Dictators of Venus: Clerical Love Letters and Female Subjection in Troilus and Criseyde and the Rota Veneris

Introduction: Pandarus and the Pragmatics of Love

The conscious attention to the rhetoric of seduction in Troilus and Criseyde puts it in a tradition of erotodidactic literature going back at least as far as Ovid’s amatory poetry.¹ Medieval texts such as the Facetus, Andreas Capellanus’s De amore, and parts of the Roman de la rose teach an Ovidian rhetoric of seduction described as praeludia to physical acts of love.² Troilus and Criseyde can itself be described as an ars amandi, and was treated as such well into the sixteenth century.³ Unlike its predecessors, Troilus and Criseyde sets this erotodidactic tradition in a more serious fictional world by personifying that tradition in the voluble Pandarus against the backdrop of the Trojan War. As the point of entry for Ovidian erotics into the narrative, Pandarus operates “in a naturalistic world where speech is action,” fashioning the love-discourse between Troilus and Criseyde.⁴ He takes Troilus’s desire and Criseyde’s resistance and gives them an Ovidian script.⁵ The script also gives Pandarus the part of “go-between” played in the style of the Ovidian praeceptor amoris, a role that medieval clerics reformulated in terms of a third role, the master of rhetoric.⁶

Throughout the central and later Middle Ages, a master of rhetoric was a master of letter-writing. Letters are central to Troilus and Criseyde as they were to the literary, political, and cultural activity of the later Middle Ages.⁷ Pandarus exercises coercive power through his three congruent roles: Ovidian seduction-teacher; comic go-between; and dictator, the professional letter-writer and master of the ars dictaminis.⁸ Martin Camargo describes the extensive mediation performed by the scribe in the process of both composing and receiving letters:

Since the style and structure of medieval letters were highly conventional, a large part of their composition was … typically entrusted to a trained professional, who might but need not also serve as scribe. The “author” would first summarize what the letter should say; then the secretary or notary would reshape this oral précis so that the desired message was arranged in the standard sequence of clearly articulated parts … a similar process occurred when the letter reached its destination. The private reading of a written text was not the normal mode of reception for medieval letters. More typically, the letter would have been read in public, by the bearer if he were literate, or by some other mediator. And in many cases the bearer was expected to elaborate on the letter’s contents, to respond to questions about them, or to supplement them with confidential information delivered (orally) in private.⁹

Pandarus performs all of these mediating tasks as he generates and shapes communication between Troilus and Criseyde.¹⁰ As scribe and dictator, Pandarus uses his learned formulas to provide form, content, and motive to their letters. The roles played by Troilus and Criseyde are intersected by two authoritative clerical discourses: the art of love and the art of letter-writing.

These two protocols are also combined in the De amore of Andreas Capellanus (c. 1190), perhaps the most famous instance of medieval erotodidacticism. Andreas anticipates Pandarus in combining the Ovid-ian love tutor with the medieval social role of the clerical courtier. De amore’s scholastic prose is quite different from the urbane elegiacs of the Ars amatoria. Ovid’s use of the term praeceptor smacks of ironic self-aggrandizement, but Andreas plays his pedagogical role straight, declaring honesty of character (morum probitate) and eloquence central to winning love—two attributes, of course, that fall squarely within clerical domains of expertise.¹¹ The De amore also reflects clerical expertise in the ars dictaminis: its “didactic preface [is] modeled after a letter to a student,” and the individual speeches in its specimen dialogues are constructed in the dictaminal order.¹² Its model dialogues are grouped by social class in a way that reflects the organization of artes dictandi.¹³ It features two fully elaborated letters...