Erotic love has been a major theme in Western literature at least since the poetry of Sappho but at no time more so than in the Middle Ages. Although partially tied in complex ways to human biology, “love” is also in large part a cultural construct, which changes and evolves as it passes from culture to culture and epoch to epoch.¹ Its complexity resists simple foundational definitions, and artists have continuously played a role in the ongoing construction and deconstruction of models of erotic love, models constructed with language and motifs taken both from artistic predecessors and from experiences in...

John Gower claims to have constructed his Confessio Amantis from two sources: the world “in olde dayes passed” and the world “which neweth everi dai.” Most critics would agree that something similar could be said of Chaucer’s love poetry, and their sources for the past were, of course, “olde bokes.” As Chaucer writes:

Than mote we to bokes that we fynde,

Thurgh whiche that olde thinges ben in mynde,

...

And yf that olde bokes were aweye,

Yloren were of remembraunce the keye.¹

[Then we must turn to books that we find, through which old things are brought to mind.…...

The last chapter demonstrated that Ovid co-opted the Roman discourse of labor and incorporated it subversively to present the works of love as activities of otium negotiosum (busy leisure), not otium otiosum (unproductive idleness). He did this on several levels, borrowing key words, motifs, figures, and even a didactic genre from Roman labor discourse. Comparing courtship to the labor of soldiers and to the labor of farmers, two species of work that were highly respected in Roman society, Ovid treated the activities associated with finding a lover, winning a lover, and keeping a lover. Also included in these labors were...

Alan of Lille’s De planctu naturae, written around the years 1160 to 1170, is a significantly different work from either Ovid’s Ars amatoria or Andreas Capellanus’s De amore. Far from a handbook of love, the De planctu is a menippean satire, a moral work, written in alternating sections of prose and verse, in the tradition of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy.¹ Although it was written before Andreas’s De amore, the discourse of love’s labor in the De planctu contains influences of twelfth-century medieval labor ideologies not found in Andreas’s treatise, and it is not at all Ovidian. Hence, it is more...

The Roman de la rose is a comprehensive treatment of all aspects of love and includes a healthy dose of the discourse of love as passion. The discourse of love’s labor, however, is at its very heart, for this long poem of nearly 22,000 lines presents the first and, to a much greater extent, the second labors of Ovid’s Ars amatoria (finding and winning a lover) within a richly detailed allegorical dream narrative. In it, the Dreamer discovers where love is to be found, and once he arrives at the proper place, the Garden of Diversion, he is smitten by...

Like all of the works studied so far, John Gower’s Confessio Amantis treats the subject of love.¹ Unlike most of the others so far, however, the Confessio is not an art of love. It is a story collection framed by the confession of a frustrated lover. Far from an ars amatoria, in fact, the Confessio is a remedia amoris.² By the end of the work, the narrator, Amans, whom we eventually discover to be an old man, learns to accept the limits of his age and is cured of his illness, the hopeless love of a young woman. The discourse...

Chaucer’s love poetry, like that of Ovid, takes its particular coloring from the discourse of love’s labor, and his labor discourse double-voices not only that of Ovid, Alan of Lille, and the authors of the Roman de la rose but also that of his own contemporary society. Of course, the discourse of love’s labor is placed into dialog with the discourse of passion in many of Chaucer’s works. The love sicknesses of Palamon, Arcite, Troilus, and even Absalom come immediately to mind. However, these are more than counterbalanced by the labor discourses of Pandarus, Diomede, Daun John, Nicolas, Januarius, and...

Rosiland’s description in Shakespeare’s As You Like It of the progress in the relationship between Oliver and Celia encapsulates in many ways an ideal paradigm in the discourse of love’s labor.¹ While the lovers fall in love at first sight, they are not prostrated by overwhelming emotion. On the contrary, love sets them to work in a reasonable and purposeful manner. The dart of love enters through a glance; the glance leads to sighs, but the sighs immediately lead to a search for both reasons and remedies. Shakespeare’s remedy, however, is not a rejection of love in the tradition of...