The Falcon and the Glove or How the Courtly Exemplum Teaches Love in Andreas Capellanus’ Tractatus de amore

Abstract

Andreas Capellanus’ Tractatus de amore contains two courtly tales, ostensibly used to symbolically illustrate its lessons on love. In the first book, which catalogues the exchanges between would-be lovers of various social classes, a noble suitor tells the Lai du Trot to the noble lady he desires and successfully persuades her not to close her door to love. The other, inserted at the end of the second book, describes a Breton knight’s quest, which is also successful, in search of the god of Love and the love of his lady. These stories, inserted on two levels of the text, one placed in the mouth of an interlocutor and the other told by the narrator, are courtly because they come from the Breton lai tradition, and they are told in, or take place around, the court; in particular the idealized court of the god of Love. In this paper I would like to explore the role these two tales play in such a contradictory treatise. Can they be read as exempla and if so what kind of love do they seek to demonstrate? I would like to show that the courtly exemplum, flexible in the hands of both reader and writer, is ideally suited to demonstrate the ambiguous truth of love. As the narrative version of Andreas’ duplex sententia, these tales contribute to a didactic discourse which transmits courtliness alongside rhetoric, and rhetoric through the teachings of love.