Andreas Capellanus on Love?: Desire, Seduction, and Subversion in a Twelfth-Century Latin Text

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This book changes the way the De amore of Andreas Capellanus has been used since Gaston Paris dubbed it the ‘code book of courtly love’ in 1883. Andreas employs courtly material, but for his own subversive purposes. Using Andreas’s text primarily to explain other texts, as has been scholarly practice, misleads us about them, about De amore, and about what is possible in the late twelfth century. Because of the exegetical tools Andreas uses and forces the reader to use, his text undermines sacred and secular institutions and the authorities that conscript desire, erotic or otherwise. Hence, it was the only book ‘on love’ burned in Templer’s inquisitorial fires.