The Danger of Separating Past and Present : My Errors in Transforming the Work of Andreas Capellanus

For my previous blog post, I decided to turn the instructional dialogue in Andreas Capellanus into a modern text message conversation between two men. I believed that this creative take on The Art of Courtly Love would best allow me to compare current-day "guy culture" and attitudes about women with those in the medieval period. While I did draw attention to man’s progression since the time of Capellanus, this focus on progression resulted in the false suggestion that the mentality surrounding love in The Art of Courtly Love had entirely dissipated today, invalidating the presence of still-persistent ideas such as female indebtedness.

I would like to first establish that this blog post and the blog post it analyses is extremely male-centric. I talk a lot about male mentality concerning love and women and compare these to modern male mentalities. There are two problems with this approach. Firstly, I am using the ideas of one historical figure to denote the mentality of an entire period and comparing it to a period where I look at multiple sources and accounts, including personal. Secondly, unlike in The Art of Courtly Love, the modern conversation of love has become more gender egalitarian and less gender-rigid, and it is difficult to talk about love today without discussing the mentality and ideas of women or of trans and nonconforming individuals.

In translating Andreas Capellanus to modern day text messages, I aimed to highlight the importance of audience in our understanding of The Art of Courtly Love. While the book was shocking in its statements on women and how gender and class roles function in love, even if satire, the fact that the literature’s audience was certainly overwhelmingly male at the time affected how the material was presented. The concept of “guy culture” has been present for millennia from the jokes of Capellanus to male-only WhatsApp groups in India and America’s infamous “locker room talk”. My first impulse in writing this dialogue was to show how guy culture had not changed.

However, when I started the project, I encountered immediate problems. The instructional nature of the work made it difficult to construct a dialogue that would resemble the back-and-forth of the modern “locker room”. Instead of attempting to force the work to be something it was not originally intended to be, I changed the dialogue to that of a friend giving another friend advice. In this context, the silliness of Capaelanus in the modern context became apparent. However, I chose the strangest of Capellanus’ advice to turn into a text conversation— the idea that a woman was required to return love to the first man who proclaims he loves her.

In the text conversation, the character of Walter, the man receiving advice from Andres, turned into a representative for the modern “woke” man. He firmly rejected and scoffed at Andes’ explanations on why the woman MUST fall in love with Andres. To a small extent, Walter’s role as a representative of public judgement and as a foil to Andres is a product of lazy writing. The dialogue that I wrote confirms a hypothesis that man today is a progression of man from yesterday, and the gender-rigid ideas of yesterday have been firmly supplanted with modern thoughts of equality and free will. However, you don’t have to look far outside the constructed reality in my dialogue to see that this hypothesis is false.

While there may not be any books on the subject, Capellanus’ ideas, real or satirized, are still present today. The idea that women owe something to men if they receive attention hardly has disappeared. The concept of the friend-zone, classic teen nerd-cheerleader romances, and the hyper focus on what women wear going out in cases of sexual assault are vestiges of the “medieval” ideas about the indebtedness of women.  In many ways, my dialogue rang true. The concepts of class, on which Capellanus bases all of his situations, has greatly diminished in importance today. I think that, for who Walter was, his reaction to Andres was real. The issue lay in my unwillingness to seriously consider that the insidious vestiges of the idea of female indebtedness still are alive and well in the male consciousness.

—Mason Sands