Abstract

The time and place of composition of the medieval Latin treatise on love, De amore, and the identity of Andreas Capellanus to whom its authorship is attributed have long been a subject of controversy. There are essentially three hypotheses, each tied to a particular interpretation of the treatise. Following the rediscovery of the work by Gaston Paris in 1883, it was long thought that to have been written in the 1180s at the court of Champagne by a court chaplain at the behest of the countess Marie, an important patroness of courtly literature. Based on new diplomatic evidence and some of the manuscript rubrics, Alfred Karnein renewed the question in 1978 with the theory that the treatise was indeed written in the 1180s, but in Paris at the court of Philip II Augustus, and not to promote the courtly love ethic but to combat it. In 1994 Peter Dronke advanced the theory that Andreas Capellanus is a pseudonym designed to link an anonymous work with a legendary romance lover, André de Paris, and that the treatise was written in the 1230s in the Arts Faculty of the University of Paris as an elaborated erotic joke. Each of these hypotheses has its strengths and weaknesses, and so the question is likely to remain undecided.