When Satire Isn't Really Satire
A look at "De Amore," a late 12th century curiosity by Andreas Capellanus (and its scholarly reception)
Occasionally you’ll see an argument break out over whether such-and-such a work was satire or not. The most common one in recent times has been the film Starship Troopers, which director Paul Verhoeven strongly implied was some sort of commentary on fascism in a director’s commentary, though it’s possible that he was making post-hoc rationalizations to cover his ass. The argument will sporadically erupt, typically online, with one camp agreeing with Verhoeven’s defense (these are typically leftists who like the film), another agreeing that it is such a satire yet fails in its goal (typically right-wingers who don’t like it), and another saying it shouldn’t be thought of as a satire at all, or at least not a clear-cut one. Typically, I’ll be in the third camp, as I don’t think “satire” is always such a straightforward matter. My thinking on this subject has largely been formed by my experiences in reading certain works of medieval literature that straddle the line between satire, sincerity, and fanciful free-wheeling irony with seemingly no regard for how a reader ought to take it. One such work, which will be the topic of this discussion, is Andreas Capellanus’s De Amore, which has been translated into English as The Art of Courtly Love (trans. John Jay Parry), and that’s the translation I’ll use.
I. Summary of De Amore
De Amore is a roughly 185-page book all about love, and it’s probably the best example of what I consider a medieval text written for no other purpose than aimless, directionless creative play. It was written by a cleric (Capellanus means “chaplain”) and directed to his protégé, a mysterious, possibly fictional gentleman by the name of “Walter,” whom no literary historian has been able to identify. I’ll sum up the book here briefly. It consists of a short preface and then three books: Introduction to the Treatise of Love (about 120 pages), How Love May Be Retained (about 30 pages), and Rejection of Love (about 30 pages).
Book One begins with a definition of love and some discussion about its nature, and then it moves into a section consisting of eight lengthy dialogues in which a man of either the middle class, lower nobility, or upper nobility attempts to woo a woman belonging to various classes including the peasantry. In each of these dialogues, the man uses a formal mode of argumentation — highly citational and inflected with classical rhetoric — to try and explain to the woman that she ought to go with him, and then the women uses an equally formal mode of argumentation to either reject his advances or essentially say “I’ll think about it.” The dialogues take up by far the most amount of space in the first book. Then Andreas gives some more discussion on love, namely about whom one should try to love, with some commentary on the demerits of wooing nuns, clergymen, peasants, and prostitutes. The book ends.
Book Two discusses how love can be maintained once it has been reached, and it features some real-world examples in which various noble women, such as Countess Marie de Champagne and Eleanor of Aquitaine, comment on various predicaments concerning love and decide who was right and wrong in each dispute. It ends with a retelling of a chivalric Arthurian romance, and the author reveals a list of rules concerning love that the King of Love presented to a brave knight at the end of the tale.
Book Three then begins, and it’s an all-out rejection of love, filled to the brim with aggressive attacks on women, the futility of marriage, the corrupting effects of Venus, and so on. Much of it consists of stories and comments written previously in the Bible, patristic literature, and classical sources like e.g. St. Jerome and Theophrastus. Then the text ends.
The whole work has caused a great deal of consternation among literary scholars, since no one really has any clue why it was made or what it was attempting to say. No one really knows Andreas’s intent. The book makes quite a few statements that, taken straightforwardly, completely go against the teachings of the church, but it also makes various statements about love that seem fairly straightforward and even reasonable. For instance, here’s the list of rules concerning love revealed at the end of Book II:
I. Marriage is no real excuse for not loving. II. He who is not jealous cannot love. III. No one can be bound by a double love. IV. It is well known that love is always increasing or decreasing. V. That which a lover takes against the will of his beloved has no relish. VI. Boys do not love until they arrive at the age of maturity. VII. When one lover dies, a widowhood of two years is required of the survivor. VIII. No one should be deprived of love without the very best of reasons. IX. No one can love unless he is impelled by the persuasion of love. X. Love is always a stranger in the home of avarice. XI. It is not proper to love any woman whom one would be ashamed to seek to marry. XII. A true lover does not desire to embrace in love anyone except his beloved. XIII. When made public love rarely endures. XIV. The easy attainment of love makes it of little value; difficulty of attainment makes it prized. XV. Every lover regularly turns pale in the presence of his beloved. XVI. When a lover suddenly catches sight of his beloved his heart palpitates. XVII. A new love puts to flight an old one. XVIII. Good character alone makes any man worthy of love. XIX. If love diminishes, it quickly fails and rarely revives. XX. A man in love is always apprehensive. XXI. Real jealousy always increases the feeling of love. XXII. Jealousy, and therefore love, are increased when one suspects his beloved. XXIII. He whom the thought of love vexes eats and sleeps very little. XXIV. Every act of a lover ends in the thought of his beloved. XXV. A true lover considers nothing good except what he thinks will please his beloved. XXVI. Love can deny nothing to love. XXVII. A lover can never have enough of the solaces of his beloved. XXVIII. A slight presumption causes a lover to suspect his beloved. XXIX. A man who is vexed by too much passion usually does not love. XXX. A true lover is constantly and without intermission possessed by the thought of his beloved. XXXI. Nothing forbids one woman being loved by two men or one man by two women.
Now, if you’re wondering, “Did I read that first rule correctly?” the answer is, yes, you did. It is saying that adultery is no big deal, it’s perfectly acceptable. And the last rule is saying basically the same thing. There are also curious statements like rule 13, “When made public, love rarely endures.” This sentence makes more sense when you read previous statements on love in the text, particularly the claim from one of the dialogues that a husband and wife cannot truly love each other. But this list also gives a hint as to the central problem with this book, namely that its spiciest claims are often presented unassumingly alongside a whole bunch of others that are fairly sound and logical. After all, who would argue against the idea that boys cannot love until they reach the age of maturity? It’s basic science. And many of the other statements are fairly bland observations about what being infatuated with someone is like. The entire book is like this: there are blasphemous statements, reasonable ones, boring ones, silly ones, and the character of the thing is thus quite hard to pin down.
Here’s another example of what I’m saying. If you consider the dialogues and how they each end in the would-be lover getting rejected by the woman, you might think, “Well, that seems downright satirical. After all, it’s a how-to manual on finding love, and each dialogue ends in the guy getting rejected. Surely that’s funny.” But then you read the thing, and you quickly find that whatever potential for humor there may have been is mostly absent from its actual content. Here’s an excerpt, chosen at random, featuring an argument that a male lover uses, and then the woman’s response:
The man says: “I wonder whether you think and feel what your tongue seems to pronounce, for what you say cannot properly be proved by the examples you give; in every one of them it is human skill that we commend, and men prefer natural qualities to accidents. But character in a plebeian woman arises only from the innate qualities of her soul and the admirable ordering of her mind, and so we may consider it natural. Therefore your illustrations cannot support your contention, and I believe we should properly say that good character deserves more praise in a plebeian than in a noblewoman. We value more highly a pheasant captured by a sparrow hawk than one taken by a falcon, and a man who pays more than he owes deserves greater credit than one who offers only what he is bound to. Again we think more of the skill of an artisan who is able to make a good boat out of poor timbers than of that of a man who builds it of very good, well-fitted ones. And is it not considered better and more laudable if a man acquires some admirable craft all by himself than if he learns it from some other craftsman? That, at any rate, is certainly true if you would but admit it. It is quite proper, then, that in this case we should give the decision against the woman who is of noble descent.”
The woman says: “It seems to me there is a good deal of doubt of your good sense, since you are so clearly trying to speak against yourself. Although you are of noble blood and well-born, you are openly trying to belittle nobility and to plead against your own rights. And you make such a reasonable defense of your position that I am inclined to believe we should consider that good character deserves more credit in a plebeian than in a noblewoman, because no one has any doubt that the rarer any good thing is the more dearly is it prized.”
Now, this is just a brief excerpt of a section that goes on and on and on for dozens of pages, and not once will you find any variety in the manner in which each person expresses himself or herself. There is precisely one voice in this section, and it is the voice of scholastic disputation. The idea of this section is pretty funny as a concept. The execution of it, however, is altogether a different story. It’s like when Andy Kaufman decided he would bring a sleeping bag to a comedy club for his performance, curl into it, and nap for the entire act. The idea is great, but the only humor during its actual event can come from observing the unrest of the audience, and here, we can only imagine Andreas’s audience. It thus becomes easy to understand why people did not perceive any humor or satiric intent in this book from the end of the romantic period up to the 1950s.
As for the section in which Andreas says that women are actually bad and you should opt for celibacy instead, you can have a taste of it here:
Because of their avarice all women are thieves, and we say they carry purses. You cannot find a woman of such lofty station or blessed with such honor or wealth that an offer of money will not break down her virtue, and there is no man, no matter how disgraceful and low-born he is, who cannot seduce her if he has great wealth. This is so because no woman ever has enough money—just as no drunkard ever thinks he has had enough to drink. Even if the whole earth and sea were turned to gold, they could hardly satisfy the avarice of a woman. Furthermore, not only is every woman by nature a miser, but she is also envious and a slanderer of other women, greedy, a slave to her belly, inconstant, fickle in her speech, disobedient and impatient of restraint, spotted with the sin of pride and desirous of vainglory, a liar, a drunkard, a babbler, no keeper of secrets, too much given to wantonness, prone to every evil, and never loving any man in her heart.
Much like with the last excerpt, the whole section housing this quotation goes on like that for pages on end. This is the part that critics first assumed was thrown in merely to appease church orthodoxy, but then later decided was entirely sincere and a great display of Andreas’s earnestness in his Catholic faith. It’s probably the only part I find genuinely funny because of how over-the-top it is. Truly, Andreas Capellanus was a MGTOW before the MGTOWs arrived on the scene.
II. Scholarly Invention of Courtly Love
At its core, De Amore is a medieval reworking of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, itself a fairly jocular, tongue-in-cheek pick-up-artistry treatise from 2 AD. But De Amore also combines other genres as well, including missive, formal debate, chivalric romance, rule book, and, at the end, misogynist invective. It also was written during the time of the Occitan troubadours, who wrote plenty of poetry about something called fin’amour, which they present with an almost mystical sense of elevation. We also find find love presented in quasi-religious terms in Andreas’s work, such as during a part in one of the dialogues in which a would-be lover recounts a highly allegorical and frankly bizarre story about the God of Love, depicted as a knight, marching in some procession with all kinds of women behind him. There have been scholarly speculations that these medieval ideas about love found in the troubadour poets, which were quite distinct from those of Ovid’s time, were themselves borrowed from somewhere else. Various speculations have been made about possible influence from Islamic mysticism, as seen in such works as Ibn Hazm’s The Ring of the Dove. And one controversial thesis from Denis de Rougement, a Christian who was friendly with Georges Bataille (and with whose ideas his own are surprisingly compatible), argued that the troubadour poets were secretly Cathars and their ideas on love had roots in Gnostic heresy, and thus all modern western portrayals of romantic love have their roots in Gnosticism.
Now, before these theories on Islamic or Gnostic influence showed up, there was a motivated desire during the 19th century to find traces of paganism within the medieval period – this was undoubtedly an effect of the romantic worldview. And eventually one romanticism-inflected scholar named Gaston Paris coined the term “courtly love” to describe this medieval view on passionate romance. In his view, courtly love was a vast, far-reaching sensibility that pervaded the entire European Middle Ages from the 12th century until its end, and thus he lumped the troubadours together with, among others, Andreas Capellanus, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, the Arthurian tales of Tristan as well as Lancelot, Guillaume de Machaut’s various works, and one particularly notorious 13th century text called The Romance of the Rose, which was started by Guillaume de Lorris and finished by Jean de Meun. Because Paris so willingly lumped everything amorous together into one big conceptual smorgasbord, scholars made a number of weird assumptions for quite some time, like for instance that the troubadours’ love poetry was all addressed to married women in hopes of them cheating on their husbands. This was simply untrue; only a small minority of it was, at least from what anyone could tell.
There were also bizarre offshoot theories that emerged, like Luigi Valli’s claim that Dante and the other poets of the Ars Nova, like Guido Cavalcanti, were members of a secret pagan initiatory organization called the Fedeli d’Amore, or Faithful to Love, and Dante’s poems to Beatrice were a statement of this distinctly non-Christian Neoplatonic religiosity. The perennial traditionalists René Guénon and Julius Evola were both quite convinced by this idea, and Evola was particularly entranced by Valli’s notion that Dante was a crypto-Ghibelline, which was part of the theory. Quite a few scholars rejected this idea, including Erich Auerbach. Ezra Pound specifically dismissed it in his Guide to Kulchur, probably because he was aware of its popularity in fascist Italy.
Anyway, the scholarly consensus following Gaston Paris’s work was that there was indeed this thing he called “courtly love,” and that Andreas’s De Amore was the most well-expressed, systematic expression of its precepts. C.S. Lewis bought this idea, and even as he acknowledged that Ovid’s work was jocular and ironic, he saw no elements of satire or irony in Andreas. As far as the last book was concerned, in which Andreas completely disavows both love and women altogether and encourages “Walter” to feel the same, pretty much everyone felt this was merely a formal gesture to placate the church authorities.
III. The Discovery of Irony
It wasn’t until the 1950s that this changed, when an American medievalist called Durant Waite Robertson, Jr. (or just D.W. Robertson) showed up to challenge not only the idea that Andreas was serious but that there was ever anything resembling “courtly love” at all in the first place. His methodology was basically to take passages from the text that disagreed entirely with what the major church fathers had to say, like Saint Augustine or the Venerable Bede, and then use the discrepancy to show that Andreas must have been joking. After all, he was a member of the clergy, and he must have known that his statements were in direct violation of specific passages from either the Bible or perhaps some great church authority, which were saying the opposite. The correspondences were far too clear, and far too jarring — he couldn’t have been engaging in such blatant heresy!
One such example is in how Andreas describes the lover falling for his beloved: it perfectly mimics the manner in which Saint Augustine describes a sinner falling into sin. First, there’s the concupiscence of the flesh, then the mental contemplation of the act, and then finally, the consent of the will. And, just to move all doubt, Robertson shows that irony was recognized as an acceptable part of rhetoric, as it had been discussed as far back as Isidore of Seville, who defined it as saying the opposite of what the literal statement means. Ultimately, once Andreas is finished with his 150 pages of nonstop irony, the last thirty pages of renunciation are like a cold slap of reality to the face, and the orthodox truth presents its harsh but wise insights about how women are terrible.
Whether or not this argument seems convincing, it certainly persuaded a bunch of scholars to reevaluate their earlier stances. One critic who initially resisted his method of analysis, E.T. Donaldson, finally conceded, “I think Andreas meant to be funny: my sense of humour is insufficiently robust for me to agree with Robertson […] that he succeeded.” D.W. Robertson became a juggernaut of medieval literary criticism in large part due to his commitment to historicism and his innovations in textual analysis. No one before him was analyzing secular vernacular literature using the same allegorical method of exegesis that monks would use for the Bible, and no one denies today that this practice greatly enhances our understanding of many medieval poems and literary works, like for instance the Middle English Pearl or William Langland’s Piers Plowman, and certainly Chaucer, about whom Robertson wrote an entire book. Robertson made it clear that if you want to understand the intellectual background of the Middle Ages, you must go to the Patrologia Latina, and medieval literature stems from that same background.
But he also had some major flaws as an historian. The problem with Robertson was that he assumed that all medieval literature was made with some moral purpose in mind and that the correct way to read any text was by finding its moral message, no matter how tenuous it might seem to a lay reader. This approach would include even the most frivolous works one can imagine, like the old French fabliaux, which are often just dirty jokes about cuckoldry. Of course, anyone could argue “yes, the point of this funny poem is to say that cuckoldry is actually bad even though it’s presented a source of amusement here,” but you’d be starved trying to find some hidden reference to Albertus Magnus or John Chrysostom or whoever in these poems.
But to Robertson, it didn’t really matter. The medieval period was a unified period characterized by quiet, understated hierarchies, and if you truly want to understand a work of literature, you must always show that it agrees with Christian Orthodoxy. Every single time. And how. Because of this foundational premise, Robertson assumed that all the Occitan troubadour poems were just as secretly critical of fin’amour as any conservative monk would be. When you think about it, though, this really makes no sense at all. After all, why would a bunch of poets try and satirize an attitude about love when it doesn’t even exist in the first place? What then would they be satirizing? The far more reasonable assumption would be that fin’amour was indeed a real thing and these poets really felt it. For this reason, most Occitan troubadour poetry scholars feel that Robertson ultimately did their particular field more harm than good.
Robertson’s work in fact left a mixed legacy in all areas it touched. When it came to literature produced within royal courts, elevated poetry for an educated audience, or literature by members of the clergy, professors taking his approach could really get somewhere and come away with some fascinating insights. But they could also reach some very weak conclusions, particularly when the time would come for them to explain “the moral of the story.” A perfect example is John V. Fleming’s book The Roman de la Rose: A Study in Allegory and Iconography (1969). Though it has plenty of great points, its major claim about the book’s moral purpose — namely, that the allegorical personification of Reason is the poem’s true moral hero — was convincingly contested by a few astute critics. Their objections were so strong that they prompted Fleming to write a sequel called Reason and the Lover (1984), in which he tried again to convince everyone of his first book’s argument. It was considered even less persuasive than the previous attempt. I remember reading one review of it by a European professor who criticized Robertson for having a distinctly American effect on medieval literary criticism, one in which ambiguity and paradox always poses serious discomfort, inviting the critic to resolve it somehow, no matter how ill-conceived the conclusion might be.
Anyways, Robertson’s approach to Andreas’s De Amore fails on similar lines. He was right to say that the book is shot through with irony, but his argument about its moral purpose is unpersuasive. The book just feels too genuinely earnest in various places to register as a satire. It does, however, have plenty of playful and amusing moments. For instance, in the seventh dialogue between a would-be lover and a woman, she tells him to write a letter to the Countess Marie de Champagne to ask her if she thinks that love can exist between husband and wife, and also if jealousy is helpful or detrimental to love. He does, and Andreas interrupts the dialogue with his letter to the Countess. Then, in the very same dialogue, Andreas presents the Countess’s response, in which she agrees with the man about everything. At this point, the whole internal logic of the dialogue has broken down, since it would have taken her days to reply, yet the dialogue includes it anyway. Then, later on in the eighth dialogue, another would-be lover from high nobility talks to a woman of the same class, and he says,
I admit that I have a wife who is beautiful enough, and I do indeed feel such affection for her as a husband can. But since I know that there can be no love between husband and wife (the decision of the Countess of Champagne supports this statement), and that there can be nothing good done in this life unless it grows out of love, I am naturally compelled to seek for love outside the bonds of wedlock.
He is, of course, referring to the decision made in the previous dialogue delivered to another man through a private letter. And although the editor of the translation I’m using inserted some parentheses, none would have been there in the original Latin, so it’s to be taken as part of the dialogue rather than an insertion resting outside of it. The text has, at this point, become self-referential in such a way that distorts its own internal logic. It has broken the fourth wall.
This kind of playfulness reappears during the later section in Book II in which the author mentions various disputes between lovers and then defers to the authority of some noblewoman. Here’s an example:
Another case comes up in this way: A certain knight, although he was lacking in every manly virtue so that every woman rejected him as a lover, so impudently demanded a certain lady’s love that she granted him the hope of it. By her teaching she developed in this lover so good a character that she gave him a kiss and an embrace and through her he was brought to the highest excellence of conduct and was praised for all the good qualities. After he had been established as a pattern of virtue and a model of good manners, another lady strongly invited him to love her and the knight became wholly obedient to her will, forgetting, so it seems, the gift of the first lady. On this point we have the response of the Countess of Flanders.
And then it gives some lengthy “quotation” from Isabelle of Vermandois, the Countess of Flanders, who sides with the first woman. One could argue, following a Robertsonian interpretation, that the whole point of this section is to mock the frivolity and sin of these noble women who decide on these disputes, or something like that (Isabelle did indeed have an affair). But the women’s reasoning is often too sensible to come across as satire, nor do they always promote sin, such as in this case, which argues that the knight should remain faithful to just one woman. Even if the point is to make the noblewomen all appear vapid and base in some other way, I’d say we’re still too far into the weeds of love’s internal logic for this to come across as a real condemnation.
The most damning bit of evidence against Robertson’s view is the simple fact that De Amore was itself condemned about a century after it was written by Bishop Étienne Tempier in 1277. Tempier and a team of sixteen scholars put together a written statement attacking 219 various strands of Aristotelianism, occultism, and other paganism-tinged teachings that he thought should result in immediate excommunication, but he only gave two specific examples of books that should be banned: one was a book on geomancy, and the other was De Amore. Whatever clear-cut irony D.W. Robertson perceived in the book, it sure wasn’t apprehended by Tempier.
But the condemnation doesn’t really show that the book was a work of clear heresy, either. Probably the most convincing explanation for why this condemnation happened comes from a defender of Robertson, a German critic named Alfred Karnein, who argued that the book was being translated into the vernacular by that time, and thus it was mainly its vernacular reception that concerned church officials. In other words, the book could be accepted as a playful little lark that intellectual elites could enjoy on their own time, but not if it were being read by the laity, who would almost certainly take whatever sinful doctrine they might want out of it. That theory certainly would explain why it took a whole hundred years for anyone to get a bee in their bonnet about it. Still, though, Karnein’s explanation doesn’t fully substantiate the idea that the De Amore is a hard-edged work of satire with an obvious moral intent that would’ve immediately registered to clerics and clergymen throughout the entire text. Subtle, yes; ironic, sure. But satirical?
IV. The Possibility of Irony as Aimless Play
The truth is, Robertson’s criticism is the kind of argument you’d expect an author to make about his own work if he needed to cover his ass. That is, he presents the kind of defense any author would make if he were on trial and had to show his commitment to the orthodox position, whatever it might be (though in his case it was always medieval Catholicism). Thus, the criticism has value on those terms, since it answers the question, “What if Andreas Capellanus had been condemned by a bishop within his lifetime?” But if no such condemnation happened, and thus Andreas had no opportunity to make such claims about how his work interacts with the Bible and orthodox doctrine, then all of these textual correspondences and critical observations can only stand as potentialities. And although I might be a little naive here, I fail to see why it would be necessary for another cleric from the 12th century to read the book and catch every reference to Saint Augustine in order to recognize that the book functions more as an amusing experiment in rhetoric than anything to be taken seriously.
As a matter of fact, we can think of D.W. Robertson’s approach as the diametric opposite of Leo Strauss’s. Strauss and his followers would take a guy writing something within the bounds of orthodoxy, and then they’d find these little contradictions in the text, or abstruse references, or whatever else to show that the author is actually making an “esoteric” statement that conveys something heretical or otherwise opposed to the intellectual/political milieu to which he belongs. Then, some preternaturally qualified genius who stands against history (if not time itself!) could come along and be able to perceive its esoteric message hidden between the lines.
Robertson, by contrast, takes an author who seems to be saying something heretical, and then uses a similar approach to show that he’s actually 100% within the boundaries of orthodoxy. What we might call the “esoteric” statement is actually the one that intellectual elites would supposedly grasp with no trouble at all, but not the laity, who might really become corrupted by the stuff. And while Straussian and Robertsonian approaches both involve finding the true meaning of a text in opposite directions, they each still rely on irony as a means of explaining their position. Strauss has plenty of problems that we can discuss some other time, but the main problem I’ve always had with Robertson is that his approach never answers why some goody-two-shoes would want to indulge so heavily in taboo subject matter in the first place, even if only to show how it’s bad. From Robertson, we get the template for a great script an author would use to defend himself, but no real sense of what prompted such a descent into the maelstrom of sin in the first place.
Clearly, there must have been something at least interesting enough about these blasphemous and sinful activities to prompt otherwise devout people to wade through them at such lengths, like the entire throng of poets from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries all over Europe, from Rutebeuf to Juan Ruiz. And if they were indeed mesmerized by the prospect of sin to such a degree, then does it really matter if they were ultimately orthodox and preaching an orthodox message? They were already into Stage Two of Saint Augustine’s three steps toward sin! I suspect this line of thinking is why Camille Paglia in Sexual Personae (1990) was so dismissive of medieval literary scholarship at the time, even though she didn’t try to argue specifically for any latent paganism in the texts and mostly skips right to the Renaissance with her analysis of Spenser’s Faerie Queene. She was responding to the paradigm that Robertson largely established, and which remained remained dominant for quite some time (and alas, I’m afraid the scholarly paradigm that has replaced Robertsonian historicism is just too depressing to mention. Utterly pitiful).
And yet I’ll repeat it once again: for all his faults, Robertson was correct to identify that irony pervades the Middle Ages, particularly when ribald and earthy subjects have entered the picture. In the medieval period, when things get coarse, they get strange — we might even say “avant-garde” or “postmodern” — and this condition persists for quite some time, like in Renaissance romances such as Orlando Furioso and Book Three of the aforementioned Faerie Queene. The moments of sheer strangeness in these works are often just as risible as they are wondrous and fascinating. Without appreciating the persistence of irony in the Middle Ages, we can’t really understand or laugh at the humor throughout Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, to give another example, or even begin to understand how such a delightfully ridiculous poem could also have been written by the same author as the deadly serious Pearl.
I believe that the enterprise of literary criticism hasn’t paid enough attention to sustained works of irony that altogether lack satire, or at least lack any coherent satire. I’m talking about irony for its own sake — no, let me rephrase: irony with no sake of anything attached to it at all. No particular target. Irony that engages in purposeless free play, not for anything, but as the sheer joy of messing around in a non-committal fashion — perhaps a bit like the way Kant describes how we aesthetically evaluate any pleasurable experience, from a great work of art to a beautiful sunset.
Northrop Frye was one of the major modern figures to give irony in literature a sustained examination, but even he, in his Anatomy of Criticism, doesn’t quite pinpoint the kind of irony I’m attempting to describe. Earlier in the book, he discusses the ironic modes of tragedy and comedy, including commentary on ironic tone and structure, and he presents irony as a phenomenon in which the writer pretends to know less than he does, or says as little while meaning as much as possible. But a work like De Amore is, if anything, the reverse, and would resemble the way he defines Menippean satire rather than any comedy or tragedy with an ironic tone/structure. However, Frye treats all satire as weaponized irony, and I can’t see how De Amore could quality. For him, Menippean satire includes, among many other works, Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, Thomas More’s Utopia, and Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel. He describes it as literature that meditates on a single theme, often with multiple styles, in which the characters function as mere mouthpieces for ideas rather than real characters. The gratuitous display of erudition is also one characteristic of these Menippean satires:
The tendency to expand into an encyclopaedic farrago is clearly marked in Rabelais, notably in the great catalogues of torcheculs and epithets of codpieces and methods of divination. The encyclopaedic compilations produced in the line of duty by Erasmus and Voltaire suggest that a magpie instinct to collect facts is not unrelated to the type of ability that has made them famous as artists. Flaubert's encyclopaedic approach to the construction of Bouvard et Pécuchet is quite comprehensible if we explain it as marking an affinity with the Menippean tradition.
So going by this description, De Amore is closest to a Menippean satire, particularly since it resembles a miscellany despite being written by a single author. But I would question the notion that it’s genuinely satirical when any potential consistent object of the satire remains obscure and the intention of its mockery is so difficult to pin down. If it’s anti-love, then it makes too strong a case on love’s behalf, and if it’s indeed anti-woman as the end would have us believe, then the juxtaposition between the subtlety that pervades the first five-sixths of the book and the hyperbole that characterizes the last sixth really ought to put the whole exercise into question. And additionally, there’s something to Frye’s reasoning on this particular category that I find incomplete. Is the Menippean satirist really so concerned to show off his erudition, just to prove his worth as an authority figure, or as Frye puts it, “overwhelm his pedantic targets with an avalanche of their own jargon”? Would it be so implausible to instead suggest that rattling off various factoids, or making inordinately large lists, or displaying rhetorical prowess for incongruous situations can each constitute their own source of amusement? Consider the list of kings in the great Welsh tale, Culhwc and Olwen. Note some of the descriptions as they continue.
I think the most likely explanation for why De Amore is so peculiar is simply that Andreas wrote it as a thought experiment. For the most part, critics and intellectuals don’t like thought experiments. They’re allergic to the joy of screwing around. Everything must have an agenda, and every author must have an axe to grind. Moreover, if there is no real target of critique, and there is no real underlying message, then there’s little for the critic to say besides, “Well, he was just screwing around,” and no procedural hermeneutics can be applied to prove it (or at least convince people that something is being proven). But in literature, it happens all the same. The erotic sonnets of John Donne have this quality, as do various works of poets lumped under the “Mannerism” label (see the treatment of the subject by Ernst Robert Curtius). And as I’ve suggested, I think a great deal of this “courtly love” literature is primarily about experimentation through irony, not attacking anyone or anything in particular. What I think is really happening here is what Charles Sanders Peirce called “the play of musement,” or sometimes “pure play.” I’ll write a bit more about this subject later, as well as the uses of irony in general, but I’ll end this discussion here with a definition from Peirce himself. As you read it, surely you’ll recognize it as something every human has experienced at least once, including bored clergymen:
There is a certain agreeable occupation of mind which, from its having no distinctive name, I infer is not as commonly practiced as it deserves to be; for indulged in moderately – say through some five to six per cent of one’s waking time, perhaps during a stroll – it is refreshing enough more than to repay the expenditure. Because it involves no purpose save that of casting aside all serious purpose, I have sometimes been half-inclined to call it reverie with some qualification; but for a frame of mind so antipodal to vacancy and dreaminess such a designation would be too excruciating a misfit. In fact, it is Pure Play. Now, Play, we all know, is a lively exercise of one’s powers. Pure Play has no rules, except this very law of liberty. It bloweth where it listeth. It has no purpose, unless recreation.
Update 03/16/24: Made some edits for grammatical clarity; clarified some misleading/badly phrased comments on both Frye and Robertson.