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3. Noble Servitium: Aspects of Labor Ideology in the Christian Middle Ages and Love’s Labor in the De amore of Andreas Capellanus
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Noble Servitium Aspects of Labor Ideology in the Christian Middle Ages and Love’s Labor in the De amore of Andreas Capellanus The Romans and Greeks despised men who served anyone, especially a woman. Now we find service raised to an art form. —Diane Ackerman Est manifestum quod vobis servire solum est cunctis in hac vita regnare . [I have the clear certainty that merely to serve you is to have universal kingship in this life.] —Andreas Capellanus I The last chapter demonstrated that Ovid co-opted the Roman discourse of labor and incorporated it subversively to present the works of love as activities of otium negotiosum (busy leisure), not otium otiosum (unproductive idleness). He did this on several levels, borrowing key words, motifs, figures, and even a didactic genre from Roman labor discourse. Comparing courtship to the labor of soldiers and to the labor of farmers, two species of work that were highly respected in Roman society , Ovid treated the activities associated with finding a lover, winning a lover, and keeping a lover. Also included in these labors were the sex act itself and the writing of love poetry. Ovid’s writings were highly influential during the Middle Ages, particularly during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, called the “aetas Ovidiana ” by Ludwig Traube.1 Because Ovid’s writings on love were often 1. Traube is cited in Ralph J. Hexter, Ovid and Medieval Schooling: Studies in Medieval School Commentaries on Ovid’s “Ars Amatoria,” “Epistulae ex Ponto,” and “Epistulae Heroidum” (Munich: Arbeo- used as school texts, they became key sources for many medieval writers. Ovid’s influence, for example, is thought to be particularly strong in the De amore, composed by Andreas Capellanus sometime during the middle of the 1180s.2 Although little is known about the life of Andreas, it is probable that he was a cleric and possible that he was attached either to the royal court of France or to the court of Champagne.3 De amore is written in three books, with the first two modeled roughly on the three books of the Ars amatoria and the third modeled on the Remedia amoris.4 While Andreas discusses the labors of winning and keeping a lover, he does very little with the labor of finding a lover. Instead, he spends time defining what love is. Not only does Andreas borrow the general idea of using the didactic genre (at least in part of the De amore) to discuss love, but he also employs key terms used by Ovid in the Ars, such as labor, opus, and militia amoris. In place of officium, however, he adds such terms as servitium (service) and obsequium (act of service). The De amore, however, is not a slavish imitation of the Ars and Remedia amoris, for it is thoroughly imbued with the clerical and aristocratic cultures and with the labor ideology inherent in the three estates social model. Like other works in this tradition, however, it does not incorporate the primary labor ideology of the Bible, that is, labor as a result of mankind’s sin. The complexity of Andreas’s treatise has spawned numerous debates over its self-contradictory treatments of love, its “real meaning,” and its relationship with the possible practice of “courtly love.”5 The essentially Noble Servitium Gesellschaft, 1986) 2; and in Peter L. Allen, The Art of Love: Amatory Fiction from Ovid to the “Romance of the Rose” (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992) 47. 2. P. G. Walsh, introduction, Andreas Capellanus on Love (London: Duckworth, 1982) 1–2. All quotations and English translations from the De amore will be taken from this edition and cited in the text by page number. Walsh writes that there is no established manuscript tradition for the title of this work but that De amore “reflects most accurately the scope of the treatise” (1). 3. Walsh 2–3. See also John Benton, “The Court of Champagne as a Literary Center,” Speculum 36 (1961): 578–82. 4. Walsh 12–13. On the one hand, Allen calls the split between Book 3 and the other two books “essentially and fundamentally Ovidian” (60–62). On the other hand, Michael Cherniss argues against any Ovidian influence on the De amore beyond the most general idea of making a mock didactic poem about love (“The Literary Comedy of Andreas Capellanus,” Modern Philology 72 [1975]: 227). Cherniss believes that twelfth-century literature played a much more important formative role than Ovid...