, that all good men are set by God in this life to submit to the wills of you and other ladies, and it seems to me to accord with reason that men are not able either to amount to anything or to drink from the fount of goodness unless they do so under the persuasion of ladies. Although it seems that all good things derive from women, and that God has granted them so great an election, and they are said to be the cause and origin of all good things, nevertheless the necessity clearly supports itself the such ought themselves to exhibit good deeds so that the manners of those men looked upon by those women seem in all ways to increase from virtue to virtue. For, if their light bestows brightness on no one, it will be like a candle lying hidden in a bushel . . .

The man here clearly engages a specifically mystical discourse of desire. De virtute in virtutem echoes St. Paul’s account (2 Cor. 3.18) of the

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Christian’s freedom to directly face God, reflect him, and be “transfigured into his likeness, from splendour to splendour.”62 Paul’s discourse in the cited passage incorporates the degrees of glory that will be visible in bodily resurrection (1 Cor. 15.40) with the mystical experience he has already had (2 Cor. 1–5) including his ascent through the spheres that reflect those degrees of glory, virtue, or splendor. These passages were used as scriptural support for twelfth-century theologies of the mystical ladder, an image employed by many, including Bernard of Clairvaux.63 Andreas uses them to expose and debunk phony seduction, be it religious or sexual. True to Bernard, Andreas’s cleric in the eighth dialogue mingles the fount and source of all good with the Object of the climb up the mystical ladder of acquired virtues and enlightening revelations. Untrue to Bernard, however, he also identifies this source with women. The man proceeds, also in holy Pauline and Bernardian fashion, to claim that he only desires “the milk of nurturing hope” from her, that he is “sustained solely by chaste thoughts,” and he begs her “with most stringent prayers,” “with a sense of obligation turn and gaze on me, and offer my lonely contemplation some supporting prospect of development” (1.6.405–406). She is in no way flattered and she disengages his mystical parole, bringing him back down to earth by answering with quotations from Cicero, with discussions of knightly duties and with the judgment of God. Although the man is a cleric in this eighth dialogue, well versed in all the standard ecclesiastical pronouncements upon matters of import, the woman seems to be the one who is interested in truth. When they engage in the discussion of Eve’s sin, she counters his accusation of general female gluttony with an individual’s willingness to trespass for the sake of “knowledge of good and evil.” How Eve’s trespass is read and theologized is central to formulating doctrines of free will and the goodness of God. Eve’s sin eventually came to be called the felix culpa, since through it and through Mary’s reversal of it came Christ’s humanity. This doctrine suggests that God is not responsible for evil: evil is the result of people’s abuse of their God-given freedom. Even given the evil people do, God is able to intervene, turning the evil to good. This is probably the simplest and most positive of related doctrines available at the time. But it is never offered as any kind of solution in Andreas’s text, nor is any of the others. Instead, the problem of evil is left at God’s doorstep, and the abuse of freedom more often appears as a compromise of the truth of one’s inner convictions than as disobedience. Andreas’s text seems to suggest, with an almost spiritual purity, that even (perhaps especially) in the face of coercion, people should be true to their own convictions and desires. Although Andreas’s text engages religious discourses on desire and seems especially occupied with

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the social restrictions on desire that are related to religion, it is not itself a religious text, at least not in the usual sense. Nor is it exactly a secular one. A brief look at Andreas’s contrary use of confession will help clarify this further. Andreas’s text does share with religious texts the appeal (in both senses) of confession. Bernard continually refers to his experience (not always pleasant) and to his feelings for his monks. He longs and hopes for their progress in the spiritual life, as St. Paul does for his congregations. Bernard waits with his monks for the Lord; he rejoices with them and suffers with them.64 Andreas’s text participates in this kind of confessional appeal, as is clear from even a cursory reading of his Praefatio. Beyond this, however, Andreas’s text participates in a confessional mode that seems unusually subtle and, unlike most confessions, convincingly honest. Whether the aim of this selfrevelation is to seduce is difficult to determine. Some comparison with other confessions or self-revelations is a good way to begin to understand Andreas’s use of confession. The most famous of early confessions, and one likely known to most twelfth-century authors, is Augustine’s. Like the short biography of St. Paul in Acts, Augustine’s autobiography is a conversion story intended to show the goodness and power of the one true God in order that everyone might “give glory to God.” In other words, the stories exist that the reader might be converted to the Christian religion, confirmed in it, or, as in Augustine’s case, converted to the correct version of it. In Paul’s case, God transformed a nasty persecutor of Christians into a zealous evangelist for the faith through a frightening supernatural experience. Augustine’s much longer story begins with his birth and rewrites his life, noting all that God was doing for him that he did not notice at the time. He confesses his sundry faults and shows how God helped him change his ways. As much as Augustine hated theater, the confessions seem nevertheless to be staged. The reader becomes an observer or “audience,” in the theatrical sense, of Augustine’s private, intimate monologue to God. Given the stated goal of the Confessions, and given also the rhetorical passion of the language, it is impossible to see Augustine’s confessions as entirely ingenuous. Only in the places of slippage, where the text seems to escape its author, where he seems to accidentally disclose something about himself that is clearly not part of his goal, does his discourse seem completely honest. Andreas’s “confessions” seem intentional, though not generally overt, but their loci are among the places the reader seems to be directed to look. Unlike other medieval confessées, Andreas does not describe his conversion or any mystical experience. He does claim that he remains in the chains of his desire, and shows nothing but fear toward the God of the Church. He

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does not engage in any of Augustine’s humble self-glorification; when Andreas seems to preen himself, it is in order to poke fun at himself. He seems to be well aware of his foibles, but he does not present them as something he is in the process of overcoming. He simply accepts them as a given to which he is resigned. Chapter IV will present a developed discussion of examples. For now it is enough to note that there is no conversion hinted or incipient in his confessions, as much as he protests that men of his type will go to hell. As we shall continue to see in his loci of self-revelation (and selfrevelation is at core confessional) Andreas portrays himself as protean, multiple, and undefinable in any complete way; there is no pretense toward a thoroughly knowable, depictable self. There seems to be an admission that the self is as unknowable as the Other. Such an admission seems also to function as a kind of objection against the usual kind of self-revelation, making visible the bad faith inherent in it. In comparison with Andreas’s self-revelation, his more famous and powerful predecessors, Paul and Augustine, appear to be pursuing readers as clumsily as the men in Andreas’s dialogues pursue the women—at least if their readers are as witty as Andreas’s women. Andreas’s mode of self-representation seems not only to stand against the usual religious modes of selfrepresentation but also to suggest that such representations are calculated to persuade in such a way that the reader’s freedom to make an honest choice is seriously inhibited and that the reader’s conversion is based on a falsehood. Because of the ways Andreas plays with the dynamics of the authoritative master, he undermines them rather than perpetuating them and leaves his reader free of the obligation to believe him or even to hear him out. Richard, on the other hand, does promote his own authority but not in ways as clear and subtle as those of Bernard. Richard only writes about himself as an occasional unnamed third person whose experience is somehow relevant. One of the charms of Richard’s texts is that they are offered as tools and suggestions to be used or not as the reader sees fit. The fictions to be used by the reader upon himself are discussed as such, and the images that are used to appeal to his senses are also discussed as doing just that, with arguments attached to justify the practice. Unlike Bernard, there is no attempt on Richard’s part to assert his authority rhetorically, nor to obfuscate his designs on the reader. This is not to say that there is no seduction of the reader being attempted; it is just more intellectual and less coercive. It may be that Andreas’s text participates in a seduction of its own, despite its selfsubversion and subversion of the techniques of seduction, but, if so, it is even more subtle than Richard’s. In suggesting that it is subtle, I do not

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also suggest that its appeal is “sneaky,” like Bernard’s. Andreas’s text is covert for practical reasons, but an engaged reader can find its suggestions and appeal. Much of its appeal lies in the freedom it leaves the reader. One could argue that this is in itself a type of seduction. The next chapter considers further what kind of seduction and of whom.

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CHAPTER IV ANDREAS AND WALTER

To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little. . . . To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not—this is the beginning of writing. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 99–100 Si haec igitur, quae ad nimiam tuae petitionis instantiam vigili cogitatione conscripsimus, Gualteri amice, attenta curaveris aure percipere, nil tibi poterit in amoris arte deficere. Nam propter nimiae dilectionis affectum tuis penitus cupientes annuere precibus confertissimam plenamque amoris doctrinam in hoc tibi libello edidimus. If with respect to these things, which we have put together in writing through nightlong meditation at the excessive urgency of your requests, friend Walter, you have taken care to grasp with an attentive ear, nothing can be lacking for you in the art of love. For on account of a feeling of excessive love, to assent to your deeply longing prayers, we produced for you a most dense and packed doctrine of love in this little book. Andreas (3.1.1) No indirect means could be more effective in the expression of sadness than that “all night long.” Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 97

aving established in previous chapters that Andreas’s text is at least as dense and subversive as it is funny, this chapter continues to explore why the text was written by looking more closely at who wrote it and for whom. Since teaching its reader how to seduce women is clearly not what Andreas’s text is about, and it is about reading, sifting rhetoric, and questioning cultural institutions, one might ask why these literary and political discourses are couched in a text also about sexual relations. For some readers it is already evident that sex, or control of it, has much to do with institutions and that seduction is inherently related to rhetoric.1

H

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Beyond this, however, Andreas may have had personal as well as political reasons for writing. This chapter begins to explore those possibilities. The section below, “Andreas’s Desire Uncovered,” examines what the text indicates about its author and its author’s desire. The section that follows it, “Identities,” looks further into the textual rather than historical identities of Andreas and Walter. The section, “Readership,” discusses the text’s readership, based primarily on a reading of the text, and the readership’s relation to Andreas and Walter. The final section, “Feminine Desire and the Transgendered Agents of Andreas’s Text,” completes the discussion of Andreas’s relationship to Walter, provides the final evidence of Andreas’s identification with what I call the “feminine position,” and lays the groundwork for discussion of Andreas’s Book III in my final chapter. Andreas’s Desire Uncovered Andreas’s Praefatio establishes its author as a self-named authority on love who, unable to follow his own advice, claims he writes in the throes of his own lack of self-control, based on his feelings for Walter. Walter is his excuse for writing what he claims to be an inappropriate text. Further, the Prologue (Praefatio) creates Walter as a silent, absent other, as well as a novice seeking inappropriate instruction about love. Neither Walter’s desire nor his requests can be denied by Andreas because of his own desire to please the wayward youth; therefore, Walter is made to be the occasion of Andreas’s transgression. Walter should, according to Andreas as authority, devote himself to “weightier” matters. For clarity of reference, here is the Prologue in its entirety: Cogit me multum assidua tuae dilectionis instantia, Gualteri venerande amice, ut meo tibi debeam famine propalare mearumque manuum scriptis docere qualiter inter amantes illaesus possit amoris status conservari, pariterve qui non amantur quibus modis sibi cordi affixa valeant Veneris iacula declinare. Asseris te namque novum amoris militem novaque ipsius sauciatum sagitta illius nescire apte gubernare frena caballi, nec ullum posse tibi remedium invenire. Quod quam sit grave quamque molestet meum animum nullis tibi possem sermonibus explicare. Novi enim et manifesto experimento percepi quod qui Veneris est servituti obnoxius nil valet perpensius cogitare nisi ut aliquid semper valeat suis actibus operari, quo magis possit ipsius illaqueari catenis; nihil credit se habere beatum nisi id quod penitus suo debeat amori placere. Quamvis igitur non multum videatur expediens huiusmode rebus insistere, nec deceat quemquam prudentem huiusmodi vacare venatibus, tamen propter affectum quo tibi annector, tuae nullatenus valeo petitioni obstare; quia luce clarius novi quod

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docto in amoris doctrina cautior tibi erit in amore processus, tuae prout potero curabo postulationi parere. (P.G. Walsh, 30) (Translation mine.) The insistent approach of my love [dilectionis] for you forces me, o reverend friend Walter, to make open to you from my sayings and to teach by the writing of my own hands how it is possible for the state of love to be preserved intact between lovers, or equally, how those who are not being loved might somehow be strong to deflect the darts of Venus affixed in their own hearts. You claim, as a new soldier of love, wounded with a new arrow, not to know how to aptly govern the reins of the horse that soldier himself rides nor to be able to find any remedy for yourself. How serious this is, and how much it disturbs my soul, I am unable to explain to you with speeches [sermonibus]. Yet I know by proven experience and have observed that he who is the submissive servant of Venus desires to consider nothing weighty—unless it be how he might always fortify himself with acts of labor by which he might enchain himself more completely; he believes himself to have no happiness unless it be that which ought deeply to please his love. Although it does not seem very expedient to dwell upon these kinds of things, nor is it yet fitting for a prudent man to be free for huntings of this kind, nevertheless, because of the feeling by which I am bound to you, I am strong in no way to withstand your petition; because I know clearer than day that your progress in love will be more cautious from one learned in instruction for love, I will take care to comply with your request as I am able.

There are some strange aspects to this Prologue. First of all, there is no mention of women. The love that is of interest to either of the two possible subjects is amor or his own love or personal desire.2 Second, service to Venus is depicted as a kind of slavery, as compulsive service, but the author claims he is bound to serve Walter with just such chains. Third, the author claims he will show Walter how to “deflect darts already affixed”—a logical impossibility, as has been noted—then writes that Walter claims to be already “wounded with a new arrow.” The text admits from its beginning that it is about the author’s and the reader’s desire and that they are both already in love. I will elaborate by attending especially to the words in the preface that I have italicized above. Under scrutiny, it is not just Andreas’s affection for Walter, or a sense of duty, that moves him to write on what he claims to be a morally equivocal topic, but it is the “insistent approach” or “persistent hanging over” (instantia) of his dilectio for Walter that so moves him. It is the author’s delight in or love for (dilectio) one he calls venerande that creates the pretext for writing. Although dilectio and venerande are not in themselves unusual epistolary salutations—they occur most often between clerical or religious writers—Andreas’s use of them is unusual. A study of contemporary usages, especially of dilectio, shall serve to illustrate my point. The list of epistolary salutations is from Ludwig Rockinger’s

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chapter on the Rationes dictandi prosaice, a manual of rhetoric that would have been available in twelfth-century France.3 Of the thirty-nine contemporary examples of epistolary salutation provided in the Rationes dictandi prosaice, only seven of them use dilectio or venerandus. Venerandus is used three times, once for a father and twice for a religious superior. The father is not only venerable, but the son expresses his dilectio.4 Walter is clearly being elevated by the appellation venerandus beyond his supplicant student status vis Andreas the Master. If Maria Brackett is right about Walter, that he was historically the nephew of Philip II, and personally very close to him at court, then venerandus could be Andreas’s desire to honor Walter’s position.5 Although I do not put this outside the realm of possibility, the text’s undermining of the system of nobility throws this otherwise fine alternative into question. The remaining examples of dilectio in the Rationes dictandi prosaice always appear as adjectives, not as nouns; they are generally in the passive voice, and nearly all are “familial,” being used between fathers, sons, and brothers. None of the uses carry the potentially erotic valences of Andreas’s preface. The most erotic exemplary salutation is to a pastor or benefactor: “Quanta mentis flagrantia et amoris desiderio vestre dilectionis presentiam desiderem, non ratione discernere, non manu scribere, nec viva voce exprimere”6 (“How much ardor of mind and of love for the desirable delight of your desirable presence reason cannot discern, nor hand write, nor living voice express”). This also comes from the language St. Paul uses to describe his mystical experience. Nevertheless, dilectio remains adjectival even in this instance, a minor decoration proffered by an assumed or passive “I.” If Murphy’s suggestion that salutations and signatures are intended to show discriminations between degrees of friendship and degrees of station, a careful study of them would not prove vain.7 For the sake of brevity, however, I offer two polar sets of examples: the letters of Hildegard of Bingen and those of Abelard and Heloise. Most of the letters addressed to Hildegard, which are from various pontiffs, prelates, bishops, and other clergy, call her dilectae filiae in Christo, something like beloved daughter in Christ, and insist upon the paternal affection of their authors for her. She responds, if she is not too angry, with various sparsely adorned forms of pater.8 On occasions such as these, forms of dilectio are employed in a missive formula in the passive voice so as to be nearly inconsequential. At the other end of the spectrum, the letters between Abelard and Heloise use forms of dilectio actively and repeatedly, as verbs and nouns, especially to describe their erotic feelings, inloveness, and deep esteem for one another.9 Their dilectio is an almost palpable entity that they offer and share with one another and in which they indulge and exult. Outside its uses in missive salutations, forms of dilectio were most often used to describe sensual or erotic feelings of “delight,” which could be

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either carnal or religious, or both, depending on the object of these feelings. Du Cange traces dilectio etymologically to eating, being fed, and feeding to others the elements of Holy Communion on high feast days. The connection between the sensual experience of eating and spiritual delight is commonplace in twelfth-century religious writings. Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons on the Song of Songs hold excellent examples. The Psalmist’s “O taste and see that the Lord is good” was routinely repeated in liturgies for the mass and was often used as a point from which to meditate about “tangible” experiences of God.10 Du Cange concludes that dilectio was a synonym for caritas, but he neglects to point out the erotic side of caritas, which was as often used by monastic writers to denote being “in love” with God, as it was to mean charitable acts, goodness or an unemotional, obedient love of God. Of the many possible examples of the mixed usage of caritas, Richard of St. Victor’s De gradibus charitatis (Paris, c. 1175) is probably the most economical. It begins: Vulnerata charitate ego sum. Urget charitas de charitate loqui, libenter me impendo charitatis obsequio, et dulce quidem, et omnino delectabile de delectione loqui. Jucunda materia, et satis copiosa, et quae omnino generare non possit vel taedium scribenti, vel fastidium legendi. . . . O vehementia dilectionis! O violentia charitatis! O excellentia, o supereminentia charitatis Christi! (PL 196.1207) I am wounded by love [charitate]. Love [charitas] urges me to speak about love [charitate]. I submit [obsequio] myself freely, lay myself out for love [charitatis] and how sweet it is and completely delicious [delectabile] to speak about delight [delectione]. [This is] pleasing matter, and plenty abundant, and about which it is not possible to generate everything or to write tediously, or to read with aversion. . . . O the vehemence of pleasure [dilectionis]! O the ferocity of love [charitatis]! O the excellence, O supereminence of the love [charitatis] of Christ!

Preceding and following this effusive passage, Richard mixes carnal and spiritual pleasure before finally writing of a melting union with God. Richard here conflates delectio, dilectio, and charitas. Charity, or the love of God, becomes a fiery passion described in the sensual terms of human sexual experience. In earlier Latin, dilectus or a delectus is a beloved or chosen one, a delicium is a “sweetheart,” while dilectio or delectio signifies a “delight, amusement or satisfaction.”11 Richard is not alone in confusing or conflating these terms, which are in fact etymologically related. His contemporaries used or avoided them in ways that reveal similar understandings of their possible significations. In his Speculum charitatis (3.2–7) Aelred of Rievaulx uses dilectio and amor interchangeably. He distinguishes caritas and cupiditas as right and wrong

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modes of thought and behavior that stem from the same internal catalyst that is amor or dilectio.12 In The Mirror of Charity, dilectio is for Aelred a generalized kind of motivating force or love, which psychoanalysts today might term desire. This “love” can be either spiritual or carnal, directed toward human or divine. In his De amicitia spirituali, however, Aelred uses dilectionem to describe right love only once and that is in a quotation from the Vulgate Bible.13 As an especially beloved disciple of Bernard of Clairvaux, Aelred wrote De amicitia spirituali, patterned on Cicero’s De amicitia, at Bernard’s request. Male friendships were among Aelred’s greatest assets. His experience allowed him to write brilliantly and originally on the subject and won for him the love of his fellow monks.14 But it was also his experience with male friendship that caused him to flee the court of David I, king of Scots, in great anxiety, to enter the monastery as a young man. Aelred’s flight, anxiety, and devotion to brothers awakened whatever homophobia the existing authorities had and constitute the reasons his work went unsung and his person uncanonized, if not rejected, for centuries.15 Aelred uses every means possible in De amicitia to justify “delight” in friends, yet he avoids employing the word dilectio. From his rare use of the word in a treatise on friendship, it is clear that dilectio is not necessary to describe feelings appropriate for friends. For feelings of friendship, Aelred generally employs some form of affectio. Aelred’s avoidance of dilectio suggests that it could be seen as a dangerously sexual or sensually loaded word. In one of the rare instances of its use in the Friendship, Aelred employs a variant, delectaret, to describe how his morally questionable attraction to friends at court made him feel: Cum adhuc puer essem scholis, et sociorum meorum me gratia plurimum delectaret, et inter mores et vitia quibus aetas illa periclitari solet, totam se mea mens dedit affectui, et deuouit amori; ita ut nihil mihi dulcius, nihil iucundius, nihil utilius quam amari et amare videretur. (Prologue to De amicitia spirituali, PL 195.659–660) While I was still a schoolboy, the charm of my friends greatly delighted [delectaret] me, so that according to the customs and vices with which that age is tried, my mind surrendered itself completely to emotion and devoted itself to love, so that nothing seemed sweeter to me, or nicer or more worthwhile than to love and to be loved.

Delectaret is here clearly on the side of the flesh however we interpret Aelred’s relations with his courtly friends. Generally, Aelred avoids dilectio and its relatives altogether in Spiritual Friendship, possibly because “particular friendships” in monastic houses were officially frowned upon for their sexual possibilities. Since in Spiritual Friendship he tries to show the spiritual

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value and innocence of special friendships among monks, and the similarity of those relations to divine union, he would have wanted to avoid any possibly sinful connotations. When Bernard asked Aelred to write Spiritual Friendship, he also requested that it be rendered “blameless.”16 Bernard was himself careful with the word dilectio but had less to fear than Aelred, since the object of his own dilectio was a textual Christ, rather than tangible brothers. G.B. Burch writes that, for Bernard, dilectio is amor spiritualis or charitas affectualis, a very rarified emotional experience that has nothing to do with bodies.17 Yet in his Song of Songs, after describing the kiss of the Lord’s feet, hem, hands, and especially mouth (cf. Sermons 1–4, 8), Bernard uses dilectio in an exegetical passage to describe a quasi-erotic, quasispiritual experience: “Carnis,” inquiunt, “voluptatem, qua paulo ante, tanquan vino ebriae, tenebamur, vincunt hae, quas tua nobis ubera stillant, deliciae spirituales.” Et pulchre vino comparant carnalem affectum. Ut enim uva expressa semel non habet iam quid denuo fundat, sed perpetua ariditate damnatur, sic caro in pressura mortis ab omni prorsus sua delectatione siccatur, nec ultra revirescit ad libidines. (S.B. Opera, 1.47; Sermon 9, VII.9–10) “These spiritual delights [deliciae],” they say, “that your breasts distill, can conquer in us the pleasures [voluptatem] of the flesh, that enslaved us just as drunkards are enslaved by wine.” This comparison of carnal pleasures [affectum] with wine is so very apt. For the grape, once pressed, can never again exude its liquid, it is condemned to endless dryness. So too the flesh, caught in the wine press of death, is completely drained of its co-natural pleasures [delectatione], never again to revive to the stirring of sensual passions [libidines]. (K. Walsh, 2.60)

Bernard employs voluptatem, affectum, delectatione, and libidines to describe sensual pleasures; here these terms belong to “the flesh.” He uses delectatione to describe something sensual. Later Bernard compares enjoyment of the bride’s breasts with inebriation, which is a signifier of sensual pleasure (dilectiones) in the passage above. Although these images are clearly part of Bernard’s fantasy to be used to promote the contemplative life, they are just as clearly sensual and erotic.18 The breasts of the Church do not simply provide nourishment; they distill a permanent pleasure of excess that hints at being wilder than drunkenness. Like it or not, the bride’s breasts are female body parts, even when worn by Jesus or Bernard himself and must be sucked by a presumably adult male subject. It seems, therefore, that Andreas’s use of dilectio is more complicated and interesting than a politely affectionate or formulaic missive salutation. Like the letters of Abelard and Heloise, Andreas’s Prologue employs dilectio

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actively, not subsuming “I” and “you” as in polite formulas but making them primary and visible subjects that act: Cogit me multum assidua tuae dilectionis instantia, Gualteri venerande amice, ut meo tibi debeam famine propalare mearumque manuum scriptis docere qualiter inter amantes illaesus possit amoris status conservari, pariterve qui non amantur quibus modis sibi cordi affixa valeant Veneris iacula declinare. The insistent impendence [or approach] of my love for you compels me, o reverend friend Walter, to make open to you from my sayings and to teach by the writing of my own hands how it is possible for the state of love to be preserved between lovers, or equally, how those who are not being loved might somehow be strong to deflect the darts of Venus affixed in their own hearts.

This salutation is anything but a passive formula. Not only are the “I and thou” plainly stated, and the “I” actively loving, but the nature of that love, being dilectio, could be as profound as religious experience and as delightful as passionate sex. Further, that love is instantia—impending or hanging over and approaching the two or hanging over Andreas and approaching Walter continually and insistently (assidua). The approach of this love compels the writing, as though the author wants his work to perform as a go-between or a billet doux to effect a seduction. This love sounds, from the very beginning, intense and obsessive. The first few lines of Andreas’s text provide an unusual description of feelings for a friend, let alone for a student, particularly in an introduction to a work ostensibly on secular, heterosexual love, or the seduction of women. If the author had wanted to preclude the possibility of his feelings for Walter being read as sexual, not only could he have made himself passive and less visible, but he could have employed different terminology: that is, he could have written of his affectio instead of his dilectio. Affectio, a form of which appears at the end of Andreas’s Prologue, would seem to be a more appropriate term for feelings between friends, or master and pupil, than dilectio. Yet again, at the beginning of Book III, Andreas says his affectus (feeling state) for Walter is dilectionis: “Nam propter nimiae dilectionis affectum tuis penitus cupientes annuere precibus confertissimam plenamque amoris doctrinam in hoc tibi libello edidimus” (3.1; “For on account of a state [affectum] of excessive [nimiae] love [dilectionis], to assent to your deeply longing prayers, we produced for you a most dense and packed [stuffed full] doctrine of love in this little book”). Andreas’s dilectio here is not the mere excess [immoderata] of the meditations on the beloved prescribed in Book I to ignite sexual desire: it is nimiae, exceedingly

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excessive. His affection and Walter’s prayers are here as heavily laden with sexually suggestive desire as are his little book and its description. Andreas employs a cognate of dilectio a few lines later: “O miser et insanus ille ac plus quam bestia reputandus, qui pro momentanea carnis delectatione gaudia derelinquit aeterna et perpetuae gehennae flammis se mancipare laborat!” (3.5; “O wretched, mad and reputed more so than beasts, [is] the man who for momentary enjoyment [delectatione—delight, love] of the flesh gives up eternal joys and labors to enslave himself to the flames of everlasting hell!”) Delectatio, in this passage, is a pleasure a man takes in the flesh that is reputed to make him miserable, more miserable than the beasts. But comparison with beasts is problematic for two reasons. First, it evokes “unnatural” or “bestial” acts, which in Dialogue 8 turn out to be in fact natural and desirable. Second, it raises the question of exactly how miserable (not “low,” as is the usual and expected comparison) beasts are compared to humans. Beasts, unlike any human, do not have to endure the incomparable miseries of an unattainable love, nor do they have to worry about hell. Beasts are therefore much less miserable than humans. When the passage is unpacked, it seems that Andreas’s officious warnings about hell, especially with respect to fleshly or bestial enjoyments, cannot be taken but as rhetorical litmus papers to test the reader’s skills and attention to the text. The warnings seem to be a thin shell covering the inflammatory subjects of Andreas’s text, a shell that seems real only to readers who are themselves unable to conceive of any way of seeing but in terms of Neoplatonic hierarchy and Christian dogma. The Prologue’s use of venerandus may not be as unusual as its use of dilectionis. Parry noted, in his search for the historical Walter, “Trojel, who believes that [Walter] was a real person, points out that the title ‘venerandus’ was applied only to bishops and to members of the French royal family, and Walter can hardly have been a bishop.”19 If he was a member of the royal family, it was not of the immediate family. Venerandus is from veneror, “to reverence with religious awe, to worship, adore, revere, venerate.”20 Being a gerundive, rather than an adjective like venerabilis, venerandus carries with it a subject and object; it denotes someone or something being worshipped by someone else. As it is used in Andreas’s preface, there can be only one subject (the author) and one object (Walter). Walter is being adored by the author. Venerandus understood in this way, rather than simply as an expression of admiration for his station, becomes oddly intense as a companion to dilectio, both rendering Andreas’s feelings for Walter potentially as cupidinous as polite. What then am I suggesting here? That Andreas was half publicly, half covertly trying to seduce Walter by means of a text? I think it is possible. Unfortunately, as for practical or social implications, the only thing that can be said with complete confidence on the matter is that Andreas’s text

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exculpates homosexuality. Where the text speaks plainly of homosexual love, it only pretends to do so in negative or derogatory terms. In fact, everywhere the standard denouncements of homosexual behavior should appear in Andreas’s text they are subverted, deconstructed, or carnivalized. I will present here the four most important sets of examples. The first is from Book I, Chapter 2, “Between What Persons Love Can Exist.” Although I discussed this first example in Chapter I, I did so toward different ends, so it bears some review. The chapter begins with what looks at first like a declamation against homosexual attraction, and it is usually translated as such. But if translated literally, it does not sound like much of a declamation: Hoc autem est praecipue in amore notandum, quod amor nisi inter diversorum sexuum personas esse non potest. Nam inter duos mares vel inter duas feminas amor sibi locum vindicare non valet; duae namque sexus eiusdem personae nullatenus aptae videntur ad mutuas sibi vices reddendas amoris vel eius naturales actus exercendos. Nam quidquid natura negat, amor erubescit amplecti. (1.2.1) This moreover is a precept to be noted in love: that love cannot exist unless it is between persons of opposite sexes. For between two males or between two females love is not able to claim a place for itself; for two persons of the same sex do not appear to be fitting for the exchange of reciprocal love or for the exercising of its natural acts. For whatever nature denies, love blushes to embrace.

Again, the passage does not say, as it should, that homosexuals are unfit for love because their love is “unnatural”21 or even displeasing to God; it even notes that it occurs between women as well as between men—a highly unusual and aware statement. And, also noted in Chapter I, the equivocal significations of blushing show that homosexuality may be in fact not only natural but also enjoyable or desirable. The gap appears once again between “nature” defined as what actually happens, and “nature” as a theoretical category invented by philosophers and theologians in order to define. As I have already pointed out, the quoted passage does not in fact assert that homosexuality is wrong. It simply says that homosexual relations “do not appear” to be “fitting” for the exercise of “natural” acts. What is acceptable in the public eye is the reason homosexual love/acts cannot “claim a place” as “love” between people. Popular opinion constitutes what is natural. That homosexuality is not aptus is the popular reason given, and aptus denotes “fitting” not only in the sense of “proper” or “appropriate” (unrelated to morality) but something that is fitted together, or bound.22 Since homosexual lovers could not be legally bound in the same ways as

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heterosexual couples, and since their physical connections are not identical, heterosexual couples, blessed by authorities that privilege offspring and the legitimate bestowal of properties, determine what is “natural.” Art once again is called nature, and such “nature” is shown to be a useful rhetorical fiction. Chapter 2 of Book I ends with a sentence as equivocal as the blush: “Nota etiam quod amans nihil sapidum ab amante consequitur nisi ex illius voluntate procedat” (“Even so, mark that the lover gets nothing tasty from a beloved unless it proceeds from her [or his] will”). The forms of the genitive singular of illius and the ablative singular of amans are not distinguished according to gender—technically, the beloved could be either male or female here. Additionally, illius can refer to the lover, which means the object of desire is a matter of taste. The second passage I would like to review is similar but stronger. It too was discussed in Chapter I to different ends: Dicitur autem amor ab amo verbo, quod significat capere vel capi. Nam qui amat captus est cupidinis vinculis aliumque desiderat suo capere hamo. Sicut enim piscator astutus suis conatur cibiculis attrahere pisces et ipsos sui hami capere unco, ita vero captus amore suis nititur alium attrahere blandimentis, totisque nisibus instat duo diversa quodam incorporali vinculo corda unire, vel unita semper coniuncta servare. (1.3.1–2) (Italics mine.) It is said, moreover, that “love” is from the word “hook,” which means to capture or to be caught. For he who loves is captured in the chains of desire and wishes to capture another with his own hook. Just as a skilled fisherman tries with his little tidbit to attract fishes and to capture them on his crooked hook, so truly does one captured by love strive to attract another person with his blandishments and insists with all his efforts to unite two separate hearts into one body with a chain, or if united to preserve the union forever.

The italicized words in both the Latin and in the translation above represent a masculine pronoun. Given the context, a male “fisherman” is “fishing” with a very phallic “hook” for a male beloved. As has already been detailed in Chapter I, in both sacred and secular tradition fishing is the less manly sport of the religious man, and Andreas presents himself as a cleric. The third example I would like to use is from the beginning of Book I, Chapter 6, “How Love Is Won and in How Many Ways.” Andreas says that although “some” teach that there are five ways to win love, it is his own view that there are only three modes of acquiring love: through appearance, character, and eloquent speech. For the purposes at hand, appearance is of most interest. Andreas writes that appearance is the least important of the three because only simpletons are fooled by it. He ends

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discussion of the three modes with a paraphrase of Ovid’s Amores: “Nitimur in vetitum cupimus semperque negatum” (3.4.17; “We strive for [rise up to mount] that which is forbidden, and we always desire the forbidden thing”). Yet, and relating to appearances, the quotation is directly followed by a rehearsal of another prohibition: cross-dressing: Sapiens igitur mulier talem sibi comparare perquirat amandum qui morum sit probitate laudandus, non autem qui mulierum se more perungit vel corporis se cultu perlustrat. Non enim potest virili congruere formae mulierum se more ornare vel corporis ornatui deservire. Tales etiam mirificus Ovidius redarguendo notavit: “Sint procul a nobis iuvenes ut femina compti, fine coli modico forma virilis amat.” (1.6.8) The wise woman therefore should seek to obtain for herself such a lover who is praised for his manners, not however who anoints himself according to the habit of women or glossies himself with care of the body. Nor is it possible for manliness to be congruent with [or] to adorn itself in the manner of the beauty of women or to serve ornamentation of the body. Such ones even marvelous Ovid noted with disapproval: “Let young men adorned as women be far from us, the beauty of manly men loves to be dressed according to moderate bounds.”

The advice that is supposed to be to Walter is here directed to women or, at least, to someone in a position to evaluate men as potential lovers. Andreas’s quotation of Ovid is also curiously laden with duplicitous possibilities that even Walsh’s translation cannot escape: “Young men decked out like ladies, come not near; a manly form prefers but modest care” (P.G. Walsh, 43). Walsh’s rendition makes it sound as though men prefer men who look like men to women. The Latin does seem to indicate that male bodies love masculine appearances other than their own. Even if one does not like this suggestion, the passage as a whole does bring up the possibility of men possessing womanly beauty and presenting themselves as women. Since this mode of self-presentation is proscribed by society, it can also ironically become a desirable forbidden fruit. The final example is from Dialogue 8. First, the man turns the woman into a man: Homo ait: Vos talia dicitis qualia qui verbis tantum suos ditare studet amicos, rei autem ipsos intendit penitus effectu frustrare. Nam hilari vultu in suo quemlibet adventu suscipere et suavia sibi responsa praestare et ipsum necessitatis imminente periculo factis nullatenus adiuvare ac suadere, ut in curialitatis ipse per omnia versetur operibus, nil aliud est quam ille qui blandi sermonis dulcedine confidentem fallit amicum atque se ipsum gloriari

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contendit. 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. (1.6.414) The man says: You speak words appropriate for one who wishes only to enrich friends with words, but who intends to deeply frustrate them with respect to accomplished deeds. If a man greets someone on arrival with a smile, makes pleasant replies to him, and then, when unavoidable danger looms, offers absolutely no practical help or advice, he may invariably engage himself in acts of courtesy, but he is precisely the sort of man who deceives a trusting friend with sugary, flattering words and then proceeds to promote his own glory. He is like a bad priest who makes pretence of numerous good qualities and reminds others of the works that win eternal life, but condemns himself out of his own mouth while showing others how to obtain their reward.

The addressee undergoes a sex change when the gender of the pronouns that qualify the person to whom she is likened in the example shifts to masculine. She is compared to a courtly “he,” and that man is in turn compared to a “bad priest” who fits the text’s description of its author (Andreas). Further on, the man giving this example refers to himself as a would-be courtier specifically like the man in his example, in ruthless competition with other men for women (1.6.425–427) claiming that God ordained relations between men to be such in response to heterosexual relationships. The speaker is also identified as a particularly hypocritical cleric, like his example in 1.6.478, who loves his own “feminine” (clerical) garb and gait, which makes him identifiable with the outcast youths in drag. Around 1.6.466–467 the woman in the dialogue becomes the agent in this gender switch and asks the man to think of her as a male friend. At 1.6.478–480 she makes herself his brother, through a comparison similar to the one quoted above. Whoever is speaking (they are all ultimately “Andreas”) the seducee apparently needs to be male for the seduction to work. The woman claims that if the naughty cleric speaking to her of love were to think of her as a man, everything would work out better for both of them. His seduction fails because he insists on seeing her as female quarry. Toward the end of Dialogue 8, there is a particularly interesting conversation that in many ways begins where the above quoted passage ends. Here (beginning 1.6.533) the woman has just presented the man with a test embedded in a story. The question is which is the more worthy (dignus) half of a woman’s body, the upper or the lower. As has been noted, the man replies in good clerical form that the upper is to be preferred, giving all the reasons typical of a Neoplatonic, hierarchical worldview.

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He not-so-charmingly adds his gratuitous opinion that no one ever tires of the consolations of the upper part, but “inferioris vero delectatio partis cito fastidit utentem et operis peracti poenitere cogit agentem” (1.6.537; “The pleasure in the lower part quickly disgusts him who exploits it and makes him repent of what he has done”). The woman responds that surely he must be wrong, because the lower part is the greatest source of human recreation, as well as of creation, and that a woman would be considered “unclean” if she were useless for sex. She then says, Superioris autem delectatio partis nulla penitus esset, nisi partis esse intuitu inferioris assumpta et eius contemplatione porrecta. Et si huic vultis resistere veritati, necessitatis cogit ratio profiteri duos masculos sibi adinvicem posse amoris solatia exhibere, quod satis esset narrare nefandum et agere criminosum. (1.6.539) Moreover enjoyment of the upper part would be not at all deep, unless it were undertaken with an eye on the lower part, and protracted with thoughts of it. If you wish to oppose the truth of this, of necessity reason compels you to admit that two males can alternately offer each other the consolations of love, which would be wicked to describe and sinful to carry out.

The first sentence engages a number of phallic plays on words to connect the enjoyments of upper and lower parts and contributes entertainingly to support her argument. The second sentence, however, seems to be a non sequitur in every respect. Sexual relations between men, which she does describe to some degree, whatever she protests, are used as evidence—even proof—of the necessarily connected enjoyments of the upper and lower parts of a woman’s body. She uses sex between males, rather than heterosexual love, as the privileged paradigm for complete human erotic pleasure. The woman associates homosexuality with the pleasure of the lower half and suggests that “platonic” encounters of the upper half depend upon interest in the lower half. Although the priest’s Christian Neoplatonism castigates homosexuality along with any other pleasure derived from the lower half, the woman’s point seems to be made on the basis that the cleric she is speaking to understands the pleasure of the lower half between men. Further, she goes on to argue, against him and the usual clerical stance, that it is good and natural to be like the beasts: Nec obstat, sicut dicitis, nobis cum bestiis communicata natura, quia illud est in rebus omnibus principale ac naturale censendum, in quo aliquid rebus sui generis ministerios naturae concordat et reperitur unitum. (1.6.541) Nor does what you have said—that we share a common nature with the beasts—stand in the way, since that is most important and natural among all

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things, in which anything harmonizes and is discovered to be united with respect to the administrations of the natural deeds of its own kind.

What is “natural” and “most important” here is that which is in harmony with its own nature and with the “deeds of its own kind.” Although the rebus sui generis of this passage is an equivocal enough phrase in itself, the direction of the arguments about natural behavior leave only very little room for a heterosexual interpretation. Beasts, which here exemplify nature, are the privileged paradigm. Since homosexual behavior has been identified both with the beasts and with the privileged paradigm, it seems unavoidable to conclude anything but that homosexuality is being identified as natural. She finishes her rebuttal of the man’s Neoplatonic values by arguing that sex is meant to satisfy like food and that the satisfaction should not be permanent, indicating that only a very unnatural food would create permanent satiety (1.6.542). Permanent satiety is, however, what heaven promises and why monks fast. The sententia of Andreas’s text is not holy—at least not in the traditional sense. From what we have seen so far, Andreas seems to identify himself as a lovesick priest, to be directing his love to Walter, and to exculpate homosexuality. If Andreas wants to seduce Walter through his text, his approach seems to be more confessional than predatory. Although confession can become a rhetorical tactic for seduction, as we have seen, Andreas gives his quarry the means with which to avoid the confessional trap. Identities Andreas does not follow Bernard, Aelred, or even Augustine as paradigms for seduction by confession. Although each of these authors “confesses” bad things they have done in the past, each represents himself as having come clean, as repenting, or as having repented. Even amidst selfdenunciation, each attempts to appear unequivocally clean in his textual self-representation. Andreas does not. In fact he seems to go out of his way to make himself look foolish, weak, proud, lustful, hypocritical, and conspicuously blind to the implications of the surface of his own teachings. If a reader finds fault with Augustine, Bernard, or Aelred, it seems to be because of a genuine blind spot in the writer’s self-knowledge or because of a chink in the author’s textual armor, not because he intends to make himself look bad. Andreas the Master, on the other hand, is not at all an attractive persona, and his self-presentation is not so much accomplished by the Master’s voice protesting that he is a bad fellow, as by the text demonstrating it. Simultaneously, by making its levels of ventriloquism conspicuous, Andreas’s text not only constructs a decoy (Andreas the

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Master) but also continually points to a gap that gives the “puppets” of the dialogues the “lines” whose cumulative effect is to transcend Andreas the Master, rendering him as much a fiction as his own speakers. I would like to suggest that it is in this gap that we can discover whatever is to be known about the text’s author, the “historical Andreas.” Unfortunately, being a gap (ironically like God) however “real” he may be, there is not a lot that can be certainly said of him. I will, however, like a theologian, try to write about (or around) him a bit in this section. Andreas’s text makes the reader look for its author. This is probably evident enough from Andreas being cited as an authority by his own fictions and from what has been pointed out about the effects of his ventriloquism. But there is also a kind of strip tease effected by textual hints that Andreas is somehow to be identified with the obnoxious cleric of Dialogue 8. The problem of clothing may be the best place to attempt to further identify some of the levels of Andreas’s textual self-representation. The woman in Dialogue 8, being wooed by a cleric, complains not only that wooing her is a sin for him but also that he is unattractive because of his effeminate clerical clothing (“clericus quidem muliebri apparet ornatu vestitus”; 1.6.490). He responds curiously: Muliebris autem indulta clericis cultura mihi nullatenus potest esse nociva, quia talis secundum ordinem ab antiqua prudentia patrum mihi mandatur ornatus, ut habitu etiam et incessu ab aliis hominibus clerici distinguantur. (1.6.493) The effeminate cultivation [muliebris cultura] allowed [indulta] to clerics, moreover, cannot in any way be injurious for me, because such adornment has been enjoined on me according to the order laid down by the ancient wisdom of the fathers so that clerics may be distinguished from other men by dress and walk.

She has only mentioned (at 1.6.490) the effeminate ornament of his clothing (muliebri ornatu vestitus) as opposed to the more desirable masculine appearance of a knight. He, on the other hand, defends the various attributions of femininity that he exhibits. He says his cultura, cultivation or care, which would include grooming and manners, or general self-presentation, is effeminate, not just his clothes. Cultura is also cultivation in the sense of what one is said to do in Andreas’s text to gain amici, which can be friends or lovers. Further, the clerk adds that his walk or gait (incessu) as well as his clothing (habitu) are signs both of womanliness and of his clerical status and were established as such by the wisdom of the ancient fathers. Given what has already been shown about the reliability of ancient wisdom with respect to the establishment of the nobility, the outward and visible signs of

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gender, along with the traditional accouterments of the clergy, are simultaneously undermined here by the citation of such authority. The signs of gender are also shown to be arbitrarily connected to their referents, and the arbitrary connections that establish the signification of gendered social status are claimed to have been made specifically by the authority of the church fathers, who were already undermined at the beginning of Book I. Further, the significations for both the “highest” and the “lowest” social categories, the clergy and women respectively, are shown to be interchangeable. The cleric of Dialogue 8 protests that if he were to give up his clerical garb to suit her, he would be disobeying the fathers. Besides (and this seems to be worse) she could taunt him with “Vade, apostata, et tui ordinis manifeste transgressor exsistens” (1.6.493; “Get out of here, you apostate and clearly a transgressor of your rank”). Not only would he be out of line, crossing the boundaries established by the fathers, but he would also become an outcast. The words he fears she could use against him, to cast him out, are reminiscent of those already associated with “young men in drag” who are also outcasts: “sint procul a nobis” (“may they be far from us”), Ovid writes and Andreas the authority echoes (1.6.8). The signs that make outcasts of those who bear them in unaccepted social contexts are the same signs clergy must exhibit to remain within the bounds of social expectation. Andreas’s text therefore suggests that gender signs, like the blush, carry opposing significations, innocent or guilty, depending on who exhibits them and in what circumstances. Andreas the Master has been identified as a priest by the man in Dialogue 7 (1.6.385), and the passages in Dialogue 8 that associate and even claim effeminacy in clerical self-presentation implicate Andreas as such a cleric. Further, Andreas the Master aligns himself with the effeminate priest of Dialogue 8 (and therefore to the outcasts in drag) when at the beginning of Book II he reiterates the opinion of that priest that the clerical lover ought not adopt lay practices or dress (2.1.12). Since effeminacy in clerics was in fact more the subject matter of jokes than of ecclesiastical prescription, contra the claims of the priest of Dialogue 8, why Andreas takes such pains to identify himself as (or with) such a cleric becomes a central question.23 I would like to suggest that he does so, not necessarily because he was historically effeminate or a cross-dresser (although he may have been), nor because I see any necessary connection between effeminacy and his possible homosexuality. Rather, it seems to me that he has some kind of investment in identifying with outcast, marginalized, or divested segments of society—which of course includes, but is not limited to, cross-dressers, homosexuals, and any whose gender performance is confusing for whatever reason. In the case of Andreas’s supposed effeminacy, it is possible that his identification is with women as much as with

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effeminate or transvestite men, or with clergy on the prowl, for that matter. Why I see him to identify thus with women will become increasingly clear. Let me illustrate. Accompanying their discussion of clerical comportment in Dialogue 8, the two speakers argue over whether gluttony is more rightly attributed to clergy or to women. The woman argues to clergy, the cleric to women. In the sentence following her complaint about his clothes, the woman points out that by virtue (or vice) of his profession (or class) he is necessarily idle and a slave to his belly (1.6.490). His rejoinder is first to point out the following: “nec laicus potest nec clericus reperiri, masculus nec femina nec parvulus vel adultus, que ventris non inveniatur libenter inservier ministeriis” (1.6.497; “No one, lay or cleric, male or female, child or adult, can be found who is not seen willingly to serve his belly”). As he continues to think aloud, trying to improve upon his argument, his rejoinder begins to slide into a bit of narrative fiction recounted in order to explain why things are the way they are and how we can know this to be proper, like the descriptions of how nobility came to be in Book I. In this case, the cleric moves from the empirical observation that every human must eat, to the inference that women (being most leisured) have the most opportunity to indulge their appetites, and finally to the historical and theological paradigm and cause of female gluttony, Eve, as support for his newly developed point of view (1.6.497–499). These “performative epistemologies” show by the speaker’s performance how meditation and abstraction (the ingredients also necessary to inflame love, 1.1.1) change observed phenomenon into rarified and ascribed categories of “truth”—that is, into fictions. This particular performance shows how most of these “performances” work. The content of this particular performance is gender and class. In the above given example, the cleric’s nastiness is blunted by irony: women and clerics are supposed to be of separate social rank according to Andreas the Master, but the speakers find that the significations—including their weaknesses—supposedly peculiar to their respective classes/genders are in fact identical. Their class and gender distinctions must therefore be questioned, if not erased. Further, when Andreas proceeds in Book III to calumniate all women for everything, in parody of some illustrious fathers, since clerics have become identifiable with women, the clergy becomes tainted with the crimes of which they accuse women, including that of slandering “other” women, which I will pursue at length in Chapter V. Let me here also note that the proverb associated with cross-dressing shows up in Book III. (3.89; “This is why the well-known utterance of the sage has rightly been found to apply to women without any exceptions: ‘Forbidden fruit we strive to gain, and prize denied fain would attain.’ ”) Its resonances with Dialogue 8 should be clear. The structures that constrain

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cross-dressers, priests, and women have been challenged in Dialogue 8 and their similarities highlighted. If Andreas identifies with women, then, since “all women” in Book III are whores and women are called such throughout the dialogues, Andreas must also identify with whores, not only as a group of outcasts but also as a group who overtly resist (in however limited a way) the system prescribed for them. As women they defy marriage, and as prostitutes they defy their definition as marginal. Historically, “by the late twelfth century, Parisian prostitutes, said to frequent the cathedral cloister, were to become significant enough as a group to offer chalices and stained glass windows to the new cathedral.”24 This does not mean they were enfranchised: in fact, they had to fight for their gifts to be accepted. Nevertheless, the evidence is clear. Andreas’s disenfranchisement as a cleric is sexual. He has no right to follow his desires, whatever they may be. Returning to Dialogue 8, the cleric argues with the woman who has just condemned him for pursuing his desire: Quamvis clericorum sim sorti coniunctus, homo tamen sum in peccatis conceptus et carnis lapsui sicut et ceteri homines naturaliter pronus exsistens. Licet enim Dominus in suis ministeriis et verbi nuntiatione divini clericos sua voluit fungi legatione et honore ipsos magno gravavit, eorum tamen in hoc noluit condicionem facere meliorem, ut carnis abies stimulum et peccati fomitem removeret. Under nono credo ipsos Deum maiori voluisse carnis abstinentia colligare et duplici eos sarcina fatigare. Quare igitur magis clericus quam quilibet laicus catimoniam tenetur corporis conservare? Nec enim soli clerico corporalem credatis delectationem inhibitam, quum cuilibet etiam christiano praecipiatur a Deo ab omni suum corpus immunditia custodire et carnis desideria penitus evitare. Ergo aeque laicum sicut et clericum vestra posset argutio remonere. (1.6.481–483) Though I share the lot of clerics, I am a man conceived in sin, naturally prone to lapses of the flesh like others. For though the Lord willed that clerics should be ambassadors in His service and in announcing the word of God, and loaded them with great honor, he did not will to ameliorate their condition in this task, so as to rid them of the prick of the flesh and the incentive to sin. So I do not believe that God wanted to shackle them with greater restraint of the flesh, and to exhaust them with a double burden. Then why is a cleric any more than a layman compelled to preserve bodily chastity? You must not believe that pleasure of the body is forbidden to the cleric alone; every Christian is commanded by God to preserve his body from all uncleanness, and utterly to avoid the desires of the flesh. So your reproof could equally be a warning to the layman as to the cleric. (P.G. Walsh, 183)

Although this is a set of rationalizations set forth as an argument to help the cleric get the woman’s “love,” his response also very clearly presents some

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good questions. Since priests were not “forced” to be celibate in France until 1119, clerical celibacy was a relatively new institutional requirement, and it was still conceivable in the late 1100s for the rules for priests to be different than they had become and therefore to be changeable. In 1119, priests in the diocese of Rouen complained about the conflict celibacy provoked between body and soul. Their protest was surely within living memory, since riots broke out and some of their soon-to-be-put-aside women “resisted” by burning themselves alive.25 The priest in Dialogue 8 here asks reasonable questions as to why his vocation precludes fulfilling the desires created in him as much as in any other man. If God wanted him to be an asexual being, why does He not free him of his (un)natural urges? Since the cleric also argues that lay people are also told “to avoid the desires of the flesh,” the question becomes why it is wrong for people to follow the desire God gave them. Avoiding sex seems to be as impossible as not “serving the belly.” These good questions challenge church authority much as do the ones about lapsarian theology raised by the woman in the same dialogue. That the speakers are institutionally opposed does not reduce the efficacy of the questions they ask. Those questions also belong to Andreas their maker. This is not to say that either of Andreas’s speakers is somehow completely identifiable with him but that on one level they become mouthpieces, theatrically performing his psychomachia or specific parts of his inner battles. His decoy, Andreas the Master, functions in much the same way. But because Andreas’s text continually and self-consciously subverts itself, a point of view arises differing from those of the text’s various speakers. For instance, the man in Dialogue 8 says good men speak well of women (1.6.405–406) although he is himself unable to do so, and Andreas the decoy incriminates himself through his supposed malediction of women in Book III. But what the text performs, what emerges, is in fact a condemnation of condemnation, not of women. This unnamed voice is the one I like to think of as the “real” Andreas. Andreas’s self-representation as a perfectly rotten priest—a liar, a hypocrite, a philanderer, and so on, much like the priest of Dialogue 8—is no more honest or completely accurate than are the representations of women in Book III. Because of the hyperbole inherent in this self-presentation and because all the speakers of the dialogues represent themselves differently at different times, self-representation appears as a rhetorical tool in Andreas’s text. What then is to be said of Andreas’s “real” self-representation, not the authoritative but rotten decoy? This real “self ” is responsible for most if not all of the levels of the textual performance, so it appears to be above and beyond the text as well as to reside in it. Andreas portrays himself through his speakers and decoy as being immersed in and subverted by the nomina of his text, while his “real” self appears to occupy the critical

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position of the detached observer. He participates in a kind of immanence and transcendence. Because of his self-deprecation (confessions/boasts of the decoy, identification with the rotten priest, etc.) and because of the interpretive tools offered to careful readers, his transcendent selfrepresentation appears to be more the humble servant than the proud authority his decoy is. The question remains whether self-effacement and open-handedness are themselves rhetorical lures. Although they may be, as they exist in Andreas’s text they still leave the reader free to act upon his or her own desire. This is the freedom desired by all of Andreas’s speakers. This rhetorical open-handedness is only one aspect of the “real” Andreas’s final self-presentation. Since his text ends by evoking the Bridegroom, a parable of God’s final judgment rather than the beloved Bridegroom of the Song of Songs, and since Dialogue 5 has also already neutralized the efficacy of the hell story as a mechanism toward socialization of desire, the reader seems to be left with a final interpretive challenge and choice. On the one hand, if the reader takes the final advice seriously (if you engage in “love” you will go to hell), he/she must repress the skills and perspectives gained through reading all that has gone before. The advantage to doing this is that he/she will remain within the bounds of behavior acceptable to society and to God as He is preached. The final evocation of the Bridegroom does, therefore, function as a warning. The disadvantage of taking it as such will be that the reader will have to suppress his or her knowledge and reroute his/her desire in order to conform. On the other hand, if the reader takes the final advice as a test, a final example of the kind of rhetoric being exposed in the rest of Book III, as one last myth toward the conscription of desire, he/she is left free to employ outside the text the interpretive skills and perspectives gained by reading it. The advantage to doing this will be the acquisition or maintenance of whatever amount of personal freedom can be endured by the individual reader. The disadvantage may lie in the social consequences of how that freedom is exercised. Accepting Andreas’s text and rejecting the standard conscriptive fictions can make an outcast of the reader, like the young men in drag. What is important about this toward a sense of Andreas’s “identity” is that Andreas becomes a seductive author only when the reader realizes he/she is left free to choose to fill the textual gaps with his or her own desires. The “real” Andreas has forged his own standards and offers them to his readers for scrutiny, without the help of seductive rhetoric. This brand of “honesty” is one of those standards. Andreas’s interest in his reader’s subjectivity goes beyond the seducer’s interest in his object. Not only does Andreas’s text allow its reader the freedom to choose, but it also forces the reader into various positions of power. For example, the reader is forced to help consciously to construct

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Andreas’s identity. In order to demonstrate this clearly, I must repeat some earlier suggestions, with a few variations. As I have pointed out, Andreas reflects upon and criticizes himself in his text as much as he reflects upon or criticizes anything else—which is quite a bit. Again, this is accomplished through multiple voicing in the text, which is always eventually identifiable as at least partly belonging to Andreas the author. The voice of Andreas the Master (authority) is always being undermined as such. The voice of Andreas the expert is one full of pride in sinful experience. The voice of Andreas the lover is one full of pain, loneliness, and supplication (this will become more evident in the section that follows). The voice of Andreas the priest confesses hypocrisy. And, as I have shown, the ventriloquized voices of Andreas’s speakers exhibit, among many things, a kind of institutional cannibalism, the accompanying survival techniques, and how the same arguments and learning can be used to opposite ends. They seem to “act out” Andreas’s personal conflicts and opinions in psychomachic fashion. Arising out of and between all these voices of Andreas is a textual “voice” of yet another register that is attached to no particular “speaker,” although it is “heard” in and through the “speech” of each. This is a conspicuous gap that the text begs the reader to fill. This is a critical register, the result (in this case) of a text subjecting itself to its own scrutiny. The critical voice thus created necessarily derives from the reader’s interpretation and invention but is not therefore necessarily limited to the reader’s subjectivity. This critical register is as attributable to the inventor of the text as is any other voice in it, all of which Andreas takes credit for authoring. This is arguably the voice of Andreas in judgment upon his own world, the voice that not only judges but also calls Andreas’s reader (therefore his world?) to “repent,” to revise, and to start again. It is a voice that exhibits a revolutionary bravery and paradoxically, because it is so cloaked, a selfpreserving and perhaps reasonable fear. It is a voice that can be heard only by those “who have ears to hear” it. The reader is invited to invent Andreas, but not completely. Andreas creates himself as an absent presence, or present absence, to be sought like God “in the dark.” As exegete, the reader is invited on the mystic’s quest. Andreas, daringly, becomes a kind of suffering God of Love and offers himself as a very human substitute for the monastic ideal. The complexity of representations of Andreas in his text is such that I can only begin to scratch its surface. Nevertheless, I hope to have made some useful suggestions. Working models of the “inner man” or of kinds of identity were not only plentiful in the twelfth century but also generally at least as profound and sophisticated as most twentieth- or twenty-firstcentury models, since the sciences of inner realities were much more in vogue in the twelfth century than were the sciences of the external world.26

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Further, most medieval models suggest that the human mirrors the divine. Therefore, it should not shatter modern preconceptions about medieval texts too much to suggest that Andreas’s self-representation is as complex and multiple as I have here suggested. Having sketched what little is possible of Andreas, I would like to turn now to the question of audience. This is itself a manifold problem that I can only begin to address. For whom would a priest write such a text? As I pointed out in the introduction, most experts currently agree it would be for other clerics, since it is in Latin. Given “Walter,” however, and given the quantity of advice to women found in the text, “other clerics” may be accurate but perhaps too simplistic a suggestion. Readership Having established that Andreas’s desire and feelings for Walter provide at least part of his text’s raison d’être, I would like to consider the text’s readership, first by briefly exploring Walter’s identities. From the discussion of historical material presented in the introduction, it is clear that Walter was probably a historical person, possibly beloved of Andreas, and probably both were connected through the court of Philip II. Again, Maria Brackett argues not only that Walter was nephew to Philip II, and personally close to him, but also that Andreas knew Walter and offered the De amore to him near the time of Walter’s upcoming wedding.27 Partly because of this I tend to see Walter as the primary recipient of Andreas’s text. Nevertheless it is clear that Andreas’s text invokes a multiple readership by addressing women, men, and the reader, all of whom can be of varying class. This does not negate Walter as the primary reader; rather, it seems to convey Andreas’s knowledge or belief that his text would, sooner or later, be read by many. Before turning to consider this wider readership, however, I will complete my discussion of Walter as the text’s primary recipient by exploring the Walter it constructs, rather than the historical Walter, about whom we have only a few facts and some probabilities based on educated conjecture. Other than his imputed youth and naiveté drawn from the Prologue, Walter exists in Andreas’s text as an absence, or silence. Although Andreas’s varying voices speak to and occasionally for him, Walter is missing. In A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes writes that to “speak” the absence of the beloved “is from the start to propose that the subject’s place and the other’s place cannot permute; it is to say: ‘I am loved less than I love.’ ”28 This is certainly Andreas’s position in his confessed subjugation to an unattainable love (2.6.22). Barthes goes on to write that the subject is therefore waiting for the beloved and being in such a position he is feminized.29 Waiting, especially given the Crusades, was arguably as feminine an activity

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in the twelfth century as in Barthes’ day. That Andreas identifies with femininity should be clear by now, and his text does seem to await the reader’s/Walter’s response, which must be constructed by the reader according to her or his own desire and understanding. Andreas’s text sustains the discourse of the beloved’s absence, in Barthian terms; the “other” is absent as referent, present as allocutory. Walter is absent, whose lack is the reason for writing; yet Walter is present since the way in which Andreas’s text addresses him makes him so (“You ask, Walter, whether . . .”). “The present, that difficult tense, is a pure portion of anxiety,” Barthes writes.30 Walter is always addressed in the present tense, as though his reading were simultaneous with Andreas’s writing. The anxiety in Andreas’s Prologue stems not only from his expressed inability to do as he sees fit but from his basic relation to the absent/present Walter. Barthes continues, “Language is born of absence. . . . Absence becomes an active practice, a business. . . . There is a creation of a fiction which has many roles. . . . This staging of language postpones the other’s death.”31 Andreas the authority, or older “friend,” repeatedly and overtly expresses anxiety about Walter’s physical and spiritual death, warning that if Walter follows his advice about love, Walter may go to hell. Yet given what the text shows about hell stories, Andreas’s anxiety may be about his authorial fear of losing the assent of his reader, of losing Walter’s “friendship.” In the final hell story at the end of the text, Walter is compared to the virgin awaiting the Bridegroom. Whether Walter chooses Andreas or God, the final plea, warning, and locus of anxiety are couched in sexual terms, wherein Walter too is feminized. Andreas’s text is the stage upon which he performs his waiting for Walter. Andreas’s text provides an image of the anxious, amorous subject courting the absent beloved object. “Whether he feels guilty with regard to the loved being, or whether he seeks to impress that being by representing his unhappiness, the amorous subject outlines an ascetic behavior of self-punishment (in life style, dress, etc.).”32 Although Andreas’s varying self-presentations are not what I would call ascetic, they are self-deprecating, self-punitive, or abject. His will as an author, he claims, is not his own: he is slave to the desire of another (Praefatio), just as the monk is the slave of God. Andreas depicts his abjection in several ways. First of all, he presents himself as a shoddy authority. Further, when he climbs into the boots of his own fictional wooers (“The subject painfully identifies himself with some person [or character] who occupies the same position as himself in the amorous structure”33) he presents himself as an inappropriate lover in a number of ways. His feet are too big and his legs are short, fat, and round (1.6.139–140); his physique is not adequate to bear arms or control a horse (1.6.98–100); he is gray-haired (1.6.44–45); his clothes are tattered

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(1.6.424); he wears “womanly raiment” and his head is “hideously shorn” (1.6.490); he is a loquacious, lecherous liar, doomed to failure in love, but he cannot help being in love (2.6.22). Why would a lover choose to portray himself in so many unattractive ways to a beloved? Perhaps more strange, why would a teacher present himself thus to a student? Abjection can be a primary tool used in the art of seduction. It can be a lure to the beloved: have pity on me for I confess I am unlovable. The plea for pity/love from abjection is a confessional mode (though not necessarily honest) and is the opposite ploy from any of the other appeals in the text, be they from the speakers or the decoy. Whether abjection appeals to a reader is entirely subjective. Andreas’s text is a gift, not only of a tool from a teacher to a student but also the gift of a lover’s “heart” to his beloved: “The heart is the organ of desire (the heart swells, weakens, etc., like the sexual organs) . . . what will the world, what will the other do with my desire? That is the anxiety in which are gathered all the heart’s movements, all the heart’s ‘problems.’ ”34 Since Andreas’s text is full of representations of himself, and his self is divided, multiple, or unidentifiable as a complete unity, his text runs perhaps more than the average risk of being mistaken; hence, his anxiety over how it is to be taken is proportional. Andreas’s heart/text may be offered not only to Walter in compassion for Walter and to assuage Andreas’s own “otherache.”35 That is, the sufferings of the beloved with which Andreas particularly identifies are Walter’s difficulties in love, as well. According to the Prologue, Walter has approached Andreas because he is already in love and wants advice. It does not indicate with whom he is in love. Approaching another to engage in “love talk” is at least as often an engagement in seductive discourse as it is an innocent plea for help. The seducers in Andreas’s text, the men of the dialogues, consistently use this approach on the women. Andreas’s text is supposed to be a response to this kind of approach; yet it seems in turn to await a response. “Like desire, the love letter waits for an answer; it implicitly enjoins the other to reply, for without a reply the other’s image changes, becomes other.”36 Since there is no “reply” that we know of, Walter is rendered exceptionally elusive. Andreas’s text wriggles with anxiety about “death” or loss. If the lover were perfectly comfortable, perfectly fulfilled, there would be no reason for writing. “Language is a skin. I rub my language against the other.”37 Love’s atopia, the characteristic which causes it to escape all dissertations would be that ultimately it is possible to talk about love only according to strict allocutive determination; whether philosophical, gnomic, lyric, or novelistc, there is always, in the discourse upon love, a person whom one addresses,

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though this person may have shifted to the condition of phantom or a creature still to come. No one wants to speak of love unless it is for someone. (Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 74)

Whatever Walter was, and whatever he was to Andreas, to twentiethcentury readers he is very much the phantasmal object of his equally fantastical author’s desire. The work is for Walter. Yet, fickle fellow that he is, Andreas writes for us too. That is, he writes for anyone who will read. We are—as is any reader other than Walter—the snoops, eavesdroppers, and potential gainsayers for whom the troubadours wrote as much as for the beloved and her companions. That Andreas wrote for more readers than Walter is not just a historical accident since he actually addresses readers other than Walter. Unlike Walter, however, none of us is called by name. We remain anonymous categories like the speakers in the dialogues. Walter is named throughout the text, particularly when the author seems to want the reader to pay special attention. Walter’s name seems to come up most often at the beginning of Book III, where Andreas begins to warn against hell, women, and bestial sexual behavior. Earlier, sandwiched between advice on what to do in the event of offending one’s partner (coamantis) through behaving minus provide (carelessly, or without forethought) (2.1.4) and how to comport oneself in order to be pleasing to a partner (2.1.6–12) lies Andreas’s advice about often recalling one’s beloved before others: do not do so because you will give away the secret of your love (2.1.5). Since Walter is the only name Andreas repeats in his text and the only person to which he attaches any feeling, other than to the nameless “high” love, it seems to me that Andreas is trying to give away his secret, at least to the careful reader and to Walter. Not once is a woman mentioned in this chapter, which he concludes thus: Haec autem ad utriusque sexus amantem pertinere cognoscas, quae de amoris tibi retentione narramus. Sunt et alii forte quam plures modi, qui amoris possunt conservationi valere, quos attentus diligensque amator propria poterit investigatione cognoscere. (2.1.12) Moreover, these things that I told you about the retention of love you must know to pertain to a lover of either sex. There are perhaps many other ways that can be powerful for the preservation of love that a diligent and attentive lover [masc. amator] will be able to learn by his own investigation.

Walter “must know” (the present subjunctive active of “to learn” or “to understand”—cognoscere—assumes that he has already learned and is in a state of knowing) that Andreas’s words about the retention of love pertain not just to women but very specifically ad utriusque sexus amantem (to a

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lover of either sex). Why must Walter know this, especially since the seeking lover is masculine? Has Walter had experience with preserving love of men? Or is he simply learning that it is possible and being invited by Andreas to investigate? When Andreas goes on to speak of his own improvidus—an adjective the text always uses to describe sexual behavior that does not conform to social standards—fall into the stormy sea of love, for the nameless, genderless, hopelessly high love from which he cannot free himself, he writes, Quam regulam nostri quidem experimento cognoscimus esse verissimam. Nam et nos excellentissimi amoris concitamur aculeis, quamvis inde nullum sumpsimus nec speramus assumere fructum. Nam tantae altitudinis cogimur in amore languescere quod nulli licet exprimere verbo, nec supplicantium audemus iure potiri, et sic demum compellimur proprii corporis sentire naufragia. Sed quamvis in tanta simus audacter et improvide tampestatis und prolapsi, de novo tamen amore cogitare non possumus vel alium liberationis modum exquirere. (2.6.22) We know by our own experience that this rule [regulum] is most true, for we too are excited by the pricks [aculeis] of a most excellent love, although we take hold of nothing from there nor do we hope to receive the fruits. We are compelled [cogimur] to languish in a love of such height that it is not possible [or allowed, licet] to express with words, nor do we dare to claim the rights [iures] of suppliants, and so at length we are forced [compellimur] to feel the shipwreck of our own body [proprii corporis]. But although we are boldly/courageously and improvidently fallen into such tempestuous waves, nevertheless we are not able to consider a new love or to seek out any kind of freedom.

Because the sentence just prior to this confession begins in the first person (“Scio” [I know] and “mihi” [to me]; 2.6.21) Andreas seems to take pains to show that he only uses the formal “we” when he chooses to. It is possible, therefore, that the “we” of the confessional passage implicates Walter. It seems that they would be coamantes if society condoned such liaisons. As it is, their bodies become one only in the personal disaster they both feel. The “pricks” that excite them, but from which they expect no harvest, are the aculei of the farmer in 1.11, whose sexual urges are natural, bestial, and potentially “love.” They are compelled (cogimur) to languish in this love in the same way Andreas’s love for Walter compels (cogit) him to write. Yet they have no “right” (iure) to claim each other—this is the “rule” (regulum) they know by experience. Andreas then proceeds to argue in scholastic manner that chaste love (wherein lovers lie naked together and embrace but do not consummate) and compounded love ( wherein embraces lead to consummation) are essentially the same and that the former can

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become the latter without changing the nature of the dilectio or the amor, which seem also to be synonyms here (2.6.24–25). He then names Walter once again (2.6.26). Surely these are cues. Andreas begins the flurry of repetitions of Walter’s name in the first part of Book III with Gualteri amice (3.1). Walter is more to Andreas than a young man needing advice. “Friend” is the term used for “lover” in the romances written in what was probably Andreas’s language at court. Although Andreas uses the word coamans most often to refer to a lover, his text references Old French romances often enough for amicus to smack of the Old French connotations of amie. I cannot here apply Stephen Jaeger’s contention, that much of what we read as homoerotic in medieval texts should be read as a form of what we would now think of as patriotism, first, and once again, because Andreas’s text undermines nobility but also because Andreas never once refers to Walter’s probable high historical standing. More importantly, Andreas returns throughout Book III to his own desire for male friendship, at least according to the Master. At 3.11 he writes, “nihil enim in orbe tantum valet quod vero possit comparari amico” (“Nothing in the world is so important that it can be compared to a true friend”). But true friends are rare because men tend to be more interested in sex with women than in friendship, according to the Master. Women, because they are objects of acquisition and competition between men, are by definition especially threatening to male friends and should therefore be particularly avoided (3.8–12). Vice mutua diligaris (reciprocated love/delight) (3.116) is the desire attributed to Walter near the end of the book, and it seems in fact to be the only desire in the text that compares to that for sex. Although women are shown to be as capable of mutual dilectio as men, love relations between men are the paradigm, and Andreas seems to need assurance of Walter’s returned affections. Like the cleric in Dialogue 8, Andreas is trying subvertere fidem (1.6.558; “to subvert faith”), faith in existing systems or institutions (religion, heterosexuality, gender, class, and sexual rules). Although it is Walter’s faith in particular that is important to Andreas, he clearly wants his text to affect the faith of any reader. Andreas surely knew that his writing would circulate beyond Walter. Many passages in Andreas’s text are addressed to women, but perhaps the most sustained one, which also bears the most obvious exhortations to women, is found in 2.6.1–14. Two of the most obvious examples are as follows: (1) “Et certe hoc cupio mulieribus indicare . . .” (2.6.3; “I should certainly like to point out to women . . .”) and (2) “Huic autem mulieri meum non possum denegare consilium” (2.6.5; “I cannot refuse my advice to a woman of this kind”). The nature of the advice tends to be throughout the text, as it is here, to protect women from men. It tends to warn that men are liars and philanderers who will do anything to win a woman’s love and

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then break faith with her in some way. I would like to suggest that Andreas’s protectiveness includes both the beloved reader he cruises and real women, and it stems from his experience of sociosexual contracts. Whatever the truth of his advice, he clearly envisioned a female readership. Constant J. Mews argues that there were enough women educated in Latin in the twelfth century to allow for sophisticated correspondence with educated men, often about logic disguised as love talk.38 Whether Andreas foresaw this readership to lie in the future or whether he had a contemporary readership is impossible to determine with surety; yet the fact that this text exists and addresses women suggests they were a potential readership at its writing. Further, given the way female speakers appear in the text (they are astute and educated) we are left with the impression that some women of varying classes were educated enough to read his text. Since potentialities do not constitute actualities, however, and since seemingly historical reflections in texts are often illusory, these representations may mean nothing more than that Andreas thought women capable and deserving of education. The advice to women could be advice to anyone in the seducee’s position, and therefore as much to Walter or to any other reader as to women in particular. Since Andreas aligns himself with the feminine as a social signification of marginality, and since his text offers its reader the interpretive tools necessary to escape seduction, there is no need to postulate a historical female readership. Yet this is not to say one did not exist. I favor Mews’s point of view. Women who were literate in the late twelfth century were probably literate primarily in Latin, since vernacular languages were only beginning to be accepted as literary languages. All we really know of the text’s readership is that it is not “prudent” or “decent” since it insists, like the author, on wasting its time with the inexpedient “hunting”: Quamvis igitur non multum videatur expediens huiusmodi rebus insistere, nec deceat quemquam prudentem huiusmodi vacare venatibus, tamen propter affectum quo tibi annector, tuae nullatenus valeo petitioni obstare . . . (Praefatio 4) So though dwelling on such topics seems hardly advisable, and though the man of sense shows impropriety in making time for such hunting as this, the affection that binds us makes me utterly unable to oppose your request. (P.G. Walsh, 31)

“We,” the readers, have been implicated along with Andreas and Walter as being imprudent, indecent, and otherwise nonconformist from the beginning. The readers of Andreas’s text do not qualify as “men of sense.” The masculine referent, however, is Walsh’s. Andreas does not distinguish between the sexes here. Based on my suggestions in this section, as well as on what I show to be the purport of Andreas’s text vis-à-vis women in my next chapter, I would like to

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recommend that Andreas’s text be considered in the research on medieval women’s literacy being currently undertaken. Although I believe Andreas’s text was written primarily for Walter, it seems clear that he imagined a much wider audience, one as likely to include women as men. Feminine Desire and the Transgendered Agents of Andreas’s Text This section completes the discussion of Andreas’s relationship to Walter, provides the final evidence of Andreas’s identification with the “feminine position,” and lays the groundwork for discussion of Andreas’s Book III in the final chapter. Andreas neither elevates nor debases women but shows them to be fully human and as such to have a right to their desire. This section also shows how Andreas’s text causes the reader to identify with varying sexual and gendered situations so as to experience marginalized positions and thereby to understand them. It also shows that Andreas’s text encourages action—at very least that of volition—as much as understanding through identification. In the dialogues, Andreas represents women as being smarter, if not always kinder, than the men but also as claiming to support some aspect of existing social systems in apparent attempts to protect themselves. Given what Andreas’s text says about existing social systems, the women’s responses feel unsatisfactory. It is the men in the dialogues, not the women, who suggest turning the world upside down to facilitate their desire. Unfortunately, their motives are disingenuous and their tactics coercive, two qualities the text also exposes for criticism. The reader is left with accepting two unsatisfactory paradigms or faced with the option of making active changes in existing social systems in honest ways. If not a call for actual social reform, this is at least a call to reform how one is affected by existing systems. The men and women of the dialogues seem to understand that, whatever is said between them about desire and the demands of society, the women’s desire matters neither to the men nor to society. If women express desire at all, whether or not it agrees with men’s, women are condemned as whores for the expression of it. A passage at 3.28, another like the one at 2.6.15–16, discussed earlier, shows how women’s desire is marginalized by double standards for sexual behavior. This passage supposedly tries to persuade Walter to chastity. Andreas has just asserted that all men of every station will be condemned by God and by society for loving, no matter how noble the woman. He continues, Mulier quoque si amoris coeperit inservire ministeriis nullo sibi modo reputatur ad laudem, etiam si a stirpe regis ametur. Immo quamvis in masculis

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propter sexus audaciam amoris vel luxuriae toleratur excessus, in mulieribus creditur damnabile crimen et eius inde fama supprimitur, et ab omni sapientia meretrix illa iudicatur immunda et contemptui prorsus habetur. (3.28) And so it is when a woman begins to be submissive to the services of love, it in no way reputes to her praise, even if she is loved by a royal scion. Indeed, extremes of love or self-indulgence are tolerated in males because of the boldness of the sex, but in the case of women it is considered a reprehensible sin, thence their reputation is sunk, and by all the wise that woman is judged a foul whore and held in utter contempt.

A woman who follows her desire—or a man’s—is judged a foul whore. The “wise ones” who are making the judgments are left unnamed, like the ubiquitous and powerful but ultimately unauthoritative “they” discussed earlier, and they clearly privilege males. “Feminine” desire remains in the margins. Again, by feminine desire I mean both the desire of historical (or “real”) women and the desire of the disenfranchised (or of those in a “feminine” position), because these meanings overlap in Andreas’s text and are occasionally even conflated. Feminine desire is a conceptual grouping constituted in the text, though unnamed by it, and it is one of the central issues integrally related to free choice. The remainder of this section focuses primarily on Andreas’s Book II, mostly its first six chapters. Chapter 7 contains the judgments on love, pronounced by the noble ladies, and Chapter 8 contains a second romance, one that provides a list rules for lovers, rather than a hell story, as in Dialogue 5. Since in each of the chapters of Book II, feminine desire is presented so as to emphasize the limits placed upon it, and since those limits are presented in terms undermined elsewhere by the text, the limits on feminine desire are clearly being offered up for critique. The first six chapters of Book II not only recapitulate the subversion of these limits but also show that there is very little that can be done to truly change anyone’s desire: any change must arise naturally from the inner workings of the desiring subject, not from external coercion. The chapter that purports to show how to make love last shows that the task is impossible; the chapter that offers remedies for love in fact shows there are none. Parts of these chapters are directed toward women, particularly in those loci where they can simultaneously be interpreted as addressing other types of disenfranchised desire, such as homosexual desire. In the pages that follow, I will briefly discuss the relevant loci. First let us look at the reader’s gender as Andreas’s text constructs it. At the end of the first chapter of Book II, called “How to Maintain Unchanged the Love One Has Won,” Andreas writes, “haec autem ad utriusque sexus amantem pertinere cognoscas, quae de amoris tibi retentione narramus”

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(2.1.12; “These things, which we have told you about retaining love, you must understand pertain to a lover of either sex”). Neither this first chapter nor the second bestows a sex upon the beloved, who is always referenced in one form or another of coamans. The second chapter, “How a Love Gained Must Be Deepened,” also ends with an appeal to “your” (genderless) discernment. “There will perhaps be other causes by which love is deepened, and these you will be able to search out by regular investigation,” “si haec quae notavimus attentis auribus percepisti” (2.2.6; “if you have perceived with attentive ears these things that we have written”). Chapter 3, “How Love Is Diminished,” names women, but not necessarily as the coamans. At 2.3.2–3 the instructions are to a particularly gender-confused reader: “Minui quoque facit amorem de coamante percepta infamia et avaritiae malorumque morum et omnis improbitatis audita relatio, nec non com alia muliere facta commistio, licet amandi affectus ibi desit” (“Another cause of diminution of love is the perceived infamy of one’s lover, and accounts of miserliness, bad behavior, and general wickedness; also any affair with another woman, even if it involves no feelings of love”). Coamans is generally supposed in the text to be a woman, the amans the man—this would make especially good sense since Walter is addressed throughout as being in the position of the amans, although the “you” at the end of this chapter is not specifically named. But if we read coamans as the woman in this passage, her bad reputation here seems to include lesbian relations. If we read coamans as a man, Walter’s masculinity is compromised and/or we must postulate a female readership. The introductory chapters in Book II are full of such suggestions. Chapter 4 of Book II, “How Love Is Brought to an End,” is mostly about infidelity, but women are not mentioned, and there are some confusing references. At 2.4.4, “amor enim duos quaerit fidei unitate conjunctos et voluntatum identitate concords” (“Love seeks two persons joined together in unity of faith and harmonious in the identity of their wishes”). The sex of either is irrelevant, although it must be potent, viable sex (2.4.5). The chapter finishes by calling the reader amice (m.), infidelity to whom (m.amico) in the previous chapter (2.3.6) constituted grounds for ending love. But since infidelity is among the reasons women should reject a lover, it appears to be instruction to a woman. The reader’s gender is entirely fluid. In Chapter 5, “Recognition of Reciprocated Love,” amans and coamans can be read fairly consistently as male and female respectively until 2.5.6 where the amans is named mulier. Given that this chapter also goes to great lengths to show how the signs of reciprocated love can just as easily be signs of their opposite, it should not be too surprising that the significations of gender in lovers and readers are also interchangeable. Chapter 6, “If One Lover Breaks Faith with another Lover,” seems to be directly aimed at a female readership, and it points to the marginalization of

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women’s desire. The first instruction (2.6.1–2) explains what to do if the man (si quidem vir) is unfaithful. A woman who would readmit this kind of amantem to “the customary embraces” will suffer a loss of probitas (2.6.3). Amidst his condemnation of the man’s infidelity, however, Andreas interjects, “Quid enim in hoc saeculo alicui potest gratius exhiberi quam optatae mulieris amore potiri?”(2.6.4; “What even in this world is able to be shown to any man more gladly than to take possession of the love of a desired woman?”). This question is not only rhetorical, but it also voices the accepted idea about male heterosexual desire that entirely writes out female desire. It echoes the passage from Dialogue 1 (1.6.64), discussed in Chapter II above, where the woman is asked to place her person under the arbitration of the “alien” man. Since it is embedded in a question, it is held up to question; it is a compliment to women coined so that its “other side” simultaneously constitutes their loss; held in question, it is also held up specifically for criticism. Immediately thereafter, Andreas writes of a woman’s desire: “Si vero mulier, ut saepissime solitum est evenire, a praefati deceptoris amore suam non possit avertere mentem . . . Huic autem mulieri meum non possum denegare consilium” (2.6.4–5; “But if, as very often happens, the woman cannot divert her thoughts from the love of that deceiver . . . I cannot refuse my advice to a woman of this kind”). He advises her to dissemble, by pretending she does not care and by suggesting that she loves another, in order to make the object of her desire jealous. If this does not work, she should try to forget him “quia in tali tempestate optatas nunquam inveniet ancora ripas” (2.6.7; “for ‘our anchor in weather bleak will never bite the bank we seek’ ”). Although this limping Latin meter recalls both Ovid and the metaphor of the lover/sailor that Andreas and his speakers have used throughout the text, it is untraceable.39 It is therefore most likely to be Andreas the Master’s. Through its allusions, it places the woman in the position of the lover usually attributed to a man and endows her with an anchor—which in both Ovid’s and Andreas’s texts is almost always a humorous reference to a phallus. I read this passage, therefore, as not only acknowledging feminine desire but also as attributing the possibility of phallic valence to it. This is not to suggest that Andreas saw feminine desire as actually having social valence, but that, since Andreas construes feminine desire as of equal potency to masculine desire, they can and perhaps should carry equivalent social potency. Chapter 6 of Book II also includes the previously noted revision of the traditional sayings about sexual license in men and women (2.6.15–16), Andreas’s confession that he is in love (2.6.21–22), a deconstruction of the preeminent importance of monogamous love relations (throughout, but especially at 2.6.23–24), a restatement of the inevitability of a woman being

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called a whore whether she follows the rules or her own desires (2.6.34–37), and two other items that will need a bit more explanation. One is another hint at the possibility of lesbian desire at 2.6.27, which is elaborated somewhat in the discussion of go-betweens (2.6.32–33). The other is a challenge to the boundaries between love and friendship (2.6.25, 38–39), a challenge constituted by highlighting the problems inherent in trying to separate love and friendship, or in trying to make them mutually exclusive. The passage suggestive of lesbian desire is as follows. At 2.6.26 Andreas writes, Sed quaeris an peccet illa mulier in amoris praecepto, quae alteri dominae quam amori scit idonee copulatam novum suadet amorem. Et ex rationis quidem necessitate compellimur enarrare nemini licere feminam amori idonee copulatam sibi vel alii sollicitare. But you ask whether that woman sins against a precept of love who persuades another woman to a new love whom she knows to be aptly connected in love already. We are forced by the necessity which comes out of reason to say that it is licit for no one [nemini] to solicit a woman already aptly connected in love either for herself [sibi] or for another.

The solicitor begins very clearly as a woman and ends with the option of soliciting a woman for herself. Nemini, the no one for whom this solicitation is supposedly allowable, is neuter—nullo might have been used to specifically suggest a gender switch to the masculine in the solicitor, if that had been Andreas’s intent. He has made such distinctions before. Nor is sibi, which can refer to either grammatical gender, necessarily male unless we simply switch the sex of the original solicitor. There is no textual or grammatical reason to do so, but most translators do. Either it is unfathomable to them that a text by a twelfth-century cleric could in fact be suggesting that a female go-between could end up soliciting a woman for herself, or it is simply impossible for many translators to read without heterosexual blinders.40 Andreas seems to pick up the topic of same-sex solicitation again at 2.6.32–33, where he discusses go-betweens and confidants, who are cited as exceptions to the rule of secrecy in love. The man chooses a male confidant, the woman a female, and a go-between of unnamed gender is chosen to carry messages back and forth. The problem with (or advantage to) the genderless go-between is that, given the reputation of go-betweens, he/she might end up with one of the lovers— the possible arrangements are as varied as sexual inclination.41 Andreas then places his own “feminine” (marginalized) desire into the discussion. The relevant passages culminate in Andreas’s invitation to Walter to enjoy “mixed love,” with no particular reference to doing so

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with a woman. Further, these passages, 2.6.25, 38–39, are the only places in the chapter where Andreas addresses Walter directly by name, and they are comparatively close together. Book II, Chapter 6, is also the only place in the text where Andreas refers to himself as Andreas. I therefore see these textual loci as being of particular significance, places where Andreas wants the reader to pay particular attention, not only to what is being said but also by whom and to whom. Andreas names himself at 2.6.18, after describing the socially unacceptable position of the man who loves a woman who is unchaste or has more than one lover. He places words in Walter’s mouth, a hypothetical question that has nothing to do with Walter’s desire, in order to talk about his own: Sed dices forte: “Adeo talis mulieris amore languescit amator quod eius nullis potest artibus oblivisci vel suam ab ea retrahere mentem; huic ergo, magister, liberationis praesta remedium.” Sed non gaudeat Andreas de eo quod magis cupit in orbe, sine quo etiam diu non potest corporali vita beari, si suum unquam ediderit homini tam infortunato remedium. (2.6.18) But perhaps you will say: “A lover languishes in love for such a woman so much that his mind is unable to turn away from her or to forget by any art; so therefore, master, prescribe a remedy to free him.” But Andreas would not rejoice in that which he desires most in the world, without which he is not able even for long to be happy in this life of the body, if he ever produced his remedy for so unfortunate a man.

These are the only words Andreas directly ventriloquizes for Walter, and they constitute a prayer to the Master for a remedy for a man whose desire is improper. But Andreas will not furnish a remedy because he would not be able to rejoice in his own love if he were to do so. Being able to provide a remedy for love would make available a remedy for his own desire, which he has no desire to remedy, only to enjoy, even in his pain. Is this advice to a friend or confessions to a desired love? Here is, once again, Andreas’s entire confession: Quam regulam nostri quidem experimento cognoscimus esse verissimam. Nam et nos excellentissimi amoris concitamur aculeis, quamvis inde nullum sumpsimus nec speramus assumere fructum. Nam tantae altitudinis cogimur amore languescere quod nulli licet exprimere verbo, ne supplicantium audemus iure potiri, et sic demum compellimur proprii corporis sentire naufragia. Sed quamvis in tanta simus audacter et improvide tempestatis unda prolapsi, de novo tamen amore cogitare non possumus vel alium liberationis modum exquirere. (2.6.22) For we know by our own experience that this rule is most true, for we too are excited/urged by the pricks of a most excellent love, although we take

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hold of nothing from there nor do we hope to receive the fruits. For we are compelled to languish in a love so high that no word can express it, nor do we dare to be able to claim the right/justice of supplicants, and thus at length we are compelled to feel the shipwreck of our own body. But though we are fallen boldly/courageously and improvidently into such tempestuous waves, nevertheless we are not able to consider a new love or to seek out any kind of freedom.

Andreas’s use of the formal “we” takes on especially poignant valence in this passage addressed directly to Walter. The two subjects even seem to become one flesh in the moment of their physical shipwreck. Directly after this confession, Andreas addresses Walter again and begins his discussion of pure and mixed love. Since the distinction between pure and mixed love was brought up by the cleric of Dialogue 8 in order to seduce the woman, perhaps Andreas is trying to seduce his interlocutor. Andreas reintroduces pure and mixed love at 2.6.23–25 as an answer to another of Walter’s hypothetical questions. This one is about how far the limits of fidelity can be pushed, and this time a man rather than a woman commits the infidelity: Sed quum diligens indagator inveniaris amoris, non sine causa quaerere posses an purum amorem cum una possit aliquis muliere servare, ac cum altera retinere mixtum sive communem. Et irrefragabili tibi auctoritate monstramus neminem posse taliter duabus mulieribus cordis dilectione coniungi. Licet enim purus et mixtus diversi videantur amores, recte tamen intuentibus purus amor quo ad sui substantiam idem cum mixto iudicatur amore et ex eadem cum ipso cordis affectione procedit. Eadem est in illis amoris substantia, sed varius est modus atque respectus amandi . . . Since, however, you are found to be a diligent investigator of love, not without cause might you seek whether anyone can preserve pure love with one woman, and compounded or common love with another. And by irrefutable authority [irrefragabili auctoritate] we show you that no one can be joined in love of the heart with two women in this way. Though pure and compounded love are apparently different categories, a right view of them demands that pure love in its essence should be regarded as the same as compounded love, proceeding from the same heartfelt affection as the other. The essence of love in them is the same, but the manner and aspect of loving are different.

Andreas claims to show Walter, whom he is about to name, by irrefragabili auctoritate—not by reason or experience—that multiple lovers are not possible, even if all but one are loved chastely. Since he proceeds in scholastic fashion to show that chaste and consummated love are essentially the same, this “unbreakable authority” must be the cultural priority given to monogamous

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relationships. Since, also, his text has made it abundantly clear that authority is anything but irrefragabile, it seems equally clear that the cultural authority of monogamous love is in fact being broken up. Andreas goes on to argue, much along the lines of the cleric of Dialogue 8, that pure and mixed love are so much alike that if a pair who had long enjoyed pure love wanted to, they could easily move to consummated love, without changing the nature of their love (2.6.25). The repetitions are Andreas’s, not mine. If the distinctions between traditional oppositions (fidelity/unfaithfulness, sexual intercourse/emotional love, friendship/romantic love) are no longer valid, what stops Andreas’s love from being viable? Social compulsion seems to be his answer, but it does not change his desire. Walter is addressed at 2.6.26 with another answer to another of his hypothetical questions about fidelity. The question is whether a woman should be rejected if she has been raped. Andreas answers that “none can be justly censured for an action done under violenta coactione.” That is, bodily purity is not so much a matter of physical action as of social construction, and constrained action cannot be blameworthy. It seems there are at least (as usual) two registers of discourse here. In one, a woman is blamed by one man and excused by another “unless she later consents to the act.” Yet, by definition, violenta coactione precludes consent. It seems in this register patently silly that the victim would need to be excused and logically impossible that she could later consent to compulsion. Since these absurdities are not far from twelfthcentury notions about rape (and, unfortunately, much later ones as well) it seems also that this kind of thinking is being presented for scrutiny and evaluation. This passage also seems to suggest that fidelity is an interior state rather than a physical one. Violent compulsion can change behavior, but not desire. This would include the threat of hell on Andreas’s desire. The cleric of Dialogue 8 defines amor purus as differing only from amor mixtus in that the former goes only as far as nude caresses while the latter includes “the final consolation” (1.6.470–471). For him, both are physical. But of amor purus he also says, “Et purus quidem amor est, qui omnimoda dilectionis affectione duorum amantium corda coniungit. His autem in mentis contemplatione cordisque consistit affectu” (1.6.470–471; “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”). Dilectionis and affectione are, as I pointed out in Chapter IV, the words that Andreas uses to connect himself with Walter. Beyond the fact that these specific words are employed in this particular argument, male friendship and amor purus are described as being so similar that the only difference between them lies in the physical actions referenced in the definition—which Andreas has already shown to be of minimal significance in distinguishing between relations. Andreas’s discussion of

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pure and mixed love shows that friendship and love, another of the traditional opposites, are not really essentially different or mutually exclusive. Andreas seems to push the similarities between pure and mixed love (or friendship and sex) even further where Walter is named again: Quaeris etiam, Gualteri, si duo coamantes puro concorditer amore fruantur, postmodum alter petit mixtum vel communem, an liceat alteri reluctari. Ad hoc igitur te volumus penitus edoceri quod, licet purus amor potius quam mixtus sive communis sit cunctis hominibus eligendus, non tamen uni licet amantium sui coamantis rebellem exsistere voluntati, nisi forte inter amoris initia concorditer pepigerunt quod nunquam mixto fruerentur amore, nisi libera utriusque voluntas et plena concordia postularet. Sed quamvis talis conventio colligavit amantes ut non liceat amatori ultra nisi plena concordia postulare, non tamen recte agit mulier, si sui coamantis in hoc parere voluntate. Singuli namque tenetur amantes in amoris exercendo solatia cunctis inter se mutuis voluntatibus obedire. (2.6.38) You even ask, Walter, if two partners harmoniously enjoy pure love, then one of the two seeks compounded or common love, whether it is allowable for the other to resist. Toward this I deeply desire to teach you that, [although] pure love is licensed as preferable to be chosen over compounded or common love by all men, it is nevertheless not allowable for a lover to emerge rebellious to the will of a partner, unless they happen to have made a harmonious pledge at the beginning of their love that they would never indulge in compounded love unless each asked it of their free will and in full agreement. Yet even if this agreement is binding on the lovers so that one cannot make further demands unless complete agreement exists, the woman does not act rightly if in this matter she refuses to comply with her partner’s will, once she sees him persisting in his desire. For each lover in practicing love’s consolations is bound to agree to all the wishes of the other.

The agreements between coamantes in the first part of the passage seem equitable, if stilted. When the mulier is introduced in the latter part of the passage, however, any attempt at fairness disappears. It seems that if the partners were men, the freedom ideal in love would be possible. Once a woman is actually introduced, her desire is subordinated to the man’s. “Love” sounds like St. Paul’s description of how couples ought to behave in marriage—that neither should deny the other (2 Cor. 7.1–5). All of the agreements in this passage, as well as the hypothetical question itself, are based upon what is licet. What is licet, however, is being exposed as unjust with respect to feminine desire. This is one register of the discourse voiced in the passage. The other register asks the basic question: Why not move from pure to mixed love? Since there is really no good

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answer to this within the framework of the text, perhaps the question ceases to be rhetorical. The judgments that follow the first six chapters of Book II (Chapter 7) suggest that when one appeals to any kind of authority in order to aid one’s desire, desire ultimately becomes the least important of relevant considerations, especially if it is feminine desire. There are many curious things about the judgments. Although they are supposed to be given in order to help lovers overcome obstacles to their desire, desire is the element least considered in making them. The women’s desire in these little exempla is never even once taken into consideration, even when women are the supposed “defendants.” This seems especially odd given that, within the fiction, women are pronouncing the judgments. The judgments are all, in one way or another, in a man’s favor. There is a sense that this injustice would be normal or expected if men were pronouncing the judgments, as in real life, whereas it seems particularly outrageous with women acting as judges in a fiction about love. The scenario is conspicuously fictitious for a number of reasons but perhaps especially because in the real world women did not function as judges in a court of law, no matter how high their social standing. And the real world is particularly referenced for comparison in these fictions since all of the judges are historically identifiable ladies, who point to supposedly real situations as examples for why they judge as they do. All of these female judges are of the highest social standing; but even so, there seems to be an unwritten question as to whether they (or any woman) would pronounce judgment as they do in these examples if they were really in such a position. The unwritten answer seems to be that they would not but that laws invented by and for men do. Further, although all of the judgments appear inept to one degree or another, they seem especially so after having “met” the women of the dialogues, who seem to be types of the right kind of reader, the careful reader who reads well. The judges do not read the situations presented to them very well. They are enamored of their own authority and the ensuing ability to pre/proscribe. Where, then, does this leave the reader of Andreas’s text? Very probably questioning the authority of the judicial system, as well as wondering why women’s desire is so circumscribed and why human beings participate in their own disenfranchisement. Book II ends with Chapter 8, the romance that recounts the success of a trespasser into the world where the rules of love are made. This world is, of course, self-consciously fictitious and holds many things in common with all the foundational stories in Andreas’s text. The hero/trespasser’s quest is instigated by his desire for a beautiful woman, and it is facilitated by his submission to another beautiful woman who will “grant him all that he

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desires” if he proves to be brave. The lady’s horse and verbal directions lead him to his successful ends. This romance, like the one in Dialogue 5, is supposed to be a “true” account of how the rules of love came to be known. Yet the two stories not only present different sets of rules, but their narratives and tactics also differ: the story in Dialogue 5 is a story of hell and the one in Book II of heaven. The first story uses scare tactics to manipulate the listener and undermines religious attempts to gain submission in this way. This second story is a success story of sorts. It shows how following one’s desire and putting forth effort against the odds pays off in the end. A look at the hero’s actions in the meadows will serve to illustrate my point. After the beautiful maiden from the center of the forest has told him he “must advance wholly without fear” and defend himself “against all who bar [his] path as boldly as [he] can,” he encounters a knight who points to the fact that he is a stranger “from distant parts” as well as a potential trespasser. The fact that the hero is British and is not in Britain is repeatedly pointed out. Not only is he a trespasser, but exactly where he is becomes an unavoidable question. After the hero overcomes this knight, crosses an underwater bridge trusting in the quality of his horse, and drowns the guard on the other side, he finds himself in the most beautiful meadows. In a pasture full of flowers he finally finds a beautiful circular palace with no doors or windows (2.8.19). On the grass, however, there are silver tables laid with white cloths and all kinds of food and drink. There is even a basin of food for his horse. This motif is common enough in stories such as those of Chrétien de Troyes, close to Andreas both chronologically and geographically, whose works Andreas’s text seems on occasion to reflect. There can be little doubt that this kind of “otherworldly” setting in Chrétien’s works was associated with treks to the world of the dead.42 Andreas’s tale of the other world is his own, however. When the British knight begins to eat, an act of trespass reminiscent of Eve, a palace door loudly opens and a giant with a club approaches him, threatening, “quis tu tantae praesumptionis homo, qui ad haec regia veritus non es accedere loca, et in regia mensa militum tam audacter et irreverenter stipendia sumis?” (2.8.22; “Who are you, who in your great presumption did not shrink from entering the royal demesne, and so boldly and disrespectfully eat the portion of the knights at the king’s table?”). The young hero responds with words that could more easily apply to the realms of Henry or Philip and to the kingdom of heaven than to some unnamed magical netherworld: “Cunctis abundanter regia debet esse exposita mensa, nec cibum reiumque potum decet alicui denegari” (2.8.23; “The royal table should be spread generously for all, and the king’s food and drink should be suitable for anyone”). Besides, he argues, whether he is a knight

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or not (which he is) he is on a knight’s business and should be given the privileges and respect due a knight. The giant, sounding somewhat like the judicial God of the New Testament says, “Licet ista sit regia mensa, non tamen in ea decet discumbere quemquam nisi illos qui hic sunt platio deputati” (2.8.24; “Though this is the king’s table, no one may recline at it save those assigned to the palace”). Then like the angry God of the Old Testament, the giant thunders about how his “right hand” has slaughtered a thousand or more (2.8.28).43 After the hero overcomes the giant, he is led into the “inner enclosure” of the palace to receive the gauntlet he seeks, which hangs on the single, central pillar of gold upholding the palace. The hero’s success is surrounded by sexually suggestive significations. The conquered “sexual” palace is not where he remains, however. He journeys to another palace in other beautiful meadows. This time the palace is described similarly to Solomon’s temple, but richer, and Arthur, rather than God, is on its throne.44 The knight shows the gauntlet he has acquired to two guards who let him pass, but they tell him that this path is a hazard to his life and will cause him great pain. When he finally goes to claim the hawk, which is the prize that will win him the love he seeks, he happens to notice a scroll hanging on the perch of gold. The scroll reads, “Haec est [enim] chartula, in qua regulae scribuntur amoris, quas ipse amoris rex ore proprio amatoribus edidit” (2.8.40; “This is the memorandum on which the rules of love are written, which the king of love himself brought forth to lovers with his own mouth”). This he is to take back and make public if he is to gain the hawk without further struggle. He complies, to his ultimate success, without the pain or threat to his life that he was led to expect. On his way back to Britain he reencounters the lady of the wood. She begs him not to accept his departure reluctantly because whenever he wishes to approach this region alone, he will always find her here. She then gives him thirteen kisses, and he departs to receive the love of his lady who thinks him plenaria fide. Whether he is or not, his gift to her is an emblem of her sovereignty, the only thing that will gain her love. Given that this fiction is the only success story in Andreas’s text, and given that its unsuccessful parallel parodies religion’s negative approach to dissuading people from love, it seems to me that following one’s desire, whatever it is, is being promoted by the text. Given also that the story follows Andreas’s question, “why not move on to ‘mixed’ love?” it seems that Walter has an open invitation to bravely follow his desire, even if it is risky. It seems also that the scrawny hero has beaten the bastions of exclusivity, so that any reader is being offered the same kind of invitation.

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CHAPTER V ANDREAS ON WOMEN

Telle me also, to what conclusioun Were membres maad of generacioun And of so parfit wis a wrighte ywrought? Trusteth right wel, they were nat maad for nought. Glose whoso wol, and saye bothe up and down That they were maked for purgacioun Of urine, and oure bothe things smale Was eek to know a femele from a male, And for noon other cause—saye ye no? Th’experience woot wel it is nought so. Chaucer, Wife of Bath’s Prologue, ll. 121–130 Pleasure in a woman is like the sunlight, which mildly, gently, and continuously suffuses the earth with its warmth to make it fruitful. Hildegard of Bingen, Causae et curae, 76 The name of wife may seem more sacred or more binding, but sweeter for me will always be the word mistress, or, if you will permit me, that of concubine or whore. . . . In my case, the pleasures of lovers which we shared have been too sweet—they can never displease me, and can scarcely be banished from my thoughts. Wherever I turn they are always there before my eyes, bringing with them awakened longings and fantasies which will not even let me sleep. Even during the celebration of the Mass, when our prayers should be purer, lewd visions of those pleasures take such a hold upon my unhappy soul that my thoughts are on their wantonness instead of on prayers. I should be groaning over the sins I have committed, but I can only sigh for what I have lost. Heloise to Abelard, Radice, 113, 133

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ne of the few interpretations of Andreas’s text upon which past readers have agreed is that Book III is misogynous. The purpose of this chapter is to dim this one seeming point of light and, by doing so, offer a more of less coherent and meaningful way to understand Andreas’s text. The first section, entitled “On the Discourse of Misogyny,” shows that the apparent diatribe against women in Book III is not in fact misogynous but that it is a parody, presenting as foolish a venerable rhetorical discourse whose function is to conscript individual desire in order to maintain empowered institutions. The final section, “Women’s Religion,” explores a recurring reference in Andreas’s text that for clarity’s sake I call “women’s religion,” which can be interpreted as paradigmatic for social reform.

O

On the Discourse of Misogyny Misogynist discourse is at least as old as letters.1 Misogyny has been theorized in a number of ways, especially anthropologically,2 sociologically,3 psychoanalytically,4 and rhetorically.5 My purpose here is not to enter into debate with any current theory of misogyny. Instead, by providing a reading of one particular textual example of misogynist discourse in the twelfth century—Andreas’s Book II, which is often used to define medieval misogyny—I suggest that each occurrence of such discourse in medieval literature is probably best taken on its own terms and in its own context. This section hopes to alter the generalizing tendencies of much thinking about misogynist discourse in the Middle Ages. Although there have been some recent exceptions, most readers of Andreas’s Book III read it as misogynous.6 Howard Bloch, Peter Allen, and Michael Calabrese theorize from the presupposition that it is,7 and Alcuin Blamires and Carolyne Larrington include excerpts from it in their collections of examples of medieval misogyny.8 Even Don Monson’s very recent work assumes that Book III is contra women and “love.”9 Given Book III’s hyperbole and illogic, and given the historical necessity of Andreas’s training in logic, grammar, and rhetoric, I have always found this trend bizarre. Some colleagues have suggested that it is the result of our own current cultural misogyny. This may well be the case. I tend to think that because the text is by a twelfth-century cleric, its overtly ridiculous and logically impossible statements that all women always do “x” evil, have been automatically assumed to be serious defamations of women, all attributable to a kind of “medieval mentality.” Perhaps the supposition is that twelfth-century clerics are predictably self-righteous misogynists. Perhaps that is even generally true. However, I would like to suggest that we consider the possibility that medieval difference in repetition has to do with the author’s art and what it really conveys, rather than what we expect it to convey given its “genre”

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(according to us). If we recall that Andreas must have been trained in logic and grammar, as well as in rhetoric, and, again, given its illogic and hyperbole, the misogynist discourse in his text seems not so much to defame women as to defame that sort of discourse, as I shall shortly demonstrate. Finally, if Blamires’s generalization is correct, that out of fear and envy of women’s wits, the discourse primarily exists to “defend an inherited domain of intellectual pursuits aggressively against female encroachment,” there is no evidence that Andreas’s use of misogynist discourse is at all “typical.”10 If anything, Andreas’s text invites and addresses an intelligent female readership. It is neither possible nor desirable to do a thorough comparison of all uses of misogynist discourse here. However, it will be useful and exemplary to do brief comparisons with Jerome’s Adversus Jovinianum,11 chosen because of Jerome’s great authority and his text’s immense influence on the proliferation of misogynist discourse, and with Walter Map’s “Letter of Valerius to Ruffinus, Against Marriage,”12 chosen because Map, archdeacon of Oxford, was a contemporary of Andreas’s. We therefore get a sense both of the “venerable” tradition and of one of its best-known uses contemporary to Andreas. Let us first compare the two more traditional uses of the discourse. Jerome writes on the evils of marriage and sex (and women) for a man’s spiritual life, and Map writes on the evils of love (and women) for a man’s career as a philosopher. Jerome argues from scripture; Map argues from classical examples. Jerome is passionately serious; Map is sardonic and mocking. Both are apparently trying to talk the reader out of loving women, just as is Andreas in Book III, supposedly. Unlike Andreas, however, neither Map nor Jerome constantly uses “all women always” to preface his next malediction. Nor does Map or Jerome ever refer to a multiple or female readership. They keep to the fiction of a single male reader, the supposed recipient of the “letter.” Unlike Andreas, they do not admit to any personal experience of real difficulty coping with their own desire. Nor do they undermine hell, but use it as a fundamental presupposition for their arguments, just as they do the Neoplatonic hierarchy that Andreas brings up for scrutiny and criticism. Also unlike Andreas, Map and Jerome never allow women’s voices, even ventriloquated, to enter their texts; they only write about women. Even this brief comparison should serve to indicate the kind of very basic differences between Andreas’s use of misogynist diatribe and the uses of it by others. I will leave a thorough comparison of these works and similar ones to another scholar and continue with a close investigation of Andreas’s Book III. Let us begin analysis of Andreas’s Book III by looking briefly at its structure. For the sake of clarity and the reader’s ease, let us quantify the different elements of Book III according to the number of pages they occupy in P.G. Walsh’s edition. Of the twenty pages of Book III, the first nine are taken up with fifteen reasons why Walter should, ostensibly, not

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love. The sixteenth reason, that all women are bad (the diatribe), occupies the following seven and a half pages by itself. The seventeenth reason takes half a page, then Andreas finishes with roughly two pages on how to understand what he has written. As reasons for not loving, the diatribe against women takes up more than its share of space in much the same way the dialogues cause Book I, Chapter 6, to balloon, and as Dialogue 8 is disproportionate to the other dialogues. Since these textual bulges seem to be nodes of special interest for Andreas, as well as pockets of clues for understanding other parts of the text, let us look more closely at the diatribe before addressing the other parts of Book III. On the surface, the types of things said about women in the diatribe seem to be fairly typical of antifeminist literature. The most obvious way in which Andreas’s text appears to differ is, again, in his insistence on and repetition of the “all women always” formula. I quote at length to give an accurate presentation of the material, and I leave out the Latin because including it would cause some obvious infelicities for the reader: No woman ever loved her husband, nor can she ever bind herself to a lover with a reciprocal bond of love. . . . All women . . . are disfigured by the vice of parsimony and greed. . . . I could never find a man to claim acquaintance with any woman who did not pressingly demand gifts. . . . There is no woman to be found . . . who will remain loyal to her love if some man approaches her with the slightest offer of gifts. . . . [T]here is no woman who will let you leave without your obtaining what you seek. . . . All women are thieves. . . . There is no woman alive . . . that an offer of money does not breach her virtue. . . . No woman ever considers herself rich. . . . Every woman is by nature not only miserly but also an envious backbiter of other women, a grabber, a slave to her belly, fickle, devious in speech, disobedient, rebellious against prohibitions, marred with the vice of pride, eager for vainglory, a liar, a drunkard, a tongue-wagger who cannot keep a secret. She indulges in sexual excess, is inclined to evil and loves no man from the heart. Woman is miserly because there is no imaginable wickedness in the world she does not boldly do at the prospect of a gift. . . . No woman is accounted so naive and foolish that she cannot guard her property . . . and win that of others. . . . Why, a guileless woman goes about selling one hen more circumspectly than the wisest lawyer transferring the possession of a good-sized castle. Then no woman is ever joined in such ardent love with a man that she does not devote all her brains to draining away her partner’s wealth. This rule of thumb is never found misleading; there are no exceptions to it. . . . Every woman is also known to be envious . . . it follows that a woman is a slanderer . . . slander is the outcome of nothing but envy and hate. . . . Everyone in the world is aware of the general and constant rule that slander only damages the good name and harms the reputation of the

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slanderer. . . . All that wise men hold is quite foreign to woman; she gets her notions at random . . . and behaves contrary to wisdom in other ways. . . . Every woman is also disfigured with the vice of greed. . . . A woman is habitually such a slave to her belly that there is nothing she would blush to approve if she were sure of excellent food. . . . [N]o amount of it could suffice for her to anticipate repletion. . . . [Although] the female sex is always avaricious . . . she exhausts all she has . . . through gluttony for food . . . . Thus you can take it as a general rule that you can get anything out of a woman easily if you take the trouble to give her fine meals fairly often. . . . We know that everything every woman says is spoken with inner deceit. . . . Every woman is further polluted by the vice of disobedience. There is no woman alive in the world . . . that . . . if she is forbidden . . . something . . . she does not . . . set out to transgress it. This is why the well-known utterance of the sage has rightly been found to apply to women without any exception: “Forbidden fruit we strive to gain, and prize denied fain would attain.” [This principle proves in Book II to be true of lovers generally, and in 1.6.7 and 8 of young men in drag in particular]. . . . I can never recall anyone succeeding in finding a woman who could restrain her arrogance. No woman has been found an exception to these rules. . . . Every woman seems to look down on other women . . . no man could despise another except through haughty pride. . . . All women are known to be also liars. There is not a living woman who . . . does not invent lies with reckless ingenuity. . . . All women are drunkards. . . . She is never so refreshed by drinking wine so many times that she refuses another cup if it is brought. . . . Wine that has deteriorated she regards as her greatest foe . . . but if she comes upon wine in good condition unmixed with water, she would rather endure a huge loss to her estate than fail to drink her fill. . . . All women are also free with their tongues . . . no woman can keep a secret. . . . Every woman in the world is also lustful . . . no man however virile could satiate a woman’s lust by any means. . . . No woman in this world is so faithful . . . that if a lusting lover appears and entices her with expertise and persistence to enjoy love, she is minded to reject his request or defend herself against his advances, at any rate once he has applied heavy pressure. This is a rule that does not mislead in the case of any woman. . . . Every woman fearlessly commits every major sin the world on a slender pretext. (3.65–112)

The rhetorical effect of hyperbole in the quoted passages is, for me, humorous, as are the blatant logical inconsistencies in Andreas’s presentation of the material. Because of the clownishness effected, Andreas’s employment of standard misogynous material here begins to look like parody of it. Let us look more closely at the illogic. Besides the logical inconsistency of a woman being so greedy that she has to sell her estate for food, Andreas says women are such drunks that they will not stop drinking until they have had enough—and the wine

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must be good. Neither of these attributes seems to describe a drunk but someone who is, instead, a discriminating drinker. Andreas also illogically asserts that women are so sexually insatiable, that they may need “heavy pressure” from a “lustful lover.” Anyone who is “insatiable” hardly needs any kind of “pressure,” especially not heavy pressure. It is the lover, the man, who is identified as lustful and rude. In fact, as we shall see throughout this chapter, Andreas not only unsays every nasty thing he says about women, but he in turn incriminates men. Before moving on, however, let us look closer at one of the main faults of women that Andreas emphasizes through repetition in the diatribe: their nasty relationship to money—they are greedy, rapacious, and so on. In fact, he returns to money-related vices so often that one wonders why. Why the emphasis on women’s financial status? And why, if he is trying to show how greedy they are, do they always seem to be the ones who lack, who must get money from men if they are to have it, who must sell their estates for food if they are hungry, who must guard their property from men? Why, if Andreas means to malign women, does he use an exemplum about a “foolish” (simplex) woman who goes about selling “one hen” more circumspectly than does the “wisest lawyer” when transferring the possession of a “good-sized castle” (3.72)? Why do men have economic control of castles and women of hens when foolish women are more intelligent than is sapientissimus iurisperitus? Could it be that Andreas is in fact pointing to a social and economic injustice? These are odd comparisons to support the maligning of women. The woman’s property consists of a hen while the man’s is a large castle—why this comparison if not to suggest the (im)possibility of a woman owning a castle, as well as the possibility of the nobility being “bought out”? The exemplum suggests that economics and intelligence are potentially more puissant than are nobility, social class, and gender. If money is the basis of power, not inherited hierarchical privilege, the question then becomes what is to stop women from becoming enfranchised by economic means: nothing, according to Andreas’s text, except for the greed of the enfranchised, who in this case are men. In the diatribe, women must get their subsistence from “others” (aliena). These aliena, the accusative plural of alienum, are reminiscent of the male “aliens” of 1.2, to whom women are sold or must trade their bodies. Nearly as often as Andreas harps upon women and money, he accuses them of slander. Yet he tends to do so directly after one of his more vituperative degradations of women. There is no way, except through heinous inattention, to read his repeated denunciations of slanderous women without being aware of the slanderous nature of the discourse against women, which he is ostensibly perpetuating. Typically, Andreas incriminates himself, or rather his textual persona, the authoritative clerk,

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along with anyone who would perpetuate the slander, who in his time were men and clerical. In Books I and II, especially in the eighth dialogue, Andreas identifies himself not only as a cleric but also as a liar and as proud—two more of the sins of which he accuses women in his diatribe. The diatribe seems to exist more to challenge the moral rectitude of misogynists than to accuse women. Another telling aspect of the “bulbous diatribe” is its treatment of Eve. Eve is first used in lines 81–82 to illustrate woman’s avarice and gluttony, and in this instance she is used in mostly the usual way: Et haec omnia possumus in Eva prima mulierum cognoscere quae, licet manu divina sine hominis fuerit facto plasmata, nil tamen magis vetitum timuit assumere cibum, et pro ventris ingluvie de Paradisi meruit habitatione repelli. Si ergo illa femina, quae sine crimine fuit divina manu creata, vitia non potuit compescere gulae, quid erit in aliis, quas in peccatis mater concipit in alvo, nec unquam sine crimine vivunt? (3.81–82) We can observe all this in Eve, the first woman; though fashioned by God’s hand and not by man’s work, this did not make her any more afraid of taking the forbidden fruit, and she deserved to be expelled from her home in Paradise because of her voracious belly. So if the woman, created sinless by God’s hand, could not restrain her belly’s vices, how will the rest fare, each conceived in sin in her mother’s womb and never living without sin?

Yet the sentence that follows this passage, what should be the moral to its story, is not typical: “Sit ergo tibi pro generali regula definitum, quod [in] nihilo facile poteris in muliere carere, si saepius curaveris eam splendida mensa cibare” (“Thus you can take it as a general rule that you can get anything out of a woman easily if you take the trouble to give her fine meals fairly often”). The focus is on the male suitor and reader (and possibly God) and on how they are the tempters of woman—not on the woman’s gluttony. The male reader replaces the serpent in the garden. Men are further incriminated in the next line: “Est etenim mulier tanquam cera liquescens, quae semper est formam novam parata suscipere et ad sigilli cuiuslibet impositionem mutari” (3.83; “Woman is like melting wax, always ready to assume fresh shape and to be molded to the imprint of anyone’s seal”—anyone who is not a woman, that is). If women were as malleable as the assertion suggests, which the women in the dialogues disprove, not only would women be more manageable, but men, being the ones who mold women, would be responsible for the sins of women. Again, the text seems to indicate that each is or ought to be responsible for his or her own behavior, not Eve and not those in power. Further discussion of men’s manipulation and of Eve will be taken up toward the end of this section.

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Here is a final and very important example of Andreas’s use of illogic: Andreas advises Walter not to give himself over to loving, not only because he will place himself in danger of going to hell but also because “illud omnis mulier sine timore pro levi occasione committit” (3.107; “every woman fearlessly commits every major sin in the world on a slender pretext”). If this logically (not to mention experientially) impossible reason is why Walter should not love, there is little to keep him from indulging. If the misogynist discourse in Andreas’s text exists neither to denounce women nor to prevent Walter from loving, what is it doing there? I see Book III not only as a reiteration and refinement of themes, and as a final test of the reader’s skills, but also as an exoneration of women and as an exposure of the institutions that perpetuate their oppression. Part of my assertion should be clear enough from the above discussion of the diatribes, but a look at other portions of Book III will substantiate my claims even further. Let us begin by looking at the material that prefaces the diatribes with pseudo-reasons for not loving. Most are religious and the others are about the ramifications of heterosexual arrangements on relations between men. The religious reasons for not loving are standard arguments against carnal indulgence of any kind and are plainly antiflesh. Andreas must undermine these arguments if he is to undermine misogynist discourse, since they were integrally related to its perpetuation.13 After the threat of hell, the first religious pseudo-reason for not loving (i.e., for avoiding women) that appears in Book III is actually three arguments. I will divide the passage according to the three arguments: [1] Cernas ergo, Gualteri, et acuto mentis disquiras ingenio, quanto sit praeferendus honore, qui coelesti rege contempto eiusque neglecto mandato pro mulierculae cuiusdam affectu antiqui hostis non veretur se vinculis alligare. (3.6) [1] So, Walter, you must observe and with your acute intelligence discover the preferential distinction to be conferred on the man who scorns the King of heaven and who ignores His command, not fearing to shackle himself with the bonds of the old enemy, through his passion for some unimportant woman.

The first part of this objection to loving is equivocal because, as the passage reads, the disobedient lover could in fact be seen as some kind of hero, risking even an encounter with the devil for his love. Further, Walter is told to pay close attention and use his intelligence to discover the praeferendum honorem of the man who would scorn the king of heaven and ignore his command. Why does Andreas use this construction if not to get the careful reader to think through the possible implications of this preferential distinction? By

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whom will he be preferred and distinguished and in what way? Will God distinguish him from the righteous and prefer him for hell? Or will he distinguish himself among lovers and those who prefer his bravery to submission? Or will he simply enjoy the personal integrity gained by living honestly and therefore be distinguished in his own eyes? Which, given what Andreas has indicated about hell elsewhere, does the reading subject prefer? Here is the second part of Andreas’s argument: [2] Nam, si voluisset Deus sine crimine actus fornicationis exerceri, sine causa praecepisset matrimonia celebrari, quum magis per illum modum quam per matrimonia Dei posset populus multiplicari. (3.6) [2] If God had sanctioned acts of fornication without sin, there would have been no point in His commanding marriages to be solemnized, for His people could have increased more by fornication than by marriage.

This second objection is as equivocal as the first because “multiplying” is the authoritative scriptural justification for marriage and sex cited by all of the Church fathers. As it is presented here, however, it is clear that fornication would in fact be a more effective mode of ensuring human reproduction. Scripture and the Fathers go down with the matrimonial ship, sunk by the would-be efficacy of rampant human desire. The way the second part of the argument reads, there is nothing inherently wrong with fornication. Refraining from it was a rule made up by the Almighty in order to support another of his rules—marriage. The Almighty sounds a bit like the noblewomen, the arbitrary unjust judges, called upon by lovers to impose order on their chaotic lives in Book II, and like the clergy. One rule leads to another, never really supporting the rules they are meant to support, just creating a need for yet another rule.14 In this case, the reason for the existence of marriage, at least in any religious or moral sense, is left in question. Here is the final part of the argument Andreas puts forward: [3] Cuiuslibet igitur hominis satis est admiranda stultitia, qui pro vilissimis Veneris [amplectendo] terrenis hereditatem amittit aeternam, quam ipse Rex coelestis cunctis hominibus proprio sanguine recuperavit amissam. Immo ad summan scimus verecundiam pertinere viventis et Dei omnipotentis iniuriam, si carnis illecebras et corporis voluptates secutus ad Tartareos iterum laqueos elabatur, ex quibus laqueis pater ipse coelestis semel eum unigeniti filii sui sanguinis effusione salvavit. (3.7) [3] So one must marvel at the stupidity of anyone who for the sake of the most tawdry earthly joys of Venus loses that eternal inheritance, which was

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lost and which the King of heaven himself regained by His blood for all men. Indeed, we realize that it is an occasion of the greatest shame for a living creature, and of injustice to almighty God, if a man follows the enticements of the flesh and the pleasures of the body, and falls back into the snares of hell from which the Father of heaven once saved him by shedding the blood of His only-begotten Son. (P.G. Walsh, 287–289)

The final part of Andreas’s “argument” here turns to the history of salvation as the religious reason for avoiding fornication, but Andreas’s version of it is not quite what should be expected. The bare-bones narrative of the religious history is that God created people in a blissful state, which was lost when they disobeyed a rule, but the blissful state can be regained at the resurrection through adhering to Christ, God incarnate, and claiming his salvific death. This history can be (and was) presented in whatever way might make it most useful to the argument at hand. Many of these presentations were and are elaborate, logical, and even poignant. But Andreas’s version is not. As he recounts or cites the story, he emphasizes the fact that every person is still in danger of losing that “eternal inheritance” which was supposedly already lost and regained. What is therefore most apparent in his representation of the master narrative is that paradise has not been regained, since people still have to be rescued from hell by striving against their own natures and since they are in constant danger of falling back into the pit. Nor is the beneficent, loving, humility of the incarnation emphasized in his presentation, as it could be—the texts of Bernard, Aelred, and Richard all stand as prime examples of this most likely of options—if Andreas were really interested in Walter’s conversion. Rather, in the last sentence, the Father and Son are quite separate and the Father is presented as exhibiting, if not the sort of bloodthirsty indifference Walsh’s translation reflects, at least a singularly detached legalism with regard to his own son, reminiscent of St. Paul (e.g., see Rom. 3.25 and throughout). The juridical model of the atonement had been around since Paul and continued in Andreas’s time to stare down at one from the tympana of cathedrals. Nevertheless, much more loving formulas also existed, as we have seen, and had been gaining acceptance throughout the twelfth century. These are as conspicuously absent from Andreas’s account of salvation history as God’s grace is from Andreas’s representations of life. Andreas’s presentations of widely held and loveless religious arguments against loving are not at all attractive. Not only are the religious arguments Andreas offers against loving in Book III unappealing, but they are usually also presented in ways that make them appear to be foolish, wrong, or unbelievable. After having suggested in 3.3–7 that fornication is a rule arbitrarily imposed by God, Andreas points out in lines 8–12 that heterosexual love damages one’s neighbor and

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ruins male friendship. Loving one’s neighbor as oneself is the second Christian commandment. But in these lines, “neighbors” are all males whose fundamental relations have to do with expedience and competition. “Love” is not so much wicked as impractical, causing jealousy between men competing for the same goods. Charity toward neighbors morphs into men needing to keep their practical relations with other men smooth. That this is impossible in any case, given the current system, becomes clear later in Book III. Andreas addresses fornication as a sin at 3.13, citing the doctrine that it stains both soul and body but spuriously arguing from this commonly held premise that fornication is therefore the worst of sins: “Ergo super omnibus est criminibus evitandum, unde non immerito evidenter divina clamat auctoritas criman nullum esse gravius fornicatione repertum” (“So rightly and clearly divine authority cries out that there is no sin more serious than fornication”). Anyone educated enough to read Andreas’s text would have known that fornication was traditionally among the least of mortal sins, gluttony (the infamous sin of Eve) being the only one of the seven that was commonly less so.15 The final effect of his overemphasis on the seriousness of fornication is to lessen its seriousness and to undermine the superficially fevered arguments supposedly intended to frighten would-be fornicators. In lines 14–17, the complaint against love is that it shackles the lover in the bonds of servitude, but the way those bonds are described undermines the complaint. In line 16 Andreas writes, “Nam etsi mundum universum lucreture amator, sui autem amoris detrimentum vel aliquod patiatur adversum, omnia taman prosumma reputaret inopia” (“Even if the lover gained the whole world but suffered the loss of his own love or some hindrance to it, he would consider all his gains as the worst poverty”). This clear allusion to the Gospels (“What will a man gain by winning the whole world at the cost of his true self ?” Matt. 16.26; Mark 8.36; Luke 9.25) and to Paul (Phil. 3.7–8) seems to indicate that the lover’s love is a heaven substitute or that heaven is a reified substitute for the lover’s love. The allusion could be read as implying that the lover is trading love for heaven, instead of finding heaven in love, if it were not for the line that follows: “Quis ergo tam fatuus repertur et amens qui conetur illud appetere, quod tam feroci servitute cogit hominem alienae se potestati subiicere et alterius in cunctis penitus arbitrio colligari?” (“Who, then, reveals himself such a fool and madman as to try to obtain what forces him with oppressive servitude to subject himself to another’s dominion and to be wholly tied to another’s will in all things?”). One answer to the question is Jesus, the man who subjected himself to God’s will and “justice.” The only other answer (besides the lover) is the religious devotee, who subjects himself to God, or more accurately to his ecclesiastical superiors, in a Christ-like manner.

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If, however, God really is a God of Love, the Fount of Life, then devoted submission might make some sense. If God is the vindictive judge who hates fleshly appetites and flings sinners into hell, as the type of theological leaning portrayed in Book III would suggest, that kind of subjugation makes a mockery of any kind of love, but especially of divine love, and gives the reader no reason (except fear based on fiction) to submit to “God’s will.” At this point, it becomes important to delineate another of Andreas’s rhetorical techniques, because it shows up unmistakably in lines 18–28, which follow those we have been discussing and because it will help explain why I cite passages out of sequence in the pages that follow. Briefly, lines 18–28 are about a few of the practical drawbacks of love, such as the poverty and bad reputation it brings—they are not the specifically religious reasons for not loving but are interwoven with them. The technique is a form of repetition, of interruption and return. For instance, Andreas returns to reputation again at line 56 after having discussed other reasons for not loving. Andreas’s rhetorical method of interruption and return does not seem to be an accident, nor is it conventional. Excursus, or claiming to stray from the issue at hand then “returning” to it, is not what Andreas does here. Murphy, Curtius, and Copeland all give examples or paradigms that do not fit this particular method of Andreas.16 The method is one he employs throughout the text, but it is most conveniently obvious in the last passage of diatribe. First he makes an unqualified assertion, then turns to a discussion of something else, usually only barely related, returns to the first issue with qualifications that either reverse the first statement or challenge it. In the final spate of antifemale maxims, the first and final usually opposing statements on an issue are brought increasingly close together so that his method becomes impossible to miss. The final outcome is that misogynist discourse is undermined as bearing any truth about women, as is the veracity of Andreas’s identity as a misogynist. Misogynist discourse in Book III serves two purposes: it adds to the smokescreen by creating additional confusion (to protect Andreas from naive and judgmental readers) while it makes Andreas’s methods and opinions unmistakable to the careful reader. Further, the method is used specifically for discussion of what might be called “men’s religion,” a religion of the empowered, the kind of religious system that the Master claims as legitimate but that Andreas challenges. Using this technique, Andreas returns to a version of the super eminent wickedness of fornication in lines 29–32 when he claims “there is no sinful transgression which does not result from love.” Its overall suggestion seems to be that love brings life and that life brings sin, further implying that if one hates love, one hates life. There is much “all/always” rhetoric in this section, with an especially silly passage on how incest is common because

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men cannot resist their sisters (3.31). The emphasis on incest is interesting. Since incest could not possibly be every man’s idea of a good time, as Andreas says it is—so much so as to be unavoidable—it makes the reader aware of his/her own desire contra the Master’s imputation. It is also a jibe against the elaborate rules defining incest that the Church instituted in the twelfth century to facilitate the needs (and wants) of the nobility in marriage and primogeniture.17 It also seems to reflect and poke fun at a very literal interpretation of the Church’s suggestion that all are brothers and sisters in Christ. It also continues to raise the question of just why it is that God invented sex if it is so damnable and so impossible to avoid. Andreas uses love as the root of evil as the premise for another argument against love that seems, once again, to turn into an argument against religion instead of against sexual love: Sed et alia ratio insidiari plurimum videtur amori. Quum enim ex amore mala cuncta sequantur, nullum penitus hominibus inde video procedere bonum, quia delectatio carnis, quae inde multa aviditate suscipitur, non est de genere boni, immo constat esse damnabile crimen, quae etiam in coniugatos ipsis vix cum veniali culpa sine crimine toleratur, propheta testante qui ait: “Ecce enim [et] in iniquitatibus conceptus sum, et in peccatis concepit me mater mea.” (3.33) But another reason seems to lie in ambush for love. Since all evils follow from love, I see no good whatsoever to proceed thence for people, since pleasure of the flesh is that from which much vehement desire is incurred, nor does it beget [anything from] among goods; on the contrary, it stands firm to be a damnable sin, since even between spouses themselves it is barely tolerated as a venial fault without sin, on account of the witnessing prophet who says: “Behold even I was conceived in iniquities, and in sins my mother conceived me.”

Andreas points out in this passage why a right-thinking person of his day is forced to reject love. It is because of how scripture is interpreted, because of the doctrine of the Fall (evil being perpetuated in generation), and because pleasure is not considered a good (even among technically licit pleasures). Even the one “good” supposedly derived from sexual intercourse—birth— becomes cause for mourning rather than joy, since it perpetuates evil. Andreas points out that life itself becomes evil when carnal pleasure is considered evil simply by tracing the argument based on Church doctrine to its logical conclusion. Andreas returns to the wickedness of sex again at 3.38, this time beginning with the false claim that, based on scripture, God is the caput and principium of castitatis and pudicitiae (“the head and principal of chastity and modesty/shame”) while the devil is the author of amoris and luxuriae. The

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problem with his suggestion, scriptura referente cognovimus (“we know the scriptural reference”), is that scripture in fact says nothing of the sort. The subtle uses of scriptural passages and references elsewhere in the text show that Andreas knows scripture too well to be mistaken on this point. What Andreas the Master suggests here in fact borders on dualist heresy.18 If an authoritative source for this kind of thinking can be found it is with Jerome, not with God in scripture.19 The Bible is far less interested in chastity than are the Fathers, all of whom were deeply influenced by Neoplatonism. Although Paul recommends chaste behavior in Christians in a number of contexts, his discussions do not condemn sex. It seems then, once again, that Andreas’s references to religious arguments serve to expose erroneous or questionable leanings in them rather than to condemn love. Andreas continues from the premise he has established, that God is responsible for chastity and the devil for sexual indulgence, to compare God and the devil (3.38–42). The devil is several times compared to an enemy waiting in ambush, insidiis, but the only ambush recently and previously named in this set of arguments was perpetrated upon love by religion (see the first line of 3.33 quoted above: “Sed et alia ratio insidiari plurimum vedetur amori” [“But another reason seems to lie in ambush for love”]). The devil is said to be a liar and to do the opposite of what he promises, but since Andreas has done both of these things in his text and has confessed to them as well, it is hard to give the devil the scorn supposedly due him. Finally, the devil will lead those who serve him to hell where he statutis poenis affligit (3.41; “afflicts them with the ordained punishments”). According to twelfth-century doctrine on “last things,” God is judge and the one who ordains those punishments—the devil only does his job as God’s executioner. Andreas’s grammar and vocabulary concur, suggesting the devil is an obedient servant to an irrational and cruel God. Andreas quickly follows up with a comment about God that cannot help but feel ironic after attributing hell to Him: “Deus autem non sic, sed pro bonis promissa atque suavibus optima nobis et suavissima solvit” (“God discharges His good and sweet promises by conferring on us what is sweetest and best”). Andreas continues equivocally: “quicunque illius se vult comitatui plena fide committere, nullius hostis patietur insidias sed ad optata loca securus et ad gloriam deducetur aeternam” (3.42; “Whoever wishes to entrust himself to God’s company with full faith will not experience the ambush of any enemy, but will be guided safely to the region he desires and to eternal glory”). Unfortunately, this passage echoes the passages in which the God of Love is compared to the God of Christianity, specifically when those gods let the “sailor” down: when he is caught in “powerful waves” and given no help (1.4.3–4) and when Andreas confesses the shipwreck of his (and Walter’s) body (2.6.22). Given also that Andreas has already shown

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how precarious the Christian’s position is, how God does not rescue the desirous from their desire, and that the next sentence is about wars (3.1.43), this protection from enemies does not sound particularly dependable. The wars are supposedly started by love, but in Andreas’s day they were mostly started by the nobility and the Church, each righteously contending for its due. Given the Crusades at that point, God’s protection from military enemies seems as unlikely as God’s protection from lust. Hearing from someone who protests that he cannot find any help for himself that there is “sure” help available sounds not only hollow but also like a suggestion from the worst of religious hypocrites. On the basis of these kinds of relations with God, Andreas then concludes, “Merito ergo quisque tenetur amorem luxuriaeque actus abiicere et corporis pudicitiam penitus amplexari” (3.42; “So every person is rightly obliged to renounce love and acts of sexual indulgence and wholly to embrace bodily chastity”). Once again, the apparent call to chastity seems more like a call to the reader’s interpretive skill and common sense. Andreas goes on to write that war is an unequivocal evil, as he describes it, which “multosque cogit commissum luere crimen, quos peccatum nec sui nec parentum potest [ulla] ratione contingere” (3.43; “compels many to atone for a wrong done, even though no sin can attach to them either through their own or their parents’ fault”). Amor is blamed for the wars, but its outcome—innocent suffering—is placed in terms of atonement for wrongs done by others. As such, it sounds as much like protest against lapsarian theology and the punitive retribution of hell as it does a protest against love. Even clearer from this passage, soldiers and innocent bystanders both pay for the greed of those powerful enough to make war. Amor is not the cause of war, greed and religion are. It seems then that in Book III, as much as in the rest of Andreas’s text, one kind of discourse becomes a vehicle for another kind, rather than merely an end in itself. Andreas’s pleas for Walter’s chastity, as much as his supposed instructions on love, serve as a kind of verbal screen upon which to hang and behind which to hide discourses that seem to be of far more interest and import. Andreas is no more interested in Walter’s chastity for religious reasons than he is in his own. Interlaced with all of the religious reasons for not loving, Andreas gives some practical, very worldly reasons for not loving. These reasons are not generally good in any moral sense and seem to jar strangely with the religious reasons, however spurious those are made to appear. Andreas’s first secular argument against loving is that it causes damage to one’s neighbor, “quem ex mandato divino quisquue tanquam se ipsum iubetur diligere” (3.8; “whom we are commanded by God to love as ourselves”). But, immo et sine legis iussu, “even without the command,” he argues, as if about to

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announce a better reason, we must love our neighbor inspecta utilitate, “with an eye for the use of it,” since “nemo enim modico etiam tempore proximorum posset necessitate carere” (3.8; “no one is able to dispense with need for neighbors, even for a little while”). The mundani necessities of bodily living seem to override divine injunction, even though they are in this case ultimately in agreement. Beyond this fairly irreverent suggestion, however, the argument indicates that people are in fact interdependent and that their physical needs should be honored. Curiously, Andreas here uses both amor and diligere for both the kind of relation that hurts neighbors as well as the kind that one is supposed to have with neighbors. This seems to suggest that the amor and caritas are not really very different—perhaps because they are both based on physical need and interdependence. What Andreas therefore recommends is not the avoidance of amor that he initially pretends to but a better look at what amor is and consideration of one’s actions toward establishing a social balance that will facilitate the needs of everyone. “Neighbor” had already been defined by Jesus as anyone with whom one happens to come into contact (cf. Luke 10.29–37, the story of the Good Samaritan). Just as the religious arguments presented evoke views that challenge or oppose them, so also the practical arguments evoke critiques of actual practices and suggest alternatives. The neighbors discussed in 3.8 are left genderless, while the human relations at issue in the passage directly following are between men, specifically “friends.” On account of “amor: unus ab altero divertitur amicus, et inimicitiae inter homines capitales insurgent” (“One friend is then turned away from another, and lethal feuds rise up between men”). The most outstanding quality of the male friendship supposedly held up for value in Book III is its fragility, the relation being perpetually at risk because of any misfortune—especially financial—and because of how men are expected to defend their womenfolk: “Nullus enim tanto dilectionis alicui vel amicitiae vinculo colligatur, si cognoverit ipsum prosuae uxoris vel filiae vel propinquae instanter esse amore sollicitum, quin statim contra ipsum incipiat odii livore moveri et indignationis venea concipere” (3.1.9; “No man is bound to another with such ties of love or friendship that on discovering his friend’s pressing preoccupation with love for his wife, daughter or kinswoman he refrains from developing malicious hatred and harboring poisonous anger against him”) (P.G. Walsh, 289). It is not just amicitia between men that is challenged by how men are expected to treat one another in reference to women but dilectio as well. Yet whatever a man’s relation to another man, the risks he runs by even being related to women is the same. If he follows the common social prescriptions that arise from women being men’s property, he will likely lose his male friends. No one wins in the sexual economy as it is arranged.

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Andreas writes, “Sed qui propter obsequia carnis honorem praetermisit amici, sibi tantum vivere creditur, et ideo tanquam humani generis inimicus ab omni videtur homine deserendus et ad instar bestiae venenosae fugiendus” (3.10; “He who through slavery to the flesh has disregarded the honor of a friend is considered to live for himself only, and must seemingly be shunned by all as an enemy of the human race and avoided as a venomous beast”). This type of man is considered to live for himself only and is only seemingly shunned by all as an enemy of the human race. But, as Andreas’s text has already depicted it, this particular breed of “venomous beast” seems to be the rule rather than the exception. A true male friend—though very useful and deeply desirable—is shown to be exceedingly rare. Andreas tries to prove the great value of male friendship by citing Cicero, who said friends are more necessary than fire or water; yet Andreas simultaneously recounts the impossibility of finding a true friend, one who will not desert a man when he is in need: “Multi tamen nomine vocantur amici qui nominis vacuantur effectu, quia ipsorum amicita temporis opportunitate resolvitur” (3.11; “But many with the name of friend do not posses what the term demands, because their friendship vanishes if the occasion requires it”). He then cites Ovid: “Quum fueris felix, multos numerabis amicos / Tempora quum fuerint nubila, solus eris” (Tristia I.9.5f.; “When fortune smiles, the friends you count are many; When clouds appear you find you haven’t any,” 3.12). He simply undoes any value male friendship could have in the current system. Lovers are supposedly also reprehensible because they are unable to engage in conversation with these barely possible male friends. Lovers bore their friends with incessant talk about the beloved and are unable to listen to anything said to them that is unrelated to their love (3.36–37). Not wanting to bore one’s (unreliable) friends is a patently silly reason to remain chaste. A bad reputation (unchastity) is the worldly disadvantage of loving that Andreas cites at 3.24–28. Chastity, he says, is so highly valued by society that it is able to cover a man’s excesses and crimes. “Et si aliquis in se ipso illam constat habere, multi per eam in homine excessus operiuntur, et varia quoque criminal tolerantur” (3.53–56; And if a man is known to possess it [chastity], this virtue cloaks many excesses, and people show indulgence to his various crimes). So a man can commit any number of sins and still be considered good. Yet, he adds a provision. Chastity is a great cover for other sins as long as it is accompanied by generosity, “nam sine largitate omnis in homine virtus mortua videtur et laudis infructuosa iacere . . . virtus nulla putatur” (3.56; “for without generosity every human virtue seems dead and lies fallow, unproductive of praise . . . regarded as nothing”). In other words, whatever your virtues or faults in the eyes of society, generosity is

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what makes your reputation “good.” Reputation can be bought. Since largess becomes the ultimate bottom-line requirement for friends and a good reputation, neither chastity nor reputation ends up feeling very valuable. Further, if male friendships dissolve when one is out of money and are kept only by beneficence, the goodness and use of male friendship in the heterosexual contract as Andreas presents it deconstructs itself. The problem of legitimacy is sandwiched between the above discussions of reputation and is cited as a reason for not loving (3.44–47). The discussion begins with the suggestion that love causes divorce and even murder (the husband murders the wife). The argument that marriage is holy and rectifies lust (unlike Andreas’s previous statement on the matter) is combined with the other consolation of marriage, the legitimate “fruit” it bears. Fornication on the other hand is supposed to be different: Sed et licet quandoque proles ex fornicatione sequatur, tamen patri nulla potest afferre solatia, quum ab eius etiam hereditate pellatur. Immo filii ex fornicatione progeniti parentis ignominia referente scriptura dicuntur. Sed nec ipsi Deo tales filii creduntur accepti, sicut evidenter videtur nos sacra scriptura docere, quae dicit: “Adulterorum filii abominabiles sunt Deo.” (3.46–47) Though a child sometimes results from fornication it can bring no consolations to the father, since it is even denied his inheritance, and in fact sons born of fornication are said in scripture to be a parent’s shame [Wisdom 3.16]. They are not considered acceptable sons even by God himself, as holy scripture makes clear seemingly with the words “The sons of adulterers are accursed before God” [Eccles. 41.1–10]. ( P.G. Walsh, 301)

The scriptural references are clear, but the final quotation Andreas offers is not exact. In fact, the book Ecclesiasticus says nothing about adulterers in the cited reference; rather, it says sons find their lives and deaths to be cursed if their fathers are sinners. What seems especially curious about the passages cited on this issue is that they were supposed to have been written by Solomon, and Solomon himself was a legitimate replacement for his deceased and illegitimate older brother, David’s first born with Bathsheba, the fruit of an adulterous union. David, famous also in Jesus’ lineage and “favored of God,” murdered Bathsheba’s husband in order to facilitate his desire for her (2 Sam. 11.2–17). The sons of adulterers are clearly not “accursed before God.” They are not even always accursed in noble and ecclesiastic circles. Given Andreas’s familiarity with scripture, and his promotion of subtle interpretation, I think it highly unlikely that his brutal denouncement of illegitimate sons is serious: the cultural expectation is overplayed so that it

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might be evaluated rather than blindly accepted. The story leading up to Solomon’s birth functions as a subtext here, and Andreas rehearses it a few lines further down. In Andreas’s day, illegitimate sons were not the only sons to lose their father’s inheritance; because of primogeniture, second sons and any sons but the first were denied an inheritance by law. As far as that particular “consolation” of marriage goes, then, all sons but the first might as well be illegitimate. Those other sons were usually left with the choice of entering military service, or joining the ranks of clergy.20 Perhaps Andreas was one of these. Solomon was the least legitimately worthy of all David’s sons. David had plenty of older sons by earlier wives gained in legitimate ways; but, being a favorite in God’s plan, Solomon inherited his father’s kingdom anyway, much to his brothers’ dismay. Unlike the offspring to which the Old Testament references above allude, he did “amount to something.” Given that Solomon’s story is a subtext in the passage of Andreas’s under consideration here, the reader is faced with an Abelardian comparison of conflicting authorities—not about sex, but about legitimate inheritance and the justice of God. But this is not Andreas’s only use of Solomon. After citing physical weakness and illness as results of sexual indulgence (3.57–61) Andreas claims that love also causes the “wise” to grow “more deranged” (3.62; “magis sapientes insanire dicuntur amore”) than those with less knowledge to guide them, specifically citing Solomon and David and the stories recounted above. This is especially odd since both were famed for their wisdom. And it is not their lust that Andreas condemns, but Solomon’s worship of false gods and David’s murder of Uriah. Finally, Andreas pulls an obvious reversal and concludes (3.64) that if men as great as these could not control their lust, with all their “instruction in wisdom” what “lover of women” could? Does “Walter” really stand a chance? It is in the wake of the sins of these great wise men that Andreas introduces his final argument—the ad feminam denunciations of women, to which I now return. Another of the sins of women upon which Andreas harps in the diatribe is envy, and it appears at 3.73: “Invida quoque mulier omnis generali regula invenitur” (“As a general rule, every woman is known to be envious”)— supposedly, here, of women’s beauty and anyone’s wealth. That women have beauty and men have money, is a misogynistic truism (often become reality) that continues to affect women today; but the example Andreas offers in support of this rule is about men’s envy of other men’s women. Andreas’s quotation at 3.74 of Ovid’s Ars amatoria 1.349–350 is exact: “Fertilior seges est alienis semper in agris, / vicinumque pecus grandius uber habet.” Walsh translates, “The crops are lusher in a neighbour’s field, / Their neighbour’s cattle heavier udders yield” (309). The context

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in the Ars is Ovid’s suggestion to the reader that for variety he should try adulterous relations—even the breasts of other men’s women look bigger. The envy of women’s beauty and men’s property is clearly a man’s envy in the reference from Ovid. If Andreas had not intended to incriminate men, rather than women, leaving his statements without reference to Ovid would have been much more effective. Connected to envy is the sin of slander. “Slander,” Andreas says, “is the outcome of envy and hate” (3.75). Since the misogynist discourse that Andreas parodies is an act of slander, is he suggesting that those who perpetrate and believe such discourse in fact envy women? He further incriminates those who would participate in misogynist discourse: “Cunctis enim per mundum constat hominibus et est quasi generalis regula omnibus firmum detractionis verba detractoris tantum laedere famam et eius opinionem gravare” (3.76; “Everyone in the world is aware of the general and constant rule that slander only damages the good name and harms the reputation of the slanderer”). What is there about women for men to envy? It could not be their beauty, the one thing they supposedly legitimately own, since Andreas has identified beauty as “only” an appearance in the introductory chapters to Book I, has “repudiated” that look for men, and as a cleric has claimed a feminine appearance for himself and his kind. What else could it be? Hildegard of Bingen, an older contemporary of Andreas’s, suggested that the devil’s reason for seducing Eve, rather than Adam, was that Satan was more envious of Eve’s ability to procreate than of Adam’s. Unlike any of the fathers’ arguments, all of which rest in one way or another upon the weaker nature of the woman, this one rests upon her power.21 Since women were mostly otherwise considered to be lacking or did in fact lack, and given that the discussion of the upper and lower half in Dialogue 8 shows the lower half to be godlike—the source of life and all good—it seems that Andreas may hint at the possibility of male envy of female procreativity as contributing to women’s subjugation. If women’s worth is seen as primarily procreative, as was the case, that exclusive social value may well the basis of male envy, at least as it is presented in Andreas’s book.22 As for hate, why should men hate women? This is a fundamental question underlying any misogynous behavior, not just slander. It is also a question that Andreas raises through his particular presentation of misogynist diatribe, and it is one with which the world still wrestles.23 Andreas raises the question in order that it be considered. He provides no answer except to challenge or undermine existing answers to that question. Eve was probably the most popular medieval answer to the question, “why hate women?” and so it is no surprise that Eve shows up in Book III.

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In many ways, the dialogues can be seen as “types” of the first seduction, especially since the men generally appear to be of the reptilian variety. Since the women of the dialogues do not succumb, as did Eve, Andreas’s text offers its own version of the reversal of the Fall (or salvation). Salvation comes, not in a return to innocence, as Bernard teaches, but in the acquisition of knowledge and discernment (of good and evil) and the ability not to be stupidly seduced, as well as the ability to follow one’s desire intelligently. In Andreas’s text, as in much of Christian culture generally, the scene in the Garden seems to be the basis for a lack of trust between the sexes. In the diatribe, Andreas asserts, “inconstans etiam mulier regulariter invenitur” (3.83; “Woman is also found fickle as a general rule”). “No woman” keeps a promise he says (3.84–85). But who has been more fickle than Andreas who cannot even quote his own rules with accuracy? “Sed mulieres omnes cuncta quae dicunt in cordis scimus duplicitate narrare, qui semper alia corde gerunt quam ore loquantur” (3.86; “We know that everything every woman says is spoken with a duplicitous heart, for they always bear in heart different things from what they speak with their mouths”). Andreas’s text, being a study in cloaked thoughts, even luxuriating in them, could therefore by its own equivocal definition be called “feminine.” But it is not just women and Andreas who are untrustworthy. Andreas asserts that women are covert with men because “mulier enim neminem confidit amicum et quemlibet credit penitus deceptorem” (3.1.86; “a woman trusts no man as friend, believing that all are utter deceivers”). Further, he has just given the reader good reasons to doubt the friendship of men, and throughout the dialogues he portrays male suitors as fundamentally dishonest. The enmity that was put between Eve and the serpent, and between their descendents (Gen. 3.15), is in Andreas’s text the same as that between women and men—suspicion of dishonesty. As heterosexual relations were constructed, the right of sexual approach being reserved for the superior in the hierarchy (the male), the diabolic dynamic was unavoidable. A standard example of fickle woman in misogynist discourse is that of Delilah, to whom Andreas next turns; but instead of focusing on Delilah, he focuses on Samson: “Samson enim, cuius cunctis satis probitas est manifesta, quia mulieri sua non novit celare secreta, ab ea in cordis duplicitate deceptus ab inimicorum legitur exercitu superaturs, et ab eisdem captus corporis virtute et occulorum simul est visione privatus” (3.88; “Samson’s proper behavior is known to everyone, but we read that because he could not conceal his inner thoughts from a woman he was beguiled by her deceitful heart, and so defeated by the army of his enemies, captured by them, and deprived of both bodily strength and eyesight”). Andreas’s retelling of the story is inaccurate, and it forces us to look for Samson’s

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“proper behavior.” First of all, Samson is not recorded in scripture as having anything close to probitas or proper behavior. The biblical narrative about Samson is in Judg. 16 and begins with his visit to a non-Jewish whore, making his action illicit on two accounts, at least by medieval Christian standards, and showing his behavior to be far from probitas. He then tears up the whore’s city gates for no apparent reason and takes them away to place upon one of his own hills (Judg. 1–3). A bit later he falls in love with Delilah, a Philistine (like the whore), who is paid 1,100 pieces of silver by the leading men of her people to find out the secret to Samson’s strength, so that they can prevent him from taking their city by force (Judg. 4–6). When she tries to discover his secret—and she is shockingly straightforward with him about what she wants to know—he lies to her twice, exposing her betrayal of him both times (Judg. 6–13). Yet the third time she inquires, against all reason, since he knows her motives, he tells her the truth. He is shorn of his hair while sleeping and is consequently caught, blinded, and fettered to the pillars of the temple in Gaza, the city whose gates he previously ripped off. His strength has been returning with the length of his hair while he has been in prison, however, so he ultimately wins the struggle for Israel by pulling down the pillars of the temple ( Judg. 13–31). Given that what we call “folktale motifs” would not have been part of Andreas’s interpretive repertoire, Samson can only appear to be a fool for telling the truth in the face of his likely betrayal. Delilah, on the other hand, did for the Philistines what Esther did for the Israelites. Delilah would have been considered a heroine by her own people. Since Esther was on God’s side, however, she became a paradigm of virtue, while Delilah, being an “alien,” became a paradigm of wickedness. The women’s actions are strikingly similar, but their consequent status to the Christian reader is opposite. Given Andreas’s propensity for deconstructing institutions through their genealogies, given his knowledge of scripture, and given his sensitivity to the uses of narrative fiction, it seems his misquoted reference to Samson and Delilah is intended to deconstruct the exegetical mechanisms used to vilify women or any “other.” Andreas’s treatment of Eve is similar. The Christian paradigm of wickedness, in his text, might be just as easily a heroine. He begins the buildup to his climactic discussion of her as follows: Inobedientiae quoque vitio mulier quaelibet inquinatur, quia nulla in orbe adeo sapiens et discreta femina vivit, si ei rei cuiusque interdicatur abusus, quae contra vetitum toto corporis non conetur adnisu et contra interdicta venire. Unde illud sapientis eloquium sine omnis exceptione locum sibi meruit in feminis invenire, scilicet: “Nitimur in vetitum cupimus semperque negatum.” (3.89) “Every woman is further polluted by the vice of disobedience.” There is no woman alive so circumspect that, if she is forbidden the improper use of

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something, she does not fight the prohibition with all the strength of her body, and set out to transgress it. This is why the well-known utterance of the sage has rightly been found to apply to women without any exception: “Forbidden fruit we strive to gain, and prize denied fain would attain.” (P.G. Walsh, 315)

Although the point of this passage is supposedly to incriminate women, the vice of disobedience is here being attributed to men as much as to women in a test of the reader’s recall. The last time Andreas quoted this authority was to describe an essential of male desire, as well as to connect that desire with effeminate appearances and young men in drag. The story that follows the above passage in Andreas’s text exculpates Eve and incriminates God as well as manipulative and murderous men: Sed et legitur quod vir quidam sapientissimus fuit exosam habens uxorem. Qui causa criminis evitandi eam nolens propria interimere manu, sciens mulierem libenter in vetita niti, vas pretiosissimum praeparavit et in eo vinum optimum et odoriferum cum veneo mixtum apposuit et ait uxor: “Uxor dulcissima, cave ne vasculum praesens attingas, nec de hoc liquore quomodolibet praelibare praesumas, quia res est venenosa et humanae contraria vitae.” Mulier vero vetita mariti contemnens, quum nondum procul abisset, de inhibito liquore praesumpsit et sic est penitus interempta veneno. Sed quid ista referimus quum maiora noverimus? Nonne etenim mulier Eva prima, quae manu quoque fuit formata divina, et inobedientieae vitio deperiit et gloriam immortalitatis amisit suaque culpa cunctos successores suos ad mortis deduxit interitum? Si vis ergo mulierem facere quidquam, ei praecipiendo contraria obtinebis. (3.1.90–91) We read too of a man of great wisdom who had a loathsome wife. He was unwilling to kill her with his own hand, because he did not want to commit a crime. But he knew that she took joy in seeking forbidden things, and so he got a most expensive vessel and put in it a fine, fragrant wine mixed with poison. Then he said to his wife: “My dearest wife, be sure not to touch this goblet, nor venture to sip a single drop of this liquid, for it is poisonous and lethal for humans to drink.” The woman spurned her husband’s prohibition; before he had gone any distance she took liberties with the forbidden drink, and the poison finished her off altogether. Yet why tell this story when we know more illustrious examples? Did not Eve, the first woman who was moreover fashioned by God’s hand, die and lose the glory of immortality by the sin of disobedience, by her guilt dragging all her posterity to mortal destruction? So if you want a woman to do anything, you will get your way by bidding her do the opposite. (P.G. Walsh, 315)

Why, indeed, tell this story and refer a more illustrious example if not to compare the two stories? On comparing them, God of the illustrious example

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is in the position of the wicked husband who sets up his wife’s self-murder as much through sensuous temptation as through prohibition. As for the woman’s disobedience, did this wife, like the women Andreas just wrote about, not trust her husband’s words? The man chose an especially good and fragrant wine with which to tempt her, just as the fruit of God’s tree was especially appealing to sense and appetite. The comparison of stories raises a question of God. What is the point of making an appetite and things perfect to attract it then proscribing the enjoyment of such if not to “tempt”? Reading the stories as parallels brings up the oddness of God putting a lethal tree in the garden if He never intended His people to transgress and die. Once again, Andreas and his contemporaries were not blessed with the knowledge and use of folklore motifs but had to read the story of Adam and Eve, at least on one level, very literally. Further, unlike the unfortunate wife who was the only one to suffer the consequences of her disobedience, Andreas particularly points out that Eve brought the whole human race into a state of sin and death with her. The justice of God seems quite lost in the story of the Fall. Comparing it to the fabliau-based story allows the bones of its narrative to be discerned and discussed without the adornment of theology or the fear of blasphemy. Not only are men incriminated by being the manipulators of women in Andreas’s final word of advice, but God, or at least God according to the Church, becomes highly suspect as the author of the Fall, both through his parallel with the murderous husband and through his “setup.” What loving father would put very tempting fruit in the middle of the garden, make it taboo and lethal, then allow the enemy in to work his worst? No loving one, only one of perverse cruelty. After the mock misogyny, Andreas finishes Book III with an exhortation to a chaste, devout life, which is equally mock. Resorting to a chaste devout life will not rescue the lover from love, since the devout life had itself incorporated the discourse of love, as we saw in Chapter III. There is a certain irony inherent in living a chaste life in order to be worthy of heavenly marriage and ecstasy. Further, how can sexual love be bad if it is an image of heaven and of our relationship to Christ, as tradition and Andreas’s final image suggest? These are issues that Andreas’s text forces the reader to confront. It is to the divine Bridegroom that Andreas particularly refers in the final sentence of his text. First, returning to his earlier complaint that the God of Love is unjust, Andreas invites a comparison: Non est ergo illius arbitrium eligendum, qui te cogit instanter illud toto mentis ingenio postulare, quod ipse idem tibi facit penitus denegari. Nam, si amor iustus vellet moderator haberi, id solum ad amandum cogeret amatores, quod statim vel post dignos labores eos mutua vice diligeret; quod quum non faciat, merito videtur eius militia recusanda. (3.113–114)

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The judgment/authority of such a one is therefore not to be chosen, of one who forces you to demand pressingly with all your mind’s resource that which he himself is causing to be utterly denied you. For if love wanted to be held a just ruler, he would compel lovers toward loving only that which would at once or after worthy toils reciprocate their love. Since he does not do this, it seems that his service should justly be rejected.

Once again, the two gods of love, Christian and pagan, can usually be read as stand-ins for one another in Andreas’s text. All of the disadvantages that Andreas cites for serving Love are identical with those for serving God. In this particular case, that which is being both demanded and denied by God is chastity. Andreas follows this passage with questions such as “so why do you stupidly seek to love?” and “what blessings do you seek to gain from love?” (3.115–116). Clearly, he does not expect to keep his reader or himself from desire because of antiflesh advice. Nevertheless, Andreas seems to want the reader to try to answer those questions. Part of the answer must be, given this context, that love is somehow heavenly. If one is smitten with Love’s arrow, striving against the ensuing inclinations of the flesh is a kind of hell. The service of the Christian God in this life, as Andreas’s text construes it, is a kind of hellish servitude; yet to reject serving the Christian God constitutes consignment to eternal hell. Either way, the servant’s choice of the good is enforced by a threat of evil—there really is not much choice as the traditions are constructed. One must love and suffer. Yet since Andreas has also exposed the hell story as a coercive fiction, Andreas’s final warning to Walter, to be prepared to meet the Bridegroom, seems to be more an ironic (pro)test than advice. As Andreas constructs it, the problem with choosing to reject the service of either the Christian God or the God of Love is that the gods are in charge—if one believes the stories. And if one believes them, one has no more choice in the end than does Andreas the Master. Can one choose not to believe the stories? Since Walter is compared to one of the wise or foolish virgins in the last sentences of the book (3.120–121), he is feminized, and it is the issue of choice—or lack of it—that Andreas’s text particularly associates with feminine positions. The reader/Walter is left to try to find his/her stance with respect to this story of the advent of the Bridegroom and its institutional use, that is, the reader is left to choose to choose. For the Christian of Andreas’s day there was almost no other position with respect to God than a feminine one. The soul was either the bride, who sought the Bridegroom and was invited to the eternal wedding party, or the foolish virgin, referenced in Andreas’s final lines, who did not and was not. Since the soul was always imagined as feminine and sinful, every Christian man, no matter how good, carried within him the image of a bad

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woman with whom he identified on some level. His own soul was his “shadow.” It should not be too surprising, therefore, that in Andreas’s text the discourse of misogyny is interwoven with the Christian discourse of morality and that the text makes readers aware of the connection. Since such discourses are presented in Andreas’s text as being rhetorical supports for existing systems of enfranchisement, to undermine or expose them is to undermine those systems. In Andreas’s text, the systems constructed to preserve the privileges of the enfranchised keep people of all kinds and inclinations separated or disconnected. The reciprocated affection for which the text repeatedly calls is impossible in a system built upon power over and condemnation. What Andreas’s text seems really to denounce, rather than women or desire, is living under judgment, whether the judge is “the mob” or a god. Since judgment must be based upon argument, evidence, and definition, which Andreas’s text has shown to be relative, subjective, arbitrary, and abused by the powerful, his final evocation of the Last Judgment seems far more likely to be a test of his reader’s skill than a piece of advice. Women’s Religion The woman of Dialogue 8 supplied the cleric with her own “doctrine”— the opinion not supported by the strength of the rationalioris—that love, or sex, is the source of life and of good. She rewrites Christianity in her terms, rather than in the Neoplatonic terms in which it was actually then written. She turns the hierarchy upside down by making the woman’s lower half more important for the good of the world than the upper half of either men or women, and “good” is for her connected to physical pleasure. Hers is a philosophy or worldview based on experience that reads beasts, appetites, and nature as good. She reads everything with great respect for the “lower parts.” With that as part of its foreground, this section explores a tension in Andreas’s text that could be termed “medieval Christianity versus women’s religion.” I will discuss what Andreas’s text has to say about the latter from the appropriate passages then compare my findings with what Andreas’s text says about Christianity. In Book III, Andreas writes, “O quam mirabile debet cunctis illud sapere bonum, quod viventibus poenam sine intermissione promittit et morientibus cruciatus minatur aeternos” (3.3.22; “How strange that all men should find good the taste of that which promises unremitting pain in this life, and threatens eternal torture after death”). The observation does not seem to me to be merely rhetorical, although it poses as such, and the verb debet (should, ought), unnecessary to the sense of the passage, incriminates the One who made human beings with an “evil” inner necessity.

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Book III is supposedly a condemnation of love, effecting its ends in part by condemning women. But in it Andreas indicates that to condemn women is to condemn nature: “Mulieris enim qualitatem sive statum districtius agitare nil foedius vel magis taediosum reperitur in orbe. Sed haec omittamus ad praesens, ne qualitercunque credamur in eis accusare naturam” (3.52–53; “There is nothing in the world more distasteful or tedious than an overdetailed analysis of the nature or condition of woman. But let us pass over this topic at this time so that we may avoid the reputation of somehow indicting nature because of women”). But condemning nature is precisely what his diatribe shows the Church to be doing when it engages in condemnations of women or rejections of the flesh and its pleasures. Just as the woman in Dialogue 8 provided the cleric with a revised philosophical world view, certain passages in Book III denigrate women on the basis that they have their own religion, or at least defy proper Catholicism. Besides the fact that a woman “contra vetitum toto corporis conetur” (3.3.89; “fights prohibitions with all the strength of her body”), women are famous for having led Solomon, the wisest of men, to worship false gods. This accusation, or a version of it, appears three times in Book III: at lines 32–33, 63–64, and 107–109. Each of these instances paradoxically asserts the strength of women’s “evil” religious practices over the “good” ones of men, as well as over the good men. Here is the first example: Idolorum etiam servitus manifestissime provenit ex amore, et hoc sapientissimi Salomonis demonstrat exemplum, qui mulierum amore ad deos non est veritus accedere alienos ac tanquam bestialis sacrificia mutis idolis ministrare. Sed si ei hoc potuit evenire quem Deus prae omnibus aliis sapientiae voluit maturitate ac moderatione gaudere, quae poterit nos defensare tuitio, qui eius comparatione rudes credimur et quasi sub alterius disciplina degimus? Nam, ubi viride cognoscis arescere ligneum, ibi aridum adustione consumitur. (3.31–32) Then again servitude to idols very manifestly arises from love, and this example of the very wise Solomon shows this, who for love of women was not afraid to approach foreign gods, and just as one of the bestial ones to offer sacrifice to dumb idols. If this could happen to one whom God willed above all others in to take pleasure in mature wisdom and moderation, what protection can defend us, who in comparison to him are considered raw/unformed, passing the time as if under the discipline of another? When you find the green wood is dry, then that dry wood is put on the fire to burn.

Once again, Andreas’s question is more than rhetorical. 1 Kings 11.1–10 tells how Solomon, this particularly wise man, was so fond of women that

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he had 700 wives and 300 concubines and did not fear to disobey God by marrying foreigners or by worshipping their gods. If lust had such power over one so wise, we comparatively rudes readers do not stand a chance against the temptations of the flesh. And God does nothing to help us. It seems likely, therefore, that his question about who we allow to form us raises as much doubt in God as in whatever else we may put our faith in. Andreas makes an addition to the condemnation of idolatry in the book of Kings. Offering sacrifice to specifically mute idols (“sacrificia mutis idolis ministrare”), as Andreas puts it in 3.31, is how Solomon’s actions are described elsewhere in the Old Testament (Deut. 4.28, 28.36, 28.64; 2 Kings 19.18; Isa. 37.19; Dan. 5.4, 5.23). His love of women and sex simply causes him to honor foreign gods—the Old Testament says nothing of Solomon’s “bestiality” for doing so. The worst that 1 Kings 11.1–10 says of the gods or the women is that they corrupted Solomon’s heart (“depravatum est cor eius per mulieres”). Since this did not happen until he was old, it is unlikely that his infidelity to God came directly from his lust. It would be more reasonable to see it as coming from the increased wisdom of age, a standard element in the pronunciations of the church fathers who saw the loss of lust and the increase of wisdom as the gifts of age.24 God was of course angry, but because of His love for Solomon’s father (David, who was dead), God waited until Solomon died before punishing Solomon’s descendents. God does not appear to be a particularly good or fair judge and ruler. The fidelity and judgment of God in these Old Testament stories is clearly based on favoritism, and His relationship with David is passionate.25 The dumbness of the idols and Solomon’s beastliness for worshipping them are qualities that in Andreas’s text (and perhaps generally in medieval intellectual culture) are especially associated with a Neoplatonic hierarchical worldview, wherein the L/logos and the S/spirit should reign over matter. But as has been shown with respect to a number of passages, Andreas’s text upsets the supremacy of spirit over matter and the denigration of the natural or physical world, turning beasts into paradigms for healthy behavior instead of sick or illicit behavior. Curiously, the kind of lover that appeals to the lady of Dialogue 8 is a mute, and her argument about him with the pudgy legged Cleric finally grants the mute admission into heaven, as well as to her favors, although he cannot ask for either.26 That Andreas calls the idols dumb and Solomon bestial, therefore, does not seem to constitute any kind of mark against them—quite the opposite. To make his points not only clearer but also to give them authority acceptable to a Christian reader, Andreas finishes this passage by alluding to Luke 23.31, Jesus’ prophecy of the future, comparing the end times to dry wood set aflame. Although challenges to the many levels of existing

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socioreligious institutions are abundant in Andreas’s text, it seems to evince as much a reverence for Jesus as for “nature” or “creation.” The scriptural allusion to the green wood and the fire, which Andreas uses to finish the passage about Solomon’s idolatry, particularly connects Jesus with women’s worship and the fruits of sex. The setting of the allusion is the trek to Calvary. Jesus is carrying the cross: Sequebatur autem illum multa turba populi et mulierum, quae plangebant et lamentabantur eum. Conversus autem ad illas Iesus, dixit: Filiae Ierusalem, nolite flere super me, sed super vos ipsas flete et super filios vestros. Quoniam ecce venient dies in quibus dicent: Beatae steriles, et ventres qui non genuerunt et ubera quae non lactaverunt. Tunc incipient dicere montibus: Cadite super nos, et collibus: Operite nos. Quia si in viridi ligno haec faciunt, in arido quid fiet? (Luke 23.27–31, Vulgate) Great numbers of people followed, many women among them, who mourned and lamented over him. Jesus turned to them and said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; no, weep for yourselves and your children. For the days are surely coming when they will say, ‘Happy are the barren, the wombs that never bore a child, the breasts that never fed one.’ Then they will start saying to the mountains, ‘Fall on us,’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us.’ For if these things are done when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?” (Luke 23.27–31, NEB)

When the branches were green, or the world was young, Jesus was crucified. When they are dry, the world is old, which Christians were always taking it to be, pushing the now into a perpetual state of end times or impending apocalypse. In these latter days, sterility will be considered a blessing (which it was, with the glorification of virginity) and women (if the understood “they” has a particular referent, “everyone” if it does not) will despair. This passage could be read as Andreas’s warning to clean up one’s life and prepare for the end of the world and the ensuing judgment. But it is about women and their loss, issues particularly highlighted throughout Andreas’s text. Further, this allusion is immediately followed in Andreas’s text by his passage, already discussed, which points out that the church’s teaching on sex suggests that no good (not even life) comes from sex. The teaching certainly does not seem to accord with Jesus’ feelings on the matter in the passage Andreas quotes. I shall return to this allusion when I explore my third example about women’s religion. Here is the second example, one about Solomon, recently visited for other purposes, which I present again to show the order of examples in the text so as to demonstrate how the theme develops with repetition: Sed et magis sapientes viri, postquam in amore delinquunt, luxuriae contemnere solent excessus, quam qui modica sunt scientia fulti. Quis enim Salomone

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maiori fuit sapientia plenus, qui tamen sine modo luxuriando peccavit et amore mulierum alienos deos non timuit adorare? Sed et quis maior aut sapientia clarior est David propheta repertus, qui tamen innumerabiles habuit concubinas, uxorem male concupivit Uriae et eam adulterando stupravit virumque ipsius tanquam perfidus homicida necavit? Quis ergo mulierum amator suam sciret cupidinem moderari, si in viris tanto sapientiae dogmate fultis pro mulierum amore sapientia suum non novit officium nec modum potuit luxuriando servare? (3.63–64) But wise and learned men [magicians], after they have erred in love, are accustomed to condemn departure from luxury, more than those supported by moderate knowledge. Who even was greater than Solomon, full of wisdom, who nevertheless sinned by way of luxury and for love was not afraid to worship the alien gods of women? And who is found to be a greater or more famous wise prophet than David, who nevertheless had countless concubines, coveted Uriah’s wife evilly, debauched her in adultery, and like a treacherous murderer killed her husband? Therefore, what lover of women could know how to control his desire, if these men supported by such great instruction in wisdom, for the love of women their wisdom did not know its office and was unable to preserve measure with respect to indulging?

In fact, there is no hope of escaping love. This equivocal passage is followed directly by the discourse against women. The juxtaposition implies that misogynist discourse is a kind of last ditch effort to talk oneself out of sexual desire, both by defamation of the object of desire and by projection of the desire onto the object. As for “the lover of women,” what I have suggested about the possible relations between Andreas and Walter suggests that “women” refers both to real or historical women and to metaphorical ones, or to those who occupy a feminine or disenfranchised position for whatever reason. People simply must love whom they love. The third example occurs near the end of the misogynist tirade. There is only a brief recapitulation after it, and it brings Solomon’s sins into the “present” of Andreas’s time: Est quoque ad omne malum femina prona. Quodcunque maius est in hoc saeculo nefas, illud omnis mulier sine timore pro levi occasione committit, et mulieris animus ad omne malum pro modica cuiusque suasione facile inclinatur. Praeterea nulla vivit in hoc femina mundo, non etiam imperatrix neque regina, quae totam vitam suam more gentilium non consumat auguriis et variis divinationum haruspiciis [et], dum vivit, mente credula non insistat, et quae assidue artis mathematica infinita maleficia non committat. Immo nullum opus mulier facit, in cuius principio dies non expectetur et hora, et cui ars malefica non praestet initium. Nam etiam non ducitur, nec defuncti obsequia celebrantur, nec semina trahuntur ad agrum, nec habitatio nova patietur ingressum, nec quidquam aliud datur suo initio, nisi muliebre prius

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procedat augurium, et nisi istud magicis feminarum praesagiis approbetur. Unde sapientissimus Salomon malitias cunctas et scelera mulieris agnoscens de ipsius vitiis et improbitate generali fuit sermone locutus. Ait enim “femina nulla bona.” Cur igitur quod est malum, Gualteri, tam avide quaeris amare? (3.107–109) The female sex is likewise disposed to every evil. Every woman fearlessly commits every major sin in the world on a slender pretext, and her mind readily bends to every evil under slight pressure from anyone. Again, there is no woman alive in the world, even an empress or a queen, who does not devote all her life to portents and different ways of divining the future, as pagans do; her gullible mind is obsessed by them, and she diligently practices the unnumbered wickednesses of astrology. In fact, there is no task that a woman does without awaiting at the outset the appropriate day and hour, and without inaugurating it with the baneful art. She does not even marry, or conduct the ritual for a death, or cart seed into a field, or permit entrance into a new home, or anything else to be started without first inaugurating it in the woman’s way, and having it approved by the magical prognostications of women. This is why Solomon in his great wisdom, knowing as he did all the wickednesses and crimes of woman, made a general pronouncement on her vices and depravity. His words are: “There is no good woman.” So, Walter, why do you seek so eagerly to love what is evil? (Walsh 319, 321)

“Solomon’s” words come from Ecclesiastes 7.25–29, where men fare only a very little better—only one in a thousand men is worthy of wisdom, and “this alone I have found, that God, when he made man, made him straightforward, but man invents endless subtleties of his own.” Not unexpectedly, this is a very mixed allusion. And, Andreas slaps his reader once again with his authoritative illogic: Solomon supposedly lost his wisdom to women and their false gods—is he then a proper authority to quote? Why does the church quote him? Who is wise? What makes a good religion? Prognostication is the evil practice of women’s religion being gainsaid in the above passage; yet its uses are domestic and practical. The “unnumbered wickednesses of astrology” is the kind of overstated condemnation the text has already undermined; this makes the condemnation of astrology seem far from serious. In fact, by the end of the twelfth century, the “inauguration” and “prognostication of women” at every event had been mostly replaced by legitimate Christian male equivalents. The nature of the deeds the nefarious women are claimed in 3.107–108 to perform with the help of astrology are all domestic or related to fertility in one way or another—in short, practical, and life-affirming paganism. Since the denunciation of divining the future is followed directly by the story of Jesus’ divination of the future, a comparison seems unavoidable. Both the Christian story and the pagan practice claim to divine the future; but since the Christian

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future—judgment then heaven or hell—emerges as a manipulative fiction in Andreas’s text, the Christian future loses its authority. Pagan augury seems, therefore, to be at very worst no worse. Andreas’s text may be at least as supportive of some kind of benign, practical paganism as it is of some kind of benign, practical Christianity. Certainly it exposes them as filling the same human needs. Walsh’s translation misses the fact that by the late twelfth century, maleficia (italicized in the Latin passage above) had become a term than connoted witchcraft.27 Walsh also cites classical as well as contemporary sources for this as a kind of “typical” denunciation; but this kind of citation serves to silence the questions raised by the text rather than to address them. In the latter part of the twelfth century, witchcraft was still more associated with paganism, pantheism, and fertility than it was with “devil worship.” Most present day readers, being post-Maleus maleficarum (1485) and post-Salem witch trials, associate “witchcraft” with devil worship. During the Middle Ages, pagan practices were either absorbed into Christianity or began to be treated as heresy because their power over people’s minds competed with that of the church. Strictly speaking, until the very late Middle Ages, one could be both a Christian and a “witch.” It was not until the fifteenth century, after the heretics were mostly under control (for the time being), that witches began to be persecuted by the church. Earlier, priests were even known to protect so-called witches from the fury of mobs who found them responsible for some misfortune.28 So-called witchcraft was based on ancient fertility rites, nature gods, earth spirits, gods of the hearth, and so on, all of which were practical and most of which were domestic. With the increasing influence of Christianity, these gods became aligned with the devil, in much the same way Solomon’s idols were. This practice was based on Jesus’ statement in the gospels that whoever was not with him was against him (Matt. 12.30). Everything that did not clearly belong to the standard sayings of the church therefore became “of the devil”—if it could not somehow be used by the church. Even Bernard resorted to this kind of argument against Abelard.29 But in Andreas’s text, Solomon’s idols only become emblems of Solomon’s loss of wisdom if we see them as affirming the ways of women and nature against a patriarchal, legalistic and punitive God. The comparison of the idols with the evil “prognostications” of women loses its condemnation and gains the prognostications legitimacy. So, if Solomon, his wisdom, and the church that promotes them are all to be mistrusted, what advice is, in fact, for the careful reader? It is found in Andreas’s “own words” at 3.23: “Si volueris, Gualteri, consiliis acquiescere meis, talia bona quidem aliis sumenda relinguas. Quas autem poenas

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vivendo patiuntur amantes, licet plurimum sit superius enarratum, tamen non mihi videtur quem quam posse plenius erudiri nisi fuerit magistra experientia eruditus” (“If you will fall in with my advice, Walter, leave such blessings [of hell] for others to enjoy. As for the pains which lovers suffer in this life, in spite of my long account earlier I do not think that anyone can obtain really full instruction unless he has been schooled by experience as his mistress”). Andreas’s advice to Walter, or to any reader, is to experience love and life and the consequences for him/herself. Let “Mistress Experience” (magistra experiential 3.23) not man-made rules, be your guide. Andreas’s advice is that of the Wife of Bath, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, and of the man of Dialogue 5 (1.6.212): experience is the greatest authority. In other words, follow your desire—try it. If there is an ideal or utopian vision in Andreas’s text, it not only includes, but also prefers what misogynist discourse would term women and their “ways.” Women’s fleshly religion and philosophy clearly oppose the ways of the enfranchised Christian male, as does Andreas’s text generally. That Andreas identifies himself with women in a number of ways in this text is a move that can function as a “type” of all the other social and theoretical transgression his text performs. This does not mean his transgressions, or his call for transgressions, remained or were meant to remain purely textual. His insights, if acted upon, would enfranchise “real” women as well as his own and the reader’s desire. Andreas seems to say that when we intellectually rid ourselves of personal experience as an authority, we disconnect from the real, the historical, and the politically puissant.30 His text incorporates but stands against the speculative philosophy and theology of his time, the life of the mind that makes the next world more important than this one (theology) or the “real” world not this one (Platonism). Andreas represents himself as being sexually disenfranchised in the same ways and for the same reasons women are generally disenfranchised. Like women, he is forced to wear the (“effeminate”) dress of his office, which, ironically, signifies the mark of a male institution upon him and his power/disempowerment. Andreas’s performances as women, as well as the arguments employed at every level of his polyphonic discourse, evince not only an awareness that gender identification is the social construction of the enfranchised, but also that, being a “man-made object,” gender and its privileges could conceivably be remade. Andreas argues that there is no such thing as nature, only culture, when it comes to human institutions, including that of gender. Yet he also shows a preference for things “of the earth”—desire, sex, bodies, animals, “the world.” Unlike most authors of his time, he does not place women in this earthy category any more than he does men, although he acknowledges the traditional association of

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women with matter. Andreas neither elevates nor degrades women. His male speakers put them in the category of “earthly,” as in “base,” only to advance Andreas’s critiques of the status quo, and the text suggests that women’s religion and philosophy fit into the category of the “earthly,” but not “base.” Through his construction of himself, and by many of the arguments of his speakers, he suggests that to prefer the earthly over the heavenly, as he does, is to prefer women’s ways over men’s ways. He does this in defiance of the Neoplatonic and Christian worldview of his day which identified the material with the secondary status of women, and which, while claiming to privilege the “real” over the false or artificial, was in fact deeply invested in the artificial.31 Andreas unhinges the oppositional construction of nature and art, primary and secondary, male and female, top and bottom: there need be no subordination. It may (or may not, at this point) be asked why Andreas did not make his project more explicit, why it is so covert that most readers have apparently missed it. I think it is explicit enough to have gotten Andreas into trouble with a few contemporary and later readers who cared enough to read closely. Such readers may have been behind the burning of the text. But besides Drouart La Vache, who is always cited as an authoritative reader, most readers who can really be documented as having missed the overriding issues of Andreas’s text have lived in the last century or so under the influence of nineteenth- and twentieth-century doctrines of courtly love. In 1277, Bishop Tempier’s men found Andreas’s text threatening enough, for its “vanitates et insania falsas” and for “quosdam manifestos et execrabiles errors,”32 to condemn it to the flames. Perhaps Tempier’s scholars read it to some degree as I do, though from an unsympathetic point of view. In order to bring my suggestions to yet a finer point, I quote Irigaray: The exchanges upon which patriarchal societies are based take place exclusively among men. Women, signs, commodities, and currency always pass from one man to another, if it were otherwise, we are told, the social order would fall back upon incestuous and exclusively endogamous ties that would paralyze all commerce. Thus the labor force and its products, including those of mother earth, are the object of transactions among men and men alone. This means that the very possibility of a sociocultural order requires homosexuality as its organizing principle. Heterosexuality is nothing but the assignment of economic roles: there are producer subjects and agents of exchange (male) on the one hand, productive earth and commodities (female) on the other. . . . In this culture the only sex, the only sexes, are those needed to keep relationships between men running smoothly. . . . Why are homosexuals ostracized, when society postulates homosexuality? Unless it is because the “incest” involved in homosexuality has to remain in the realm of pretense. . . . The

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“other” homosexual relations, masculine ones, are just as subversive, so they too are forbidden. Because they openly interpret the law according to which society operates, they threaten in fact to shift the horizon of that law. Besides, they challenge the nature, status, and “exogamic” necessity of the product of exchange. . . . Once the penis itself becomes merely a means to pleasure, pleasure among men, the phallus loses its power.33

Eight hundred years ago, Andreas’s text evinced a similar perception of social contracts. When Andreas’s text confesses the desire that creates it, it dismantles the existing social structures which “contain” and pro/prescribe feminine desire and women’s status. Peter Allen suggests that Andreas’s text teaches readers, not how to behave, but how to read. Allen calls Andreas’s text a “meta-literary” document. He says “the text is not to be used, but read,” “that secular literature is a textual issue, a verbal fantasy that is, in the end, neither true nor false,” and that it ought not to be “embraced” any more than ought “woman.”34 He is not the only eloquent, intelligent and erudite medievalist to make this sort of move. But it is exactly this intellectualizing, rarifying move against which I see Andreas’s text to stand. And I do not find it so easy to divorce art or interpretive technique from life or action. If it is possible to subvert texts and institutions rhetorically or theoretically, it is possible to conceive of alternative social systems. If it is possible to conceive of alternatives, is it not possible to either change exterior circumstances or one’s way of living in them so that the fruits of an alternate system might be enjoyed? Richard of St. Victor chose to obtain his desires by appropriating and “interiorizing” the whole world, which he then proceeded to use and enjoy in his own way. Andreas would rather change the institutions and have his readers change them than to fantasize himself into a conformist utopia. Although how his text was in fact intended or received must always remain in question, I would like to suggest that our conjectures are educated in proportion to our attention as readers of the text.

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NOTES

Introduction 1. The structure I follow is that supported by P.G. Walsh. See the introduction to his edition and translation of Andreas’s text. There also seems to be adequate support for this structure given the findings of Karnein and Roy, whose works I cite for discussion below. 2. Ibn Hazm, Dove’s Neckring. I have not seen much written on the relations between this work and Andreas’s in the past fifty years, and the subject could bear further study. The lack may be because the study of the relations between Arabic and European medieval texts remains relatively undeveloped in the West, compared to the study of the influence of classical texts. The relations of Andreas’s text to Ovid’s, e.g., are so commonly acknowledged that whole panels at literary conferences are devoted to them (e.g., MLA 1998). Peter Allen’s work with Andreas and Ovid is probably the most well known. See Allen’s The Art of Love. 3. All in this list but the Facetus will be discussed in some detail below. For a critical take on Andreas and the Facetus see Dronke, Latin and Vernacular Poets of the Middle Ages, 126–131. 4. Standard medieval jokes about a cleric being effeminate because of his clothing and the impropriety of his doing “manly” things (hunting, war, womanizing) recur throughout the text (especially in Dialogue 8) in such a way that the author appears to be poking fun at himself while seriously challenging gender scripts. Further discussion of this will appear in the appropriate places. 5. Don Monson, who has long argued for ironic interpretations, discusses some of the problems associated with ironic readings in his Andreas Capellanus, 122–166. 6. P.G. Walsh, 1. 7. Hissette, Enquête, 13–14. 8. Paris, 459–462. Paris claimed that Andreas’s text was “the code and law of courtly love,” “le code et la jusrisprudence” of “amour courtois,” a term Paris used to designate the erotics of the troubadours. Both attributions became institutionalized in medieval studies and, although now deeply challenged, tend to remain significant presuppositions in medievalist thinking. 9. Bloch, “ Mieux vaut,” 64–86. See especially pages 74–78, which, with a psychohistorical approach, suggest that Paris invented courtly love on the

238

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

NOTES

basis of his own experience. Curiously, however, even Bloch continues to read Andreas’s text in “Parisian” terms (cf. page 69). For a summary of works on courtly love before 1982, see P.G. Walsh’s introduction, 5–6. Dronke, “Andreas Capellanus,” 51–63. See especially the work of Alfred Karnein, who has written extensively about Andreas. Maria Brackett, amassing the sources, also argues well for this identity in her 1996 Harvard dissertation. See esp. her chapter I. Parry, 17. See also P.G. Walsh, 2–3. P.G. Walsh, 3. Coulton, 3:69, 73, 79, 90, 187; Du Cange, s.v. capellanus. The possibly “feminine” position of clerics will be explained in due course. Parry, introduction. P.G. Walsh, 244, fn. Karnein and others suggest he may have served at Marie’s court before moving to Philip’s. For a clear exposition of this theory in English, see chapter I of Brackett’s dissertation. P.G. Walsh, 12–14. For evidence both of twelfth-century women’s literacy in Latin, and of the scantiness of the evidence, see Georges Duby’s three volume study, Women of the Twelfth Century. See especially the introduction and first chapter of the first volume, “Eleanor” in Eleanor of Aquitaine and Six Others. See also the introduction to Constant J. Mews’s The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard (1999). See also Women as Scribes by Alison I. Beach. The Master at 2.1.11 reiterates what his clerical speaker has said about clerics in the eighth dialogue (1.6.492–499)—that their dress and comportment are feminine. Bourgain, 30. See especially John W. Baldwin’s The Government of Philip Augustus. Brackett, 8–51 and 78–111. It may be possible that dating of the text will be challenged again at some point. Monson brings it up again in his latest book (2005), but he does not undermine any of the supporting evidence; so, for the time being, 1185 (more or less) is generally accepted. For supporting evidence, see the introductions to P.G. Walsh’s edition and Parry’s translation, and see the works cited below on reception and transmission by Karnein and Roy, who assume the accuracy of this dating. Karnein, “La reception,” 325. Van Steenberghen, 326–327, 337, 339, 349, 422–426. See also Dales, The Intellectual Life. Hissette, “Etienne Tempier et les menaces,” 68–72. Bowden, 70. All of the propositions I list here are my translations from the Latin given in Hissette’s Enquête. Bianchi, 21. David Piché’s La Condemnation Parisienne de 1277 and Alain de Libera’s Penser au Moyen Âge build on the works of Steenberghen and Hissette and offer reasoning and evidence that support my point of view. For example, Libera’s Penser discusses Islamic thought, ideas about sex, and attitudes toward

NOTES

32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

239

astrology in relation to the condemnation, and Piché’s Condemnation argues that in 1277 “a theologically Christian moral crosses fire with a philosophically lay ethic” and “the confrontation of respective discourses of the censor and the condemned masters of arts takes on the form of a confrontation between the ‘unities of power’ whose ‘tactics’ of understanding are carried by epistemological aims and competing or divergent ethics” (9). Piché also offers the 219 (220) propositions in Latin, as well as his own translation of them. My suggestions here are sketchy, having been compiled from the work of Roy and Karnein, the only two scholars who have published much on the manuscript transmission of Andreas’s text. Since their purposes and presuppositions are different from mine, they do not cover material and information that I would find most useful. Again, more scholarship on, and more information about, manuscript transmission is much needed. Due to the accidents of history, of course, some of that information may never come to light. Roy, 48. Roy, 58. Both are also considered to have contributed intellectually to the Italian Renaissance. Karnein, “La réception,” 330–336, 338–346. Roy, 58. See also Karnein, “La réception,” 523–528. As for pastoral care, St. Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care is the prototype for nearly all later texts on the subject. None that I have read shows any similarity with Andreas’s text. Bowden, 69–70. Bowden’s work is clever and entertaining and surely much of what she sees existed for Andreas and his readers, as well as for us. Roy, 59. Roy, 69. For more on this see Karnein, “La réception,” 330–336, 338–346. Roy, 58. See, e.g., R. Howard Bloch’s “Medieval Misogyny.” See also Carolyne Larrington’s Women and Writing in Medieval Europe for a brief but accurate overview of the problems scholars face with respect to courtly love. See Rechtien and Fiedler’s “Contributions to Psychohistory: XIII,” 683–695; Rechtien and Fiedler, “Contributions to Psychohistory: XVI,” 1215–1220. Paolo Cherchi, Andreas and the Ambiguity of Courtly Love. All quotations thus far are from page ix. Bloch, “Medieval Misogyny.” Jaeger, 114. Moi, 14. See, e.g., 3.117–118 (P.G. Walsh, 323). Denomy, 49. See Van Steenberghen, 349. Dales also discusses this, both in The Intellectual Life and in Medieval Discussions of the Eternity of the World. Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition, 39. Monson, “Andreas Capellanus and the Problem of Irony,” 572. Monson, Andreas Capellanus. See pages 342–343 for one such set of comments. In this book Monson sees Andreas’s book as an attempt to

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NOTES

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

reconcile sexual love with Christian morality (in the first two books) followed by a rejection of love (Book III) on the grounds of their incompatibility. Again, especially for a work as steeped in scholasticism as Monson argues, these are not grounds for book burning. Nor is Monson’s final understanding of the text new. P.G. Walsh, 6. Robertson, 395. Cherniss, 224–225, 235. Donaldson, Speaking of Chaucer, 160. See also Bowden, 67–85. Paris, 523. Roy, 62–65. Bowden, 67–85. Allen, “Ars Amandi, Ars Legendi,” 194–195. See also Allen’s chapter on Andreas in The Art of Love. C. Brown, Contrary Things, 93. Classen, Verzweiflung und Hoffnung. Classen, “Epistemology at the Courts,” 359. Monson, Andreas Capellanus. Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender; J. Butler, Gender Trouble. See chapter 1 of Lee Patterson’s Negotiating the Past.

I Fish or Fowl (or, Is There a Genre in This Text?) 1. The reference is of course to Umberto Eco’s playful and interesting work of historical fiction, The Name of the Rose. The point is that Eco’s scholarship on medieval semiotics and his play with it in the story are well known and that Andreas’s text not only engages in semiotic play but also plays with what we would call semiotics. In the later Middle Ages semiotics would have been discussed in terms of nominalism versus realism. For example, see Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, 488. The controversy was arguably begun for Christianity in the twelfth century by Peter Abelard: see e.g., Gill, 15. This is not to say that Abelard was the first medieval author interested in semiotics. See also studies of Augustine in Marcia L. Colish’s The Mirror of Language and Eugene Vance’s Marvelous Signals. Finally, a more recent publication on the subject is the book edited by Keiper, Bode, and Utz, Nominalism and Literary Discourse. 2. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, 156–157. 3. For a fairly recent discussion of various applications of such rhetorical practices, including Andreas’s, see Catherine Brown’s Contrary Things. My approach to Andreas’s employment of bent language will be born out over the course of this book. 4. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, 195. 5. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, 196.

NOTES

241

6. “Alberic cites the Ciceronian objectives of the exordium, that is, to render the audience ‘attentive, docile, and well-disposed.’ . . . Significantly, though, Alberic uses the term ‘reader’ (lectorem) instead of ‘audience’ (auditores)— and declares his intention to discuss those ‘colors’ by which the reader is swayed. . . . [his] Colores autem eius dico quibus capitur benevolentia, docilitas, attentio . . . seems to be the first medieval use of a word-set which later became petrified into a formal part of a letter as captatio benevolentiae” (Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, 205–206). 7. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, 206. 8. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, 220–225. 9. Ward, 34–35. See also Irvine, 121–132 for earlier prototypes of accessus. 10. Although it may be the addition of a later manuscript, most scholars tend to think it is not. See, e.g., P.G. Walsh’s introduction. 11. Leclercq, Monks and Love in Twelfth Century France, 62. See also Rita Copeland’s Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation in the Middle Ages for detailed discussions of possible accessus. 12. See Du Cange s.v. tractatus and Copeland, 155–156. 13. In P.G. Walsh’s edition, counting only the Latin pages (and roughly), the Prologue takes a page, the chapters in Book I take one or two pages, and the dialogues take up about 84; whereas all of Book II takes only 25, and Book III only 18. Dialogue 8 takes 26 pages. 14. Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship, tr. Laker; Cicero, De amicitia, tr. Gould and Whitely. See P.G. Walsh’s introduction and my Chapter III for examples of their intertextuality. Andreas’s text is also bound with each of these texts in two different manuscripts. See Roy, 67–68. 15. See, e.g., a tenson by Maria de Ventadorn (b.c. 1165) to Gui d’Ussel, in Bogin, 98–101. 16. This may not be Andreas’s title, but he begins the chapter by indicating that this is what he intends to show. 17. Responsibility for this action depended, according to Abelard, on the intent behind it. See, e.g., Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, 160–162. One was not responsible for ideas or images that simply “popped” into one’s head: how one dealt with the intruder was the issue. Awareness of and control over mental actions is also one of the fundamentals of the contemplative life. See, e.g., Aelred of Rievaulx’s The Mirror of Charity, tr. Webb and Walker, 99, under “Love and Attraction.” 18. For a detailed discussion of this term as one of literary criticism, see Dällenbach, 1.1 and 2.4–5; they are the relevant parts for my reading of Andreas’s text. 19. Derrida, 212. 20. Derrida, 206. 21. See, e.g., Ruth Morse, Truth and Convention in the Middle Ages. 22. See Vern L. Bullough’s discussion, “The Sin against Nature and Homosexuality,” 55–71 in Sexual Practices and the Medieval Church. 23. Andreas himself quotes Ovid on this at 1.6.8 but not in support of standard proscriptions, as I shall detail in Chapter IV.

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NOTES

24. For one of a host of examples, see the innocent Soredamors change back and forth between pale and crimson before Alexander in Chrétien de Troyes’s “Cliges,” Arthurian Romances, tr. Comfort, 112. 25. Remedia amoris, l.749. See Ovid, Ovid II: The Art of Love and Other Poems, ed. and tr. Mosley. Andreas’s debt to Ovid’s Ars amatoria and Remedia amoris has been addressed by various critics. See, e.g., Monson, “Auctoritas and Intertextuality in Andreas Capellanus’ De amore.” See also Peter Allen, whose works I have cited. I will address the relationship of Ovid’s works to Andreas’s briefly myself in Chapter III. 26. Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender, 35. 27. On Bernard’s unprecedented success in gaining converts and his specifically rhetorical methods see Leclercq, Monks and Love in Twelfth Century France, especially chapter 2. On Bernard’s being called “god’s fisherman,” see Evans, 53. Bernard’s persuasive rhetoric also made him famous for preaching the second crusade and promoting the Knights Templar: see Evans, 32–36. 28. All the models given in treatises on rhetorical form employ it. I present more specific examples and discussion of the benevolentiae captatio in Chapters III and IV. 29. The most obvious of many possible examples lies in the romance of “Hell for Ladies” in Dialogue 5. This is a very detailed example that I explore in Chapter II. 30. Note, e.g., the arrangement of Love’s palace in Dialogue 5. The God of Love is seated where the altar would be in a church, with the “good” ladies on his right and the “bad” on his left—very like the popular tympana scenes of the last judgment straddling a main entrance to a twelfth-century church. Jesus uses the division of right and left for good and bad in his parables of final judgment (e.g., Matt. 25.33–34). 31. For an example of God as the summum bonum, see Aelred of Rievaulx’s The Mirror of Charity, tr. Webb and Walker, 1–4 and 34–37. 32. Again, compare Aelred of Rievaulx’s The Mirror of Charity, tr. Webb and Walker, 58–60. Augustine’s Confessions are perhaps better known. 33. See P.G. Walsh (40) who also finds sources in the fathers: Lombard, Sent., 4.36.4; and Hugh of St. Victor, Summa Sent., 7.15. 34. See, e.g., Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) on gynecology in Newman, Sister of Wisdom, 143–147. 35. 1.10.6 and following, which will be discussed more thoroughly in the appropriate place. 36. Abelard, Sic et non, ed. Boyer and McKeon. The Sic et non is a kind of catalogue of what the most revered authorities have to say on a given subject. Abelard’s “voice” rarely intrudes: he appears a compiler of discordant “truths,” not their author or promoter. Some historians argue that merely compiling the information in such a forthright way was enough to get him into trouble, however. For one account, see Betty Radice’s introduction to her translation, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, 37. Any synopsis of his life will proffer an opinion on this.

NOTES

243

II Repetition in Andreas’s Text 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

P.G. Walsh, 3. See, e.g., Haidu, 875–887, especially 883. Vickers, 98. Vickers, 93. Jucker, 47. Becker, 162–173. The passages quoted are from pages 164 and 166. Haidu, 876. Fischer, 9. Haidu, 883. All of the quoted material is from Conte, 197 except for the last sentence, which is from page 201. Metzidakis, 2. See, e.g., Sidney Painter’s well-known story of William Marshall, fourth son of a petty baron. Chodorow, 132–144 comments, “William’s Career demonstrates that there was mobility within the feudal ranks during the twelfth century” (133). See also Duby, William Marshall: the Flower of Chivalry. Nevertheless, like William, a man generally had to be at least a “petty” noble. See, e.g., Friedman, 157–175. P.G. Walsh, 222, n. 213. John Baldwin’s uncareful reading of Andreas’s chapter on the rape of peasants becomes “historical evidence” of precept and practice. Baldwin, The Language of Sex, 204. See, e.g., Aline Rousselle, who covers some of this history in her Porneia. See especially chapter 2 of her book, “Le corps dominé: la femme,” 37–63. Married women of course needed to remain chaste in order to assure the ownership of their husband’s property. Rousselle also shows, however, that even in unmarried women unchastity was initially treated as “hysteria,” a medical disorder, then eventually as a moral one. For a discussion of whores in the twelfth century, see Baldwin’s The Language of Sex, particularly the section entitled, “On the Margin: Prostitutes and Holy Matrons,” 78–85. See also Brundage, “Prostitution in the Medieval Canon Law,” pages 149–169 of his Sexual Practices. See Brackett, 40–46. Aelred of Rievaulx, The Mirror of Charity, tr. Connor, 64–65. Bernard of Clairvaux puts obedience and freedom in terms of love for and from God. God loves people and knows that He is the best thing for them. Therefore, even if a man cannot see this or does not feel anything for God, obedience will lead him back to his source and to his highest good. Knowing this, and beginning the trek, the person can begin to love God in return. For example, see Evans, 120–125. Aelred of Rievaulx’s The Mirror of Charity, tr. Connor, 13–14. Bernard’s influential sermons on the Song of Songs show how a literal/literary seduction is a metaphor for conversion. I will develop my comparison of these seductive discourses in Chapter III.

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22. See especially Eileen Gardiner’s Visions of Heaven and Hell before Dante. From among the many possibilities, Gardiner chooses “St. Peter’s Apocalypse,” “St. Paul’s Apocalypse,” “Three Visions from Gregory the Great,” “Furseus’ Vision,” “Drythelm’s Vision,” “Wetti’s Vision,” “St. Brendan’s Voyage,” “Charles the Fat’s Vision,” “St. Patrick’s Purgatory,” “Tundale’s Vision,” “The Monk of Evesham’s Vision,” and “Thurkill’s Vision.” 23. “Alia autem cederunt in terram bonam; et dabant fructum, aliud centesimum, aliud sexagesimum, aliud trigesimum. Qui habet aures audiendi, audiat” (Matt. 13.8, 23, Vulgate). “And some of the seed fell into good soil, where it bore fruit, yielding a hundredfold or, it might be, sixtyfold, or thirtyfold. If you have ears, then hear” (Matt. 13.8, 23, NEB). 24. Cicero, De amicitia, tr. Gould and Whitely. Cicero’s work begins with fathers introducing sons to their friends in order not only to be taught but also to become friends: all then become friends. 25. P.G. Walsh, 20. 26. Both can be found in PL in volumes 210 and 193 respectively. 27. Hugh of St. Victor, On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith, tr. Defferari. 28. See, the examples provided by Duby in Medieval Marriage. 29. “The husband must give the wife what is due to her, and the wife equally must give the husband his due. The wife cannot claim her body as her own; it is her husband’s. Equally, the husband cannot claim his body as his own; it is his wife’s. Do not deny yourselves to one another, except when you agree upon a temporary abstinence in order to devote yourselves to prayer” (1 Cor. 7.3–5, NEB). 30. Allen, “Ars Amandi, Ars Legendi,” 192. 31. Haidu, 875.

III On Clerical Intertexts and the Subversion of Seduction 1. See, e.g., one of several whole books on their enmities: Murray’s Abelard and St. Bernard. 2. Smalley, xvii. 3. Brown has also been discussed in the introduction to this book. See her chapter 3 on Abelard and her chapter 4 on Andreas in Contrary Things. 4. Monson, “Auctoritas and Intertextuality in Andreas Capellanus’ De amore,” 69–79. See also Mews, Abelard and His Legacy. On the relationships between his castration and this “fatherhood,” see several of the articles collected in Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, ed. Cohen and Wheeler. 5. Monson, “Auctoritas and Intertextuality in Andreas Capellanus’ De amore,” 77. 6. C. Brown, chapters 3 and 4. 7. For instance, see the introduction to Abelard, Sic et non, ed. Boyer and McKeon. Certainly Bernard of Clairvaux found Abelard’s work to be subversive. 8. This notion goes back, in the opinion of some, to Abelard himself, and it continues in one form or another to the present. David Knowles is perhaps the most well-known twentieth-century scholar in this camp. See Knowles,

NOTES

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

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125–126, where he argues that the Sic et non is probably not as subversive as some scholars would like to claim, since in Abelard’s trials and book burning the Sic et non was never used as evidence against him. C. Brown, 89–90. Mews, Abelard and Heloise. See also earlier works, such as Wilson and McLeod’s “Textual Strategies in the Abelard/Heloise Correspondence,” in Listening to Heloise, ed. Wheeler. Murray, 54. Murray, 129. See, e.g., Gabriel Compayré’s Abelard and the Origin and Early History of the Universities; or Haskins, 368–396. For further discussion and illumination of these issues, see Mews, Abelard and Heloise; and Listening to Heloise, ed. Wheeler. One of the most interesting discussions is perhaps found in Wheeler’s “Origenary Fantasies,” in Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, ed. Wheeler, 107–128. Evans, 53. Compare Andreas’s 1.3 on fishing for a lover. Evans (3) recounts that Bernard was made an abbot shortly after his novitiate. Evans (chapter 1) and Leclercq (chapter 2) both discuss the rapid spread of his order. Here are two instances of the high regard in which Bernard was held in the ecclesiastical community. While writing the De sacramentis, Hugh of St. Victor, already venerable in his own right, sought Bernard’s opinion on baptism (Evans, 141). When Hildegard of Bingen wanted the pope’s approval of her visionary writings, she corresponded first with Bernard asking his approval, assured that if he felt her work was from God, the pope would too. See Hildegard of Bingen’s Book of Divine Works with Letters and Songs, 271. For the Latin, see PL 197. 189–190. This formula is found throughout Bernard’s writings. For an expanded yet brief explanation of it, see, e.g., Evans, 120–130. See also Bernard of Clairvaux’s The Steps of Humility and Pride, ed. Conway and his On Loving God, tr. Anon. See Dionysius the Areopagite, The Divine Names and the Mystical Theology, tr. Rolt, 191–201. For a more recent translation and discussion, see Dionysius the Areopagite, Pseudo-Dionysius, tr. Luibheid. As an aside, Abelard’s suggestions that the relics at St. Denis could not possibly belong to the St. Dionysius of scripture and that the scriptural St. Denis differed from the mystical “Pseudo” Denis got him thrown out of the venerable cloister at St. Denis in Paris. He was, of course, vindicated later. Evans, 58–72. They were apparently the medieval equivalent of a best seller. See Emero Steigman’s “The Literary Genre of Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermones super cantica canticorum,” Simplicity and Ordinariness. See also Leclercq, Monks and Love in Twelfth Century France. Steigman, 68–93. Bernard even castigates himself for loving the art of rhetoric and eloquence. Steigman, 68–93.

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NOTES

24. Peter Allen applies Benveniste on these pronouns to Andreas’s text in some detail in his “Ars Amandi, Ars Legendi,” 187. 25. Smalley, chapter 1. Smalley cites only these three. 26. Evans, 48–49. 27. Smalley, 12–13. 28. Lewis, An Elementary Latin Dictionary. 29. Bernard of Clairvaux, The Steps of Humility and Pride, tr. Burch, 53; see also Du Cange. See also St. Paul on being the slave of God (Rom. 6.22). 30. Ibn Hazm, Dove’s Neckring. 31. See Parry’s introduction. 32. Ibn Hazm, Dove’s Neckring, lii, lxi, 120–121. 33. Ibn Hazm, Dove’s Neckring, xxv. This approach, from Arabic literature, is arguably the origin of midons in troubadour poetry. 34. Goldin, 72, no. 14. 35. The Lais of Marie de France, tr. Hanning and Ferrante, 60–61. 36. Les Lais de Marie de France, ed. Rychner, 42. 37. See esp. Leclercq’s second chapter, “New Recruitment—New Psychology,” in Monks and Love in Twelfth Century France. 38. Bernard preached the Crusades. 39. In this quotation, and in any of similar length that follow, I give all of the Latin passage. But for the shorter quotations appearing in my text, I give only the translation. I do this for the sake of brevity and clarity. 40. Although there are many textual instances of a maternal Christ suckling nuns (see Caroline Walker Bynum’s Jesus as Mother) most of these instances are not part of an exegesis on the erotic Song of Songs but descriptions of personal experiences of Christ’s nurturing, feminine qualities. See also Hildegard Elisabeth Keller’s My Secret Is Mine. 41. Benedictines and Cistercians wore white, scholars wore black. See Smalley, 83. 42. Smalley, 84. 43. Smalley, 84. 44. Smalley, 86. 45. Based on discussions between Grover Zinn and Bernard McGinn. 46. Smalley, 87–88. 47. Smalley, 95. 48. For instance, Bernard talked Master Henry Murdac out of exegetical studies and writing on the prophets (the Victorine practice) and into joining Clairvaux, claiming Murdac would not find the living Christ in the dry crusts of scripture—that sort of learning is for the Jews (Smalley, 173). 49. Zinn, introduction. 50. Zinn, 11. 51. Zinn, 144. 52. “This same man—whether in the body or out of it, I do not know, God knows—was caught up into paradise, and heard words so secret that human lips may not repeat them” (2 Cor. 12.4). 53. See Bernard of Clairvaux’s The Steps of Humility and Pride, tr. Conway. 54. Cf. Hugh on Eve (De sacramentis, 1.7.8–10), tr. Deferrari and Bernard on retracing the steps of the fall back to a state of innocence (this is the one of

NOTES

55.

56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62.

63. 64.

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the images underlying Bernard’s The Steps of Humility and Pride. See also Evans, 120–130). Ancrene Wisse contains a perfect example of how being a wife is shown to be far more unpleasant than being a nun. See also Nicholas Watson’s “ ‘With the Heat of the Hungry Heart,’ ” in Gendering the Master Narrative, ed. Erler and Kowaleski. This becomes especially clear in Richard of St. Victor’s Four Degrees of Violent Charity, found in Selected Writings on Contemplation, tr. Kirchberger. His description of this kind of ecstasy will be discussed in Chapter IV. See Bernard’s second sermon on the Song of Songs, and the introductions to many of St. Paul’s epistles. See, e.g., Bernard’s ninth sermon on the Song of Songs. See P.G. Walsh, 140, fn. 125. Chadwick, 123–124, 218–225. Of the 219 propositions condemned by Tempier, see propositions 150–169 and 16–26 on human and divine wills respectively. Hissette, Enquête, 230–263, 43–63. Hissette’s discussion, especially under article 157, shows that Andreas’s text may have been condemned, in part, for what it says about free will here, although Tempier’s team was more worried about the restrictions on will posed by Aristotelianism than by any extra freedom it may have allowed. Vulgate versions read de claritate in claritatem or de virtute in virtutem. Either way the claritate of the Vulgate is the claritudo bestowed by the woman in Andreas’s passage. Cf. Evans, 120–130. See Bernard’s exegesis on the compassion of breasts from the beginning Sermons 11 and 12 on the Song of Songs, and one of Paul’s exhortations for Christian compassion (Gal. 4: throughout, esp. 12–13) as well as his comment that he would like to see mutilated anyone who led his flock astray (Gal. 5.12).

IV Andreas and Walter 1. I am thinking here of readers familiar with the works of Michel Foucault, and with others who take up his line of thinking toward different ends (e.g., Teresa de Lauretis, Judith Butler, et al.). 2. Cf. 2.6.22 where the sex or gender of the beloved to which Andreas admits he is hopelessly bound is also conspicuously missing. 3. Rockinger, 61–88. 4. Rockinger, 64. 5. Brackett, 33. 6. Rockinger, 82. 7. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, 196. 8. PL 197.146–382. 9. Abelard, Historia calamitatum, ed. Monfrin. See also Ewald Könsgen, Epistolae Duorum Amantium; Constant J. Mews, The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard; and C. Stephen Jaeger, Enobling Love. 10. For examples see Caroline Walker Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast.

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11. Lewis, An Elementary Latin Dictionary. 12. PL 195. 578–583. 13. PL 195.664; John 15, Vulgate: “No one has greater love [dilectionem] than he who would lay down his life for his friends.” 14. Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship, tr. Laker, 12. 15. Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship, tr. Laker, 5–9 and 21. 16. See Douglass Roby’s introduction to Spiritual Friendship, tr. Laker. Even with Aelred’s efforts to render it blameless, Spiritual Friendship was more or less banned for centuries because of its dangerous possibilities. That Aelred fled to the monastery from homosexual relationships at court is debated but perhaps documented by his own pen, as can be seen in the example given above. For an example of a critical stance on this passage, see Boswell, 221–226. Brian Patrick McGuire, although not opposed to Boswell’s suggestion, believes there simply is not enough evidence to finally show whether Aelred’s confessed loss of virginity was with a female or a male. See McGuire, xi and 46–47. That Andreas’s text uses Aelred’s Spiritual Friendship as an intertext is commonly acknowledged. Again, Andreas’s text was even bound with Cicero’s De amicitia and Aelred’s De amicitia spirituali. See Roy, 67–68. 17. Burch, 58–59. The type of desexualizing of monastic writings that Burch does is typical of the field of patristics in the 1950s. 18. For further discussion of twelfth-century use of dilectio, see the section “Delectatio: The Physiology of Desire,” in Baldwin’s The Language of Sex, 127–137. 19. Parry, 27, fn. 20. Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary. 21. This became the Church’s standard argument, the authority for which probably came as much from its pagan Roman fathers (see the works of Boswell and Rousselle) as from Hebraic scripture and tradition (cf. Sodom and Gomorrah and St. Paul). 22. Lewis, An Elementary Latin Dictionary. 23. For the jokes, see any number of the fabliaux or carmina burana. For an ecclesiastical stance on the matter, Richard of St. Victor, e.g., discusses clerical comportment in several of his works, including De statu interiorus hominis, De eruditione hominis interioris, and Benjamin Minor. None of these suggest that a monk (or a cleric) should exhibit effeminate behavior or dress; in fact, they proscribe such behavior and mannerisms of any sort. 24. Mews, The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard, 81. 25. Mews, The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard, 80. 26. I have touched on this to some degree already in the various discussions comprising Chapter III. For readers interested in further examples, see especially Aelred’s works, such as The Mirror of Charity, tr. Connor; and Dialogue of the Soul, tr. Talbot. 27. Brackett, 35–51. 28. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 13. 29. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 14.

NOTES

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42.

43. 44.

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Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 15. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 16. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 33. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 129. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 52. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 57. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 158. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 73. Mews, The Lost Letters of Heloise and Abelard, introduction. P.G. Walsh, 240, n. 21. Monique Wittig’s “The Straight Mind” is, of course, one of the discussions that fueled the development of queer theory, whose application, however common now, has yet to influence the far reaches of every relevant discipline. The reliability of the go-between is notoriously questionable. See, for instance, Judgment XVI further on in Book II—the case of the treacherous go-between (2.7.37–40). Andreas here conflates the position of the “go-between,” internuntium, discussed in 2.6 with that of “confidant,” secretarium. See especially Gawain’s adventures in Chrétien de Troye’s Perceval (ll. 7371–8371) for similar meadows and a castle where the dead women in his family reside. For example, Exod. 15.6: “Thy right hand, O Lord, is majestic in strength: thy right hand, O Lord, shattered the enemy.” Compare 2.8.34–35 with 1 Kings 6 and 7. Solomon’s temple was 60 by 20 cubits instead of 600 by 200, and of carved wood, bronze, and inlaid stones instead of silver, gold, and precious stones, but the reference is unmistakable: Arthur’s love palace is richer than the “house” Solomon built for God.

V Andreas on Women 1. For a nutshell history of misogyny see the introduction to Alcuin Blamires, Woman Defamed and Woman Defended. For a discussion of foundational misogyny in Greek culture, see Robert Ernest Meagher’s Helen. 2. See, e.g., James, 180–189. He argues that misogyny is a part of most if not all cultures because sex is related to body fluids, especially to feces (because of genital proximity), which for humans is reminiscent of decaying flesh. The fear/hatred of women, he argues, is the fear of death. 3. See, e.g., Joan Smith, Misogynies. She argues that because of the “insistence and repetition” of misogynist discourse and attitudes, “misogyny is not the province of a few isolated individuals [not even just of men] but one of the concealed well-springs of our culture (187–188).” She argues that culturally prescribed masculinity and femininity enforce an unnatural separation between men and women, which maintains a power structure based on men’s superior physical strength, and that both men and women lose because of this structure. 4. See, e.g., Adam Jukes, Why Men Hate Women. Jukes argues in Freudian terms that in the process of sexual differentiation (essential to identity) dominance

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5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

is eroticized and becomes heterosexuality (the taboo against homosexuality reinforces this). He argues that sexual dimorphism and gender identity were constructed by men to account for a fundamental experience of impairment, incompletion, and loss and that men are not likely to give over their culturally constructed (and physical) power over women. Andreas’s construction of men’s relations to women in the dialogues reflects heterosexuality in a way that concords with Jukes’s theory. See Peter L. Allen and R. Howard Bloch, whose books and essays have been referenced throughout. There are two recent exceptions: Catherine Brown, whose book, Contrary Things, I have cited many times, and Albrecht Classen; see, e.g., his “Epistemology at the Courts,” 341–362. Bloch, Medieval Misogyny; Peter Allen, The Art of Love; Calabrese, 1–26. See Blamires, Woman Defamed and Woman Defended; Larrington’s Women and Writing in Medieval Europe. Monson, Andreas Capellanus, esp. 340–343. Blamires, 6. Jerome, The Principal Works of St. Jerome, tr. Fremantle. Latin text in PL 23.221–352. Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium, ed. and tr. James, rev. Brooke and Mynors. See Blamires, 2–3, for another discussion of the woman/matter/nature connection. This connection has been cited and used by all scholars on the subject and has only recently been challenged. See Newman, “Did Goddesses Empower Women?” in Gendering the Master Narrative, ed. Erler and Kowaleski, 135–155. For discussion of the Judgments in Book II, see my Chapter II. See Bernard of Clairvaux’s The Steps of Humility and Pride, tr. Conway. Bernard constructs an ascent from pride through the other sins to a “high” humility. See also Aelred of Rievaulx’s The Mirror of Charity, tr. Connor, which discusses the seriousness and effects of each of the sins, as well as their psychological ontology. Both authors support my claim. See their discussions of excursus. James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages; Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. Trask; and Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation in the Middle Ages. For example, see Duby, The Chivalrous Society, tr. Postan, 74, e.g. The Cathars were the famous dualist heretics of Andreas’s day, but since like most dualists they promoted even more purity than the Catholics, Andreas’s text cannot in any way be aligned with them. P.G. Walsh cites Ep., 22.11 (298, n. 27). That Jerome had a tendency to overstate his cases is nicely narrated by J.N.D. Kelley in Jerome. See especially pages 186–189. See, e.g., Duby, The Chivalrous Society, esp. chapters 7 and 12, tr. Postan. Newman, Sister of Wisdom, 113. Newman’s account of versions of the story of the Fall throughout this chapter is illuminating, and it supports much of what I have also argued about lapsarian theology. She shows how Hildegard

NOTES

22.

23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

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makes Eve an innocent victim, without making God look bad. Hugh of St. Victor acknowledges the devil’s envy of the woman, also, but not because of her particular powers; rather, he envies her dignified position (as well as Adam’s) in God’s universe (De sac., 1.7). As has been previously noted, Blamires suggests that misogynist discourse was based on men’s fear of women’s intelligence. They certainly appear, for the most part, to be intellectually superior to men in the dialogues, but Andreas does not seem to begrudge them their abilities. See Why Men Hate Women, by Adam Jukes, for a disturbing psychoanalytic approach to an answer. See Misogynies by Joan Smith, and Women’s Madness, by Jane M. Ussher, for evidence of the depth and tenacity of the problem. For example, see Origen, Clement of Alexandria, and Jerome. Peter Brown’s discussion of them in his The Body and Society is especially helpful. In 1 Sam. 13.14, David is a man “after God’s own heart.” In 2 Sam. 6.16, David dances in ecstasy before the ark of God. In 1 Kings 3.6, God “showed David great and constant love,” and so on. 1.6.507–511; cf. 1.6.422, 424. J.B. Russell, 65 and throughout chapter 4. Most of my assertions about witchcraft are based upon his study. Besides Russell’s work cited above, see also Shahar’s final section in The Fourth Estate, and a wacky, though useful work by Jules Michelet, Satanism and Witchcraft. Elizabeth M. Butler seems to think that the demonization of magic began much earlier. For an interesting discussion of Solomon’s relationship to magic throughout the centuries, see E.M. Butler, I:29–35 and 47–153. These sections also attest to men’s involvement with magic and to their being condemned for it whether they were truly involved or not. It is no surprise Andreas’s suggestions are so covert. As quoted by Gill, 9, Abelard writes, “I am working to find the truth, not to show arrogance: I do not dispute like a Sophist, I examine reason like a philosopher, and, what is important, I am in search of the salvation of my soul.” Bernard responds with a letter to the pope stating, “Pierre Abelard transgresses the limits imposed by our fathers; disputing and writing on our Faith, our Sacraments, our Sacred Trinity; at every point, he makes changes, he adds, he curtails as he likes. [I therefore propose] that by your hands and those of your other sons, God deliver its Church of his iniquitous lips and his deceiving tongue.” Teresa De Lauretis says much the same thing in Technologies of Gender, 23. See R. Howard Bloch’s article “Medieval Misogyny,” 19, for further discussion. P.G. Walsh, 14. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, tr. Porter,192–193. Allen, The Art of Love, 77, 76, 75, 67.

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